it immediately about him, or contemplated it through the eyes of the past. It ennobled beauty, and furnished the touchstone for virtue; and it pitilessly laid bare crudity and affectation, and searched out pretension, hypocrisy, and guilt. In short, it so animated his deepest imagination that in his poetry, as perhaps the sagest thing he could teach, it lies at the heart of his message. At the opening of Book Three in Paradise Lost the concept receives consummate expression. Here 'form' no longer is the purpose that shapes, or the soul that inhabits, this or that particular body, but the spirit that, having its effluence from God, produces His created universe. Availing himself of the associations of Biblical usage, and probably inspired by the Neoplatonists and Dante, Milton now calls this essential spirit light, and identifies light, form, and essence. In order to understand the poetical renderings of the idea, and perhaps even in order to recognize them, the following passages from Paradise Lost, the first already mentioned as opening Book Three, the second appearing toward its close, and the last from Book Seven, cannot be too thoughtfully read: Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born! May I express thee unblamed? since God is light, The rising world of waters dark and deep, 1P. L. 3. 1-12. I saw when, at His word, the formless mass, 'Let there be light!' said God; and forthwith light Sprung from the deep." To the imagination of Milton, then, light is the manifestation of the heavenly spirit, the first of things, the quintessence pure, the bright effluence of bright essence increate. Since light emanates from Divinity, it carries with it wisdom and holiness; and the progress of all forms toward perfection is made evident by their capacity to receive light. In these lines, with their vivid directness and beauty, we have the classic expression of Milton's belief in the interrelation of essential and visible condition. The appropriate words in a concordance of Milton's poetry will show how often terms relating to light and darkness appear in his verse. Yet it is not the frequency of the words that is so remarkable. Other poets have loved light, as other concordances would show; but no one else, unless it is Saint John the divine, has put his love of light quite so completely into the service of an abstract concept. On this 'P. L. 3. 708-719. P. L. 7. 243-245. point let us compare Milton with Dante, to whom also light is the symbol of beauty and of all that partakes of Divinity. The Divina Commedia is full of references to light, as Dean Church has eloquently noted: Light in general is his [Dante's] special and chosen source of poetic beauty. No poet that we know has shown such singular sensibility to its varied appearances has shown that he felt it in itself the cause of a distinct and peculiar pleasure, delighting the eye apart from form, as music delights the ear apart from words, and capable, like music, of definite character, of endless variety, and infinite meanings....Light everywhere in the sky and earth and sea, in the star, the flame, the lamp, the gem; broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted pure through the glass, or colored through the edge of the fractured emerald; dimmed in the mist, the halo, the deep water; streaming through the rent cloud, glowing in the coal, quivering in the lightning, flashing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled behind the pure alabaster, mellowed and clouding itself in the pearl; light contrasted with shadow-shading off and copying itself in the double rainbow, like voice and echo;...light in the human eye and face, displaying, figuring, and confounded with its expressions;...light from every source, and in all its shapes, illuminates, irradiates, gives its glory to the Commedia. The remembrance of our 'serene life' beneath the 'fair stars' keeps up continually the gloom of the Inferno. Light, such as we see it and recognize it, the light of morning and evening growing and fading, takes off from the unearthliness of the Purgatorio. ...And when he rises beyond the regions of earthly day, light, simple, unalloyed, unshadowed, eternal, lifts the creations of his thought above all affinity to time and matter; light never fails him, as the expression of the gradations of bliss.1 But though light is thus diffused throughout Dante's poem, his journey may, on the whole, be thought of as a steady progress from the darkness of Hell into the everincreasing radiance of the Rose of Heaven. In the Empyrean 1R. W. Church, Dante and Other Essays, pp. 163–165. he is surrounded with brightness, and Paradise first appears to him like a river of light whence issue living sparks, so that he knows that he is catching 'a ray reflected upon the summit of the First Moved which takes thence life and potency." At last he beholds the divine light itself, before which 'one becomes such that to turn from it for other spectacle it is impossible that one should ever consent; because the good which of the will is object is all assembled in it, and outside of it that is defective which there is perfect."2 Thus there is in Dante a constant advance toward light objectively considered, a constant observation of its reflection along the way, and a final and complete revelation of it as proceeding from God. At first we may be struck by similarities in Dante's and Milton's treatment of light; but there is a difference, the more noteworthy for so much agreement. One illustration will show that Milton's concept of light was a pure outgrowth and a pure expression of his sense of form as Dante's was not: let us examine their respective délineations of utter moral depravity. The method of Dante is elaborate. He depicts Lucifer as a hideous and shaggy monster, with three faces, and large, flapping wings ‘in form and texture like a bat's,' and with other visible symptoms of spiritual decay. But Milton, refusing to multiply distinctions, merely converts Satan from an angel of light to the Prince of Darkness, and thus by a negative process, that is positive and awful in view of what it denies, forms his personification of evil. Dante must reveal the spiritual corrup 1 Paradiso 30. 106-108; trans by Butler. 2 Ibid. 33. 100-105. tion of Satan by various palpable imperfections; the loss of physical lustre is but one of many external signs. Milton needs no accumulation of effects; with inspired foresight, he chose to denote the greatest moral excellence and spiritual good by a single phenomenon with physical characteristics affording him all the opportunity he desires. He has only to withdraw light in order to have darkness supplant it, and by this darkness, with its varying intensity, he is able to represent corresponding degrees of deformity. (Since Milton's allusions to light, in the main, directly or indirectly express his theory of form, we find a new significance in much of the epic. Our interpretation gives added meaning to the entreaty of the poet for light in his darkness; to the radiant brightness with which his imagination clothes Heaven, and the perpetual gloom in which it shrouds Chaos and Hell; to that forfeit of splendor by which the rebellious angels, once the true 'Progenie of Light,' become the 'Sons of Darkness'; to the Father's promise of 'light after light' to those who heed the voice of conscience; to Satan's speech of defiance upon Mount Niphates; in fact, to a majority of the passages containing such words as light, lustre, radiant, shining, dark, darkness, gloom, and night. Let us end the chapter by considering the details in the story of Satan and his revolted legions that betoken the waning of their original brightness. In the First Book of Paradise Lost, Satan, 'breaking the horrid silence' of the sombre regions into which he and his companions have been hurled, and puzzled by the darkened figure of Beelzebub, thus addresses him: |