EMPSON AND BENTLEY
187
Still, when all this is said, Empson's point remains that there's
a pastoral feeling about Milton's Paradise because Adam and Eve
in their innocence are (like pastoral characters generally) both higher
and lower than man as we know
him.
This is a useful corrective to
Mr. C. S. Lewis' solemn correction of Sir Walter Raleigh's profes–
sional flippancies; and perhaps the matter should be allowed to rest
here. But it's hard to forbear the notion that Milton's pastoral feelings
extend a lot wider than the boundaries of Paradise. There's a duality,
whether one thinks of it as swainish or not, in Heaven's wide cham–
paign and in the fields of Hell. Like Adam, Satan is above and below
the human level; the grandiose ambassador of a gorgeous kingdom
and yet a bestial element, he is a figure of comedy and yet of terror,
a joke and an ogre. The angels too are figures of genre; Milton ex–
plains in elaborate, uncomfortable detail about their digestive and
sexual functions because he knows that we, like Adam, are curious
about these rare birds; they are at once odd specimens in this world
and splendid ambassadors from another. God himself, with his arbi–
trary permissions and forbiddings, his vindictive punishments and
elaborate atonements, has two aspects; one can't imagine the splen–
didly laconic architect of the cosmos who presides over Book VII leav–
ing such a muddy, serpentine track as Book XII describes.
One of the main directions which the whole story takes is away
from the fabulous and the mythical into the prosaic and everyday.
The conventional, much-described decline of Satan is paralleled by
a decline of God from the miraculous to the legal and then to the
episodic level, a decline of Man from a princely to a schoolboy figure,
a narrowing of the theater and the issues from cosmic to psychological
scope. The myth is brought down in the last books to its practical
application, as Michael offers Adam a series of enlightened aphor–
isms to guide him through life.
If
Bentley finds nothing much to
criticize in the last books, one of the reasons may be-aside from his
being bored and tired-that Milton had come down to writing the
sort of poem of which he could approve, an enlightened poem, in the
sense that its discourse is literal, largely unadorned, and all on one
rational level.
If
there's any passage in the poem of which Dr. John–
son could say, "Its subject is the truth," and feel confident that he
was referring to a single coherent area of thought and discourse, it
is the prophecies of Michael. What this suggests is that the dramatic
