Milton, Dryden, and The Devil

I do not know if I should take it as a blemish upon his art, or, as would be the vulgar opinion, as a commendation to his originality, that the greatest and most common misunderstanding of Milton’s epic was taken to by even his own contemporaries. For John Dryden writes, in an essay on Vergil’s Aeneid, as he takes stock of the whole body of epic literature, having named Homer and Vergil, and after them Tasso, as the only great epic poets, this brief appraisal of the flaws of Paradise Lost:

“And Milton [would have been a great poet], if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his lady errant; and if there had not been more machining persons than human in his poem.”

Mr. Dryden’s last observation is an interesting one that I shall have to think on further. His second cuts to the very core of the poem, and I will suffice to answer that it was not on a whim that Milton began “Of man’s first disobedience…” and not “Of arms and a man,” although this objection is due a rather lengthier refutation. It is his third, however, that I shall answer here at length, for it is a view commonly held by careless readers of Milton, and is as erroneous as it is seductive.

Indeed, if it were not so common, I would dismiss Mr. Dryden’s criticism as quickly and confidently as any man of passable taste dismisses his equally absurd opinion (expressed in the Preface to his Fables) that the “Knight’s Tale” of Chaucer is “not much inferior” to the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unfortunately, it is an opinion which has hounded Milton’s poem in various forms. Among the Romantics, some embraced a brand of this foolishness (Shelley wrote that “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is…far superior to his God”), and others apologized for the poet (Blake wrote that Milton’s poem found its better parts among the devils than among the angels because he “was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”). The chief assumption in this error is that the most eloquent parts of a poem must represent the author’s own views, or at least the truth. Satan is surely a charismatic character, a passionate and eventually torn rebel, true to himself and loyal, as he says, to his comrades; his demand of freedom makes Patrick Henry a monarchist and his speeches, especially at the very beginning of the poem, stand alone as the most powerful pieces of poetical rhetoric in English. All of this is almost enough (as we see, wholly enough for some) to make us forget that this is Satan. Indeed the voice of the narrator and his angelic and divine characters are constantly reminding us of this fact: the first simile of the entire book gives us Satan as Leviathan, the seeming island that is in truth a monster (1.203-208). That simile is completed with these words:

“So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence
Had ris’n or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs…” (1.209-213)

Some 30 lines later, Beelzebub and Satan are free of their chains,

“Both glorying to have ‘scaped the Stygian flood
As gods, and by their own recovered strength,
Not by the sufferance of supernal pow’r.” (1.239-241)

Surely the lies under which Satan and his minions operate are clear from this comparison; and there are many other instances throughout the poem of his manipulative and deceptive nature. Yet many still choose to listen to his voice, as Eve did, when she found his words “impregned / With reason, to her seeming, and with truth.” (9.737-738).

I have gone astray, however, in dealing with the more recently common manifestation of Dryden’s malady rather than the disease he bore himself. For, although he is also caught up in an inability to realize that the devil is the devil, he does not go so far as to call him good, but rather calls him the hero of the poem. Coming as this does in a discussion of the Aeneid, we cannot be surprised that Dryden finds it hard to judge Milton’s poem under extra-Homeric criteria, and to make sense of the world of post-Vergilian epic except by the lens of his Mantuan master. Yet Milton serves a master higher than Vergil, higher even than the whole inheritance of antiquity, which he Satanizes throughout the poem, from the “Dorian mood” the Devils’ “perfect phalanx” moves to (1.550), to the games of the their hellish leisure (2.528-532), to Satan convincing Eve as “some Orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome” (9.670-671). Dryden has missed the point as much as Shelley or Blake; a different point, but a point no less central to the poem (did Dryden even make it to the opening of Book IX?), although more historical, cultural, and literary than ethical. When Dryden saw Satan giving inspiring speeches to his dispirited men on the shores of hell, he found him a hero because he followed the example of Aeneas, and must not have thought for a moment that Milton’s obvious parallel was meant rather to cast a dubious light upon the Trojan than endow the Devil with heroism.