Epic Poetry in the Future Tense: The Firm Weakness of Paradise Lost, XI-XII

A puzzle to be tried on your friends follows: from which of Milton's prose works is the following taken?

Then shall they avail themselves of names, places, and titles, and with these to join secular power, though feigning still to act by spiritual, to themselves appropriating the spirit of God, promis'd alike and given to all believers; and from that pretense, spiritual laws by carnal laws shall force on every conscience; laws which none shall find left them inrolled, or what the Spirit within shall on the heart engrave. What will they then but force the Spirit of Grace itself, and bind his consort Liberty; what, but unbuild his living temples, built by faith to stand, their own faith not another's: for on earth who against faith and conscience can be found infallible?

It has affinities with the anti-prelatical tracts; with the defenses of the English people; with Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism and Toleration; with On Christian Doctrine. Only when your friends notice the elaborate inversion, they...spiritual laws...shall force are they likely to suspect that this is not prose at all, but verse. For so it is; it is Paradise Lost XII.515-530 without line-breaks. Yet it is so abstract, so impersonal and dry, so lacking in vivid imagery or metaphor, in its meaning so flat and uninteresting, that it would be stretching a point to call it poetry, line-breaks or no. These last two books doubtless outweigh the rest of the poem in provoking Samuel Johnson's condemnation: "None ever wished [Paradise Lost] longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions."(1)

C. S. Lewis's account of these two books is accurate; his explanation of their poor quality, desperate:

 

...he makes his two last books into a brief outline of sacred history from the Fall to the Last Day. Such an untransmuted lump of futurity, coming in a position so momentous for the structural effect of the whole work, is inartistic. And what makes it worse is that the actual writing in this passage is curiously bad...If we stick to what we know we must be content to say that Milton's talent temporarily failed him, just as Wordsworth's talent failed in later life.... Perhaps Milton was in ill health. Perhaps, being old, he yielded to a natural, though disastrous, impatience to get the work finished.(2)

This amounts to saying that the badness of Paradise LostXI-XII is an accident, and one must retort that according to the most basic principle of criticism, there are no accidents in a work of art. Indeed, all the critics since Lewis who have tried to prove in one way or another that the two books only seem bad,but are really good, have proceeded on that assumption.

The statement that Books XI-XII are a "brief outline" deserves study. The books singly are not brief relative to their earlier counterparts; they are 901 and 649 lines long as opposed to 640 to 1189 for the others. But each is made up of numerous episodes(eight of them in XI; a dizzying twenty-two in XII).(3)The great increase in the latter book is accounted for by a change of format.In XI Michael produces a series of visions and then he and Adam discuss the meaning of each, so that in a manner of speaking, each episode is told twice; but in XII, Michael simply talks and Adam listens. It is as if a teacher switched from the class discussion to the lecture format. With so many stories to be gone through and so many circumstances to be explained in so little space, there is no possibility either of copia or of an authentic epic style.

The story of the creation and fall of man constitutes the first three chapters of Genesis, a total of eighty verses or about 2,176 words.Out of this acorn Milton produces the mighty oak of Paradise Lost I-X, employing the methods of Erasmus's De duplici copia rerum ac verborum and carefully imitating Homer whose style, as Eric Auerbach demonstrated, depends entirely on a multiplication and skilful marshalling of details; to accomplish this, Milton writes about 9,000 lines. Then, in about 1,650 lines, forming the last two books, he summarizes the Old Testament, the New, and 1,600 years of world history. The figures speak for themselves: a huge feat of amplification has been followed by an equally bold condensation, that is, a reduction to an epitome or summary. Hence, Lewis's lamentation that the writing is "curiously bad" is beside the point. Had Milton been writing in his best vein, he still could not have succeeded in such an endeavor. The failure of Paradise Lost XI-XII is owing not to a workmanship flaw but to a design flaw.

Nor is it any accident that Milton keeps insisting on how wretched the whole story is, though it is supposed to comfort Adam:

 

[Nimrod]Will arrogate Dominion undeserv'd

Over his brethren, and quite dispossess

Concord and law of Nature from the Earth (XII. 27-29).

Since thy original lapse, true Liberty

Is lost...

...Tyranny must be,

Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse (XII. 83-4, 95-6).

