Mr. Mark Pattison, quoting part of this passage, remarks with justice, “on the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that throughout _Paradise Lost_, as in _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, Milton felt himself to be standing on the sure ground of fact and reality” (_English Men of Letters_—Milton, p. 186, ed. 1879).
St. Jude for ages had been sufficient authority for the angelic revolt, and in a sense it was a reasonable dogma, for although it did not explain the mystery of the origin of evil it pushed it a step further backwards, and without such a revolt the Christian scheme does not well hold together. So also with the entrance of the devil into the serpent. It is not expressly taught in any passage of the canonical Scriptures, but to the Church and to Milton it was as indisputable as the presence of sin in the world. Milton, I repeat, _believed_ in the framework of his poem, and unless we can concede this to him we ought not to attempt to criticise him. He was impelled to turn his religion into poetry in order to bring it closer to him. The religion of every Christian if it is real is a poem. He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels. When Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of filling up: the additions are expression.
Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy. Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was “powerfully affected” only by that “which is conversant with or turns upon infinity,” and man is to him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell contend over him. Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him. Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised, nevertheless says of the _Paradise Lost_, that “its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares,” and this is true. The other great epic poems worthy to be compared with Milton’s, the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the deepest solicitude to the gods or God. Milton’s conception of God is higher than Homer’s, Virgil’s, or Dante’s, but the care of the Miltonic God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more impressive in Milton than in the others.