Thus will this latter, as the former world,

Still tend from bad to worse...(XII. 105-6)

...Doubt not but that sin

Will reign among them, as of thee begot...(XII. 285-86)

[Israel's kings are] Part good, part bad, of bad the longer scroll (XII. 336).

...Truth shall retire

Bestuck with sland'rous darts, and works of Faith

Rarely be found: so shall the world go on,

To good malignant, to bad men benign...(XII. 535-8)

The universal opinion in the Renaissance concerning this sort of summary writing is expressed succinctly by Julius Caesar Scaliger in his Poetices Libri Septem: "Unadorned description of facts savors rather of an instructional tool, that is,of the precepts of various academic disciplines; magnificence alone shows the poet."(Nudae namque res didaskalian,id est artium praeceptiones potius olent; apparatus solius poetae est. Gregor Vogt-Spira's German version of this seems to express Scaliger's meaning with resources that English lacks: Nackte Tatsachenbeschreibungen riechen naemlich eher nach einer Didaskalie, d.h. nach Vorschriften fuer die Kuenste; Glanz vermag allein der Dichter zu verlieren.)(4)

Particularly strange is the episode of the connubiumbetween Cain's daughters and Seth's sons.

 

[A group of men]Down to the plain descended: by their guise

Just men they seemed, and all their study bent

To worship God aright...

...when from the tents behold

A bevy of fair women, richly gay

In gems and wanton dress; to the harp they sung

Soft amorous ditties, and in dance came on:

The men, though grave, eyed them, and let their eyes

Rove without rein, till in the amorous net

Fast caught, they liked, and each his liking chose;

And now of love they treat till the evening star,

Love's harbinger, appeared; then all in heat

They light the nuptial torch...(XI. 576-590).

This explains the subsequent prevalence of evil in the world; the bloodthirsty warriors who appear in the next episode are "the product of those ill-mated marriages"(XI. 683-84).That, in turn, explains Noah's flood. But the connubium is weirdly superfluous. Paradise Lost I-X explains the prevalence of evil quite adequately. Nor is the story of Seth's sons ("the grave men") and Cain's daughters (the "bevy of fair women") in the Bible, apart from the barest hint in the first two verses of Genesis 6, which do not imply that the men were good or related to Seth, or that the women were bad or related to Cain. Lastly, the story is a fairy tale. It reads as if Seth had only sons and Cain only daughters. It states clearly that every one of the sons is good and every one of the daughters bad.The virtuous bachelors all become corrupt husbands in less than a day. The moral, "Avoid loose women" or "Choose your bride for character and not for looks" is enforced with the childish oversimplification that always seems to attend a moral of that kind. Proverbs 7:21-23 and similar texts suggest that males cannot be dissuaded from harlots by any story of gradual corruption; they must be warned of instant ruin. In George Lillo's sentimental play The London Merchant(1731), the shy apprentice, George Barnwell, meets the femme fatale, Millwood, and within three days is sentenced to be hanged for robbery and murder. In Mickey Rooney's equally sentimental film Quicksand(1949), a bluff and honest teenager hesitates between two girl friends, one planning to save herself for marriage, the other intending to raise money, no matter how, to buy a mink coat; and within three days after choosing the wrong girl friend, the bluff teenager is dead, shot by police during an attempted robbery.Milton could see the good in the fallen angels (II.496-7)and the dreadfulness of the outcome of Adam's decision whether he ate or rejected the forbidden fruit; but here the poet seems to lose all his moral insight and becomes a banal Sunday-School teacher.

But this is not exactly his fault. The episode of Seth's sons and Cain's daughters is adapted from the work of the widely-read poetic mediocrities, Guillaume du Bartas and his translator, Joshua Sylvester. These write:

 

O strange to be beleev'd! the blessed race,

The sacred Flock whom God by speciall grace

Adopts for his, euen they (alas) most shame-lesse,

Doe follow sinne, most beastly-brute and tame-lesse,

With lustfull eies choosing for wanton Spouses

Mens wicked daughters;mingling so the houses

Of Seth and Cain: preferring foolishly

Fraile beauties blaze to vertuous modestie.(5)

Compared with this, Milton's drawing of the moral seems subtle.

In fact, Milton abandoned du Bartas's connubium, as a gloss on Genesis 6:1-2, and recast the whole story as seductions of human women by devils led by Belial, disguised as Zeus and other divinities, giving rise to such myths as those of Daphne, Semele, Antiopa, and Syrinx(PR,II, 178-191).In the Paradise Lostversion, the sons of Seth are called sons of God (the biblical phrase) because of their piety (XI, 577-78). In the Paradise Regained version, Belial's "lusty crew [are] False-titled sons of God"(l. 179). At least one of these biblical glosses must be a mere makeshift, and I would suggest it is the first.

The episode of the Tower of Babel in Book XII contains two anomalies rendering it incoherent with the epic proper in Books I-X.In the Tower of Babel sequence, the feared jarring of the Tower against the Towers of heaven (ll.51-52) and the connection of the bituminous gurge with Hell (ll.41-42) are so absurd, given the location of Heaven and Hell at a great distance outside the starry heavens in Books I-IV, as to suggest that the author of Book XII never even read Paradise Lost, let alone wrote it. The detail about the mouth of Hell in fact is neither original nor from the Bible, but is based on a hyperbole that du Bartas wrote about digging a deep hole for the foundations of the Tower:

 

...for their firme foundations

They digge to hell; and damned Ghosts againe

(Past hope) behold the Sunnes bright glorious waine...(6)

Du Bartas's work is a rambling and undiscriminating collection of lore, some of it Biblical, most of it not, whose incoherence led to critical attacks both when it was published, and long after. "Thus in times past Dubartas vainly writ, Alloying sacred truth with trifling wit," wrote an Eighteenth-Century editor of Boileau.(7)For example, Heber and his son Phalec (but there is no Phalec in the Bible) enter into a pillar erected by Seth and find there four lovely statues representing the four branches of mathematics. This becomes the occasion of panegyrics on arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, et cetera (p. 469 ff.).

Yet Milton depended heavily on du Bartas in composing Book XI, which "stands out conspicuously as drawing very extensively upon the Divine Weekes. Nowhere in Paradise Lostis the indebtedness more absolutely clear," says George Coffin Taylor in Milton's Use of du Bartas.(8) Indeed, in the earlier books the indebtedness is not clear at all, for Taylor's argument depends mostly on single words and brief phrases whose co-occurrence in Du Bartas and Milton may be accidental. Thus, only of Book XI may it be said that a poet whose work at its best is as tightly structured as Dante's borrowed heavily from a poet whose work is formless.

The anomaly regarding the locations of Heaven and Hell might best be explained by supposing that Milton wrote Books XI-XII before he wrote I-X, eager to get his didaskaliaor instructional tool finished before beginning the epic proper.

Apart from indebtedness to du Bartas, another reason exists why Books XI-XII could not possibly rival the preceding poem in interest. Both are in the future tense. In the whole canon of western literature, apart from the texts to be discussed hereunder, there is possibly not one extended narrative written in the future tense--except the Hebrew prophets, whose unvarying didactic intent links them to the concept of the didaskalia already mentioned.

The two passages of XI-XII constituting exceptions to these generalizations have circumstances that make them prove the rule. The first is the stunning description of the manner in which, during the rainstorm leading to Noah's flood, Eden will be destroyed (vividly enforcing the point that we can never get back to it).

 

...then shall this mount

Of paradise by might of waves be moved

Out of his place, pushed by the horned flood

With all his verdure spoiled, and trees adrift

Down the great river to the opening gulf (9)

And there take root an island salt and bare,

The haunt of seals and orcs, and sea-mews' clang. (XI. 829-35)

The second is the narrative of Adam and Eve's departure from Eden, kindly led by one angel, but terrorized by another with a flaming sword, the finale of the whole poem. This second successful passage is in the past tense. It is, borrowing the language of Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis, unframed; its events happen in no vision, discussion, or lecture, but only inside the epic poem that began twelve books ago. This is also true of the first passage, "then shall this mount Of paradise" etc. Its topic is present in both senses of the word, temporal and spatial; Michael speaks of the mount of Paradise on whose conical edge he and Adam are both standing. The events he describes form the end of a series of transformations of Paradise in which it is first "a happy rural seat of various view"(IV. 247);then, when Adam faces life without Eve in it, "these wild woods forlorn" (IX.910);then an inky-black haunt of glaring animals beset by lightning and windstorms (X.847;714;695ff.);and now this. The two passages in XI-XII in which Milton sings in his true epic voice are in the present and past tenses.

In short, the puzzle presented by Books XI-XII is this: to explain why Milton wrote them in the future tense, in a format suited to an instructional tool, sometimes in a vein of shallow and trite moralizing, with a concept of the locations of Heaven and Hell that is traditionally Christian but totally un-Miltonic, borrowing material from a pair of mediocre poets whose work was popular in the worst sense of the word.

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In the Odyssey, XI.483-91, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and offers praise to the great warrior, in that on earth he was honored as if he had been a god, and now in Hades he is still powerful; thus, living or dead, he is happy. Achilles replies: "...do not make light of death, illustrious Odysseus...I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead" (tr. E.V. Rieu, Penguin Books, London, 1991, p. 173).

In Plato's Republic, at a certain point Socrates turns to the question of military morale.

 

But if {the army] are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these [traditional lessons concerning fear of the gods]and lessons of such kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

--Certainly not, he said.

--And can he be fearless of death,or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery,who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

--Impossible.

--Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales...and beg them not simply to revile, but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors...[Socrates quotes Achilles's speech on death]...And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free,and who should fear slavery more than death. (10)

The most disturbing thing in this suave introduction of censorship into Utopia is the bland statement that Achilles's speech must be eliminated precisely because it is good poetry. Good poetry must have a greater power to corrupt than bad poetry. Why is that so? The dialogue Ionsupplies the answer:

 

For not by art does the poet sing,but by power divine; had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away reason from poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses the pronouncers of oracles and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves, who utter these priceless words while bereft of reason, but that God himself is the speaker,and through them he is addressing us. (11)

Clearly, the accurate text of Homer is to Plato what the accurate text of the Bible is to a devout Christian. It is the source of truth par excellence. When he proposes to tear a verse of it out and substitute others which ex hypothesi will be poorer poetry, (because they are not the word of God or in brief, are not true), Plato, as often in the Republic,professes dishonesty with most becoming honesty. The poets must speak well of that other world, though in so doing they speak falsely, lose their character of poets, and produce bad verse.

The first epic poet to accept Plato's mandate was Virgil, whose Aeneas, like Odysseus, visits the underworld and speaks with the worthies there;the significant difference being that the Homeric worthies are famous for what they have done,but the Virgilian worthies are famous for what they are about to do. Virgil evidently wishes Hades to perform other didactic tasks beyond merely bolstering military morale, for he annexes to it Tartarus, a deep chasm confining those who "hated their brothers, beat their fathers, defrauded their dependents,"etc. (12)Thus civilians as well as soldiers are encouraged to love virtue, appropriately to a poem commissioned by Augustus Caesar to restore to his people their primordial moral strength.

Soon, however,

 

...they entered the land of joy, the lovely glades of the fortunate woods and the home of the blest. Here a broader sky clothes the plains in glowing light, and the spirits have their own sun and their own stars. Some take exercise on grassy wrestling-grounds and hold athletic contests...Others pound the earth with dancing feet...(VI.638-44)

Certainly Achilles could not prefer slavery to this life, with sports and games and even permission to keep his weapons so long as he doesn't use them (ll. 653-55).

Anchises, the father of Aeneas, now explains that certain souls, for their exemplary conduct while on earth,"deserve a second body" (altera fato Corpora debentur, VI. 713-14);that is, they shall be reincarnated, and Anchises already knows the noble deeds of their second incarnation. For these extraordinary persons the paradise is to some extent a purgatory. They have arrived in guilt-ridden bodies dulled by earthly limbs and dying flesh (VI.731-32);apparently even the best of men is gross when compared to the light and air of paradise. For 1,000 years, some have their sins washed out of them by water, some scorched out by fire, and then, their hour come round at last, they return to the earth's surface to occupy new bodies as the kings, consuls, tribunes, dictators and warriors of mighty Rome. In fact, Virgil has constructed this whole myth for two purposes: to respond to Plato's demand by offering an enticing reward to the dead, and to write Rome's history, from Romulus to Augustus, as if from a fictive point in time before it happened. The concept is eclectic; to satisfy Plato, the myth offers a paradisal afterlife, and to satisfy Achilles, it offers a return to the earth.

Anchises climbs onto a mound from which he can see the long line of Romans defiling beneath him and recognize its members. Even so, Michael climbs with Adam onto the rim of the Mount of Paradise from which they can see Mexico, China and Africa. As Anchises must see all the Romans, Adam must see all his descendants-- humanity on every continent. In form and manner resembling a commencement ceremony, Anchises reels off the names Silvius, Lavinia, Alba Longa, Procas, Troianae, Capys,Numitor, Silvius Aeneas, Alba, mostly personal names; then Collatia, Pometia, Castrum Inui,Bola, Cora, all place-names (VI. 763-775).Milton may have imitated this with his famous cascade, XI.387-411. Concerning this passage T.S.Eliot said it seemed to be a kind of solemn game rather than poetry fully occupied about its business,(13) and if the blame is justified, perhaps it should be shared with Plato and Virgil.

"Come now," cries Anchises, "and I shall tell you of the glory that lies in store for the sons of Dardanus"; that is, he will narrate the founding of the Roman state and the rise of the empire. This is line 756, and by line 792 he has reached Augustus Caesar, collapsing 744 years of history into 36 lines of poetry, teaching Milton and others the sinister art of condensation, of making things so brief that they seem long.

The history itself is mere propaganda;it describes Rome as if it were for sale. It mentions Romulus but not the fact that he murdered his brother (l.778). It mentions Mount Berecyntus, and its consecration to Cybele,but not the Tarpeian Rock, or the custom of hurling traitors to their death from it (l.784).Julius Caesar is there, but not his assassination(l.789). Augustus is eulogized for the hugeness of his empire, but his decision, eight years before Virgil wrote the Aeneid to halt its growth out of fear that it was overextended, is passed over in silence (ll. 791-807).

Even more propagandistic is the praise of Augustus. He will bring back the Golden Age; the lands around the Caspian and the Nile delta are even now trembling in fear of his advance (ll.798-800; Virgil forgets that in the Golden Age there were no wars). Augustus's empire extends beyond the stars, beyond the path of the sun. Hercules never traversed so many lands as Augustus has done, nor did Bacchus in his chariot drawn by tigers (ll. 791-805). Nothing in Homer bears comparison with this sycophancy; it may be a drawback of literary, as opposed to oral, epic.

But most propagandistic of all is the praise of Marcellus,the emperor's adopted son who is to die aged nineteen. There is nothing for the poet to exaggerate, so he exaggerates a large quantity of nothing. The right hand of Marcellus is undefeated in war (invicta bello Dextera, ll. 878-79). Quite true; Marcellus has never been in a war. Is this a reason to put him in an epic poem?"No son of Troy will ever so raise the hopes of his Latin ancestors"(ll.875). Hopes make a good topic, for there is nothing else. The ancient critic Servius wrote of this passage that Virgil "in the manner of a rhetorician (i.e., going to any lengths to make his case)praises the hope that was entertained of the boy, for deeds he found none."(14)

Perhaps Virgil knew that his future-tense episode was unworthy of the rest of the epic, for Aeneas, instead of leaving the underworld by the Gate of Horn, the channel of true prophecies and predictions, leaves by the Gate of Ivory, appropriated to vain and delusive dreams. The praise of Marcellus is traditionally supposed to have made such an impression on the emperor's wife that she fainted; the legend seems to indicate that Virgil was playing to the gallery. Another indication of irony in the passage is the pitting of Empire against Art:

 

Others, I do not doubt it, will beat bronze into figures that breathe more softly. Others will draw living likenesses out of marble. Others will plead cases better or describe with their rod the courses of the stars across the sky and predict their risings. Your task, Roman, and do not forget it, will be to govern the peoples of the world with your empire.These will be your arts--and to impose a settled pattern upon peace, to pardon the defeated and war down the proud (p.159).

 

(Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,

Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus,

Orabunt causas, melius, caelique meatus

Describunt radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;

Hae tibi erunt artes, pacisque inponere morem,

Parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.VI.847-53)

Virgil's point here is that Greece has conquered the world with arts, and is welcome to do so; the Roman must shun such arts to cultivate the profession of arms and build an empire of fabulous wealth based on confiscatory taxation and corruption in the administration of provinces, and the reduction of prisoners of war to slavery. Most disquieting of all is the climactic placing of the phrase debellare superbos, i.e., crush all resistance with military force, the method of pacification that made a colonial complain, "They rob, kill and rape and this they call Roman rule. They make a desert and call it peace"(Tacitus,Life of Agricola,Paragraph 30). And this exhortation to make war, not art, Virgil inserts into a work of art, carefully imitated from a Greek model. Deconstructionists should take an interest in lines 847-53, as they cancel themselves out.

We may fancifully liken Virgil to a modern television producer or filmmaker, under pressure from financial backers, putting things into his program or film that he would rather leave out. But this passage which Virgil may have considered beneath him was imitated by Ariosto, Spenser and Milton. In each of these future-tense episodes there is a prophet (Anchises; Merlin; Michael), a nation to be exalted (Rome; Italy; Britain; the faithful), a single ruler who confirms the nobility of his lineage by leading this nation (Augustus; Cardinal Ippolito d'Este; Elizabeth I; Jesus Christ), and an individual who learns, like Abraham being told the immense number of his progeny, that (s)he will found this illustrious line of heroes or kings (Aeneas; Bradamante; Britomart; Adam).

In Ariosto's Orlando Furioso ,III.xvii, Bradamante enters a cave containing the tomb of Merlin, which utters prophecies concerning her descendants when she shall have married Ruggiero. These descendants shall spread all over Europe and the east as far as India, producing marquises, counts, dukes, and Caesars. The history of Italy from the time of Charlemagne (crowned Holy Roman Empire in800 A.D.) to Cardinal Ippolito d'Este (born 1509) is reduced to the ad ventures of the House of Este, 700 years narrated in 45 stanzas, yet another of those feats of condensation inseparable from future-tense epic.

The events are derived from chronicles and read like them,dry and unadorned:

 

More famed for courtesy than warlike deed,

Azo the second, he who next repairs!

Bertoldo and Albutazo are his seed:

And, lo!the father walks between his heirs.

By Parma's walls I see the Germans bleed,

Their second Henry quelled; each trophy bears

The one renowned in story's future page:

The next shall wed Matilda, chaste and sage.(15)

In short, Azo the Second is a nudum nomen, and so are Albutazo and his wife Matilda; only Bertoldo attains anything remarkable, namely a defeat of the Germans near Parma. Ariosto is reduced to bestowing routine words of praise here and there; Azo is "famed for courtesy," Bertoldo is "renowned," Matilda is "chaste." The contrast between this pedestrian history and the wild and fantastic events of the rest of Ariosto's poem (including a voyage to the Moon imitated by Milton in his Paradise of Fools)is patent. As Virgil may have dropped hints that the future-tense passage was beneath him, so Ariosto may have done so. Astolfo finds on the moon a great many symbols of insincerity: a mass of spilled porridge represents wealthy men's bequests to the poor in their wills, gold rings represent lovers' broken vows, bellows represent the brief favors enjoyed by Ganymedes before their beauty fades. And among these, "cicadas, which their lungs had burst [signified] fulsome lays, by venal poets versed (Di cicale scoppiate imagine hanno/versi ch'in laude dei signor si fanno, Canto XXXIV, Stanza lxxvii). The Italian, however, does not call the verses fulsome but only says they are made in praise of one's lord; this being the precise nature of Ariosto's future-tense passage, which glorifies the House of Este to flatter his patron.

In the induction to his future-tense passage, Spenser in The Faerie Queenegives striking evidence of its nature and function; namely, that it is propagandistic and consists of nudae res, Nackte Tatsachenbeschreibungen, prosaic recitation of facts. First, he shows that it is a separable part of his epic by prefacing an invocation to the muse. Such an invocation--not recited as an opening ceremony, but in mid-epic--occurs only once in the Homeric poems, namely,before the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, and there its function is to brace the bard for the hardest trial of his memory in the entire poem. Second, the muse that Spenser invokes is not Calliope, muse of epic poetry, but Clio, muse of history (III.iii.4) Sidney said, "Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden." (16) Spenser here announces his intent to bate for a while his flight through the golden world and descend to the brazen.

Britomart and her aged nurse, Glauce, go to Carmarthen, Wales, to the cave inhabited by Merlin (a choice evidently influenced by Ariosto).The cave is hellish:

 

...standing high aloft, low lay thine eare,

And there such ghastly noise of yron chaines,

And brazen Caudrons thou shalt rambling heare

Which thousand sprights with long enduring paines

Doe tosse...(III.iii.8)

Thus Spenser, for his prophetic vein, reverts to the Homeric and Virgilian underworld,where the reader learns that Britomart's descendants, beginning with Arthur, will be the royal house of Wales.

Spenser's conceit is that only the Britons, i.e., Celts, are real Englishmen and that the Saxons are outlanders and oppressors no matter how long they remain in the country. The triumph of these Saxons must then be explained by a good Christian's invariable method of accounting for any genuine disaster: God's providence visiting on man the retribution of his sins:

 

...th'heauens haue decreed, to displace

The Britons,for their sinnes dew punishment,

And to the Saxonsouer-giue their gouernment(III.iii.41).

The defeat of King Cadwallader of Wales in 685 A.D. is thus the end of home rule, and of history, in Britain till the Welsh royal house can return; and by a subtle finesse it is treated as doing so when Henry Tudor becomes King of England in 1485 A.D. The long period of Saxon and Norman rule being treated as null, 900 years of English history are despatched in twenty-three stanzas. The Plantagenets, Yorkists and Lancastrians are all lacking but the tradition of condensation in future-tense epic is well served. The upshot is, that as the house of Tudor furnishes the only rightful monarchs ever to reign in Britain, Spenser's patroness, Elizabeth, sits on an unshakable throne.

Another future-tense-epic tradition to which Spenser contributes is prosiness. If there is a worst line in all these half-hearted poems, this must be it:

 

...which sudden fit...

When the two fearefull women saw, they grew

Greatly confused in behavioure (III.iii. 50)

The shortcomings of the future-tense epic all grow out of its being a didaskalia, the lecture of a master to a pupil (we recollect Johnson's characterization of Milton as "our master,"i.e., our schoolmaster), with the usual consequence of that relationship: the content is simplified or even falsified to adapt it to what are perceived as the needs of the hearer. At the outset, Plato decreed that the truth about the afterlife, or at least about what Homer said on the subject, be suppressed to spare soldiers anxiety. Then Virgil created a Moslem heaven to encourage virtue, falsified the history of Rome and deified Augustus. Then Tasso and Spenser distorted Italian and British history to make each a mere preparation, the one for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, the other for Elizabeth I.

Milton too had an army to encourage: the Christian soldiers of Puritanism, utterly routed and defeated, as he believed, through their own fault. That they might simply melt into the Anglican majority, adopt its ways, and disappear, loomed as an imminent danger. Charles II had expressed a desire that the rules of his church be relaxed to spare what were called tender consciences. A royal commission of 25 March, 1661, created the Savoy Conference to re-write the Book of Common Prayer as far as might be necessary, accommodating those Puritans who, for example, refused to kneel at communion. On the other side, the Presbyterian leader, William Prynne (the "marginal Prynne" whom Milton accused of plots worse than the Jesuits' in "On the New Forcers of Conscience") professed himself ardently devoted to the monarchy of Charles II and campaigned vigorously for a new national church that would include both Anglicans and Puritans. The Puritans must be told to keep themselves aloof from the world; hence the ceaselessly repeated statement in XI-XII that it is evil,"To good malignant, to bad men benign," etc., above, pp. 000-000.

The only passage in which Milton falsified the Bible (if Plato could commit forgeries in Homer, why not Milton in the Bible?) is the connubium of the sons of Seth with the daughters of Cain, quoted above (pp.000-000). We may infer, since he was driven to such measures, that Milton feared a connubium of some kind keenly. And, certainly, if the projected Puritan-Anglican merger succeeded, a huge connubium would follow. But beyond that, Milton feared the chaste gentry of England being corrupted by a court, feared that the king would have a papist queen, and feared that a court dominated by papists would draw Protestants away from their faith with sexual seduction and bribes (his concern for many years: the "grim wolf with privy paw" in Lycidas, l. 128, alludes to the same danger).

 

Wheras a king must be ador'd like a Demigod, with a dissolute and haughtie Court about him... to the debaushing of our prime gentry both male and female... There will be a queen also of no less charge; in most likelihood outlandish and a papist...we... need but look at present into the French court, where enticements and preferments daily draw away and pervert the Protestant Nobility.(17)

So that excrescent episode, the intermarriage of Seth's sons with Cain's daughters,has after all a function. Presbyterian and Independent boys meeting Anglican girls in brocaded gowns, Charles II meeting Catherine of Braganza and Louise de Querouaille, are, with Adam, warned to "judge not what is best By pleasure"(XI.603-04).

The glory of both the Anglican and the Roman church was the apostolical succession, and hence Book XII's insistence that the christian religion will be led by "grievous wolves" (l.508) as soon as the apostles are dead, the evil-church theme being part of the evil-world theme and functioning like it to encourage the Puritans to hold themselves aloof.

Another fear was that the Puritans would again try to make war, the events of 1642-58 having convinced Milton that that way would not work ("For what can war,but endless war still breed," Sonnet XV, line 10).Hence the episode of Nimrod, ill-begotten from one of Cain's daughters, filling the world with war (XII. 25-32) and the exhortation not to resist tyrants (95-96).

So at last Paradise Lost appears to be two poems: the Homeric poem in I-X and the didaskalia in XI-XII. The first, besides continuing the tradition of Homer, continues that of Virgil, medieval romance, the Old Testament,platonism, and more, while leading the reader through the labyrinth of predestinarian theology by the Ariadne's clue of sublapsarianism (see "John Milton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians..." in this website.) Hence it demands an educated audience, "fit...though few" (VII.31).But the didaskalia is addressed to the whole defeated and discouraged Puritan movement, meaning it is simplified to the point where the fit-though-few readers of the Homeric poem must have found it prosy. Milton's placing of this suboptimal work of art climactically at the end of the whole, that decision so distressing to C.S. Lewis, consists well with Milton's conception of the didactic function of poetry: "not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toylsom vanity, but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect"(18)

Notes

(1)Lives of the English Poetsed. George Birkbeck Hill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905, I, 183-84.

(2)A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford U.P., London, 1946, 125-26.

(3) In XI: Cain's homicide, the lazar-house, a dialogue on death, the intermarriage of Seth's sons with Cain's daughters, a dialogue on Woman, worldwide war, the Deluge, the rainbow sign. In XII: the tyranny of Nimrod, the tower of Babel, a dialogue on tyranny,the mission of Abraham, the establishment of Abraham's seed in Canaan, their enslavement in Egypt, the ten plagues of Egypt, Moses leading the Exodus, the Ten Commandments, the establishment of the tabernacle in the Israelite camp, a dialogue on the inadequacy of law as opposed to grace, the building of the temple by Solomon, the Babylonian captivity, the birth of Christ, the doctrine of Atonement, the death of Christ, the Resurrection, the mission of the apostles, the ascension, the establishment of the church, the corruption of the church, the last judgment.

(4)Poeticesin Bibliopolio Commeliano,Heidelberg, 1617, p. 231. Sieben Buecher ueber die Dichtkunst, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, Frommann-Holzboog, 1994.

(5) Bartas: His Devine VVeekes and workes Translated...by Iosvah Sylvester. At London, Printed by Humfrey Lownes, 1605. Facs. ed., Scholars' Facsimiles, Gainesville, Fla., 1965, pp. 381-82.

(6)Page 416.

(7)Page 8.

(8)Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass, 1934: p.112.

(9)By accident or design, this line has the metrical properties of the greatest line Milton ever wrote, dating from thirty years before: "Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore." Trochee in the first foot, spondee in the second, caesura in the middle of the third, trisyllabic fifth; it's all there, besides similar content.

(10)Plato, Dialogues,tr. B. Jowett, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953, II, 230-31.

(11) Dialogues I, 108; emphasis added.

(12) Tr. David West, Penguin Books, London, 1991, VI. 608-9.

(13) On Poetry and Poets ,New York: Farrar, Straus, , 1957,p. 163.

(14) Quoted in James Henry, Aeneidea, facs. ed., Burt Franklin, New York, 1972, III, 452. Et rhetorice spem laudat in puero, quia facta non invenit.

(15)Orlando Furioso, III.xxix, in Bulfinch's Mythology, Internet.

(16). Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of PoesyParagraph 11, in Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in EnglandD. C. Heath, Lexington, Mass., 1954: p. 607, col. 2.

(17) The Works of John Milton, New York: Columbia U. P., 1932, VI, 120.

(18) III,Part i, p. 236.