At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the spread of republican values and the recent revolutions in America (1765-83) and France (1789-99), opened up space to reclaim Milton from orthodoxy by appreciating Satan’s subversive qualities. The Romantics in particular objected to Paradise Lost as a “mere token of cultural and religious orthodoxy, domesticated as a distinctly theological work.” (qtd. in Kolbrener 200).
According Flannagan, “sophisticated poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw Milton from a more international perspective. . . They read his life and works in light of the French Revolution. Milton was redefined as a revolutionary, a heroic Republican resisting the authority of an unjust and degenerate monarchy” (qtd. in Duran 122).
I would argue that Flannagan’s claim that Milton was “redefined” as a revolutionary demonstrates the continuing orthodox resistance from acknowledging the revolutionary qualities in Paradise Lost, which is seen as a Romantic error by those who continue to debarb Milton of his seditious qualities.
As a response to the Enlightenment’s obsession with pure reason, the Romantics felt poetry came from raw emotion, and wanted to explore themselves and their own experiences in a more direct manner. As such, and in alignment with a growing rejection of religious truths, Romantic poets resisted the orthodox reading and celebrated Satan’s virtuous qualities.
Already in 1787, Robert Burns remarks, “Give me a spirit like my favorite hero, Milton’s Satan” and talked of “dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence; the
desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship, in that great Personage, Satan” (qtd. in Abrams 251).
William Godin asked in his Political Justice of 1793, “Why did Satan rebel against his maker? It was, he himself informs us, because he saw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed” (qtd. in Leonard 166). Godwin’s daughter Mary received a copy of Paradise Lost from Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1815; her
response to Milton, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1817) is heavy with its influence.
In A Defense of Poetry, Shelley claims Milton’s poem “contains within itself a
philosophical refutation of that system which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief and popular support.” In On the Devil and Devils Shelley’s central argument is that the Christian God is wicked. Satan has some excuse for his crimes, while God has none. “Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremist anguish on an enemy—these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant;
although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeated in one subdued are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the victor.”
Unlike Dante or Tasso’s Devil, “Milton divested him of a sting, hoofs, and horns; clothes him with the sublime grandeur of a graceful but tremendous spirit.” It was Milton’s cruel ruler of heaven that made the devil’s own “benevolent and amiable disposition” the instrument of his revenge, turning Satan’s “good into evil” and inspiring him “with such impulses, as …
irresistibly determined him to act what he most abhorred . . . for ever tortured with compassion and affection for those whom he betrays and ruins.” According to Shelley, “To have alleged no superiority of moral virtue in his God over his Devil . . . was the most decisive proof of Milton’s genius” (qtd. in Wistrich 534-536).
In Blake’s reading, the defeat of Satan in Paradise Lost signifies the “lamentable and pestilence-breeding victory of repressive reason over man’s passion and desire, that ‘Energy’
which ‘is Eternal Delight’” (Abrams 251). Blake claims the reason Paradise Lost generates sympathy with Satan’s passion over God’s reason, is because Milton was a “true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
Coleridge notes, “the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than service in heaven,” and argues Milton sought to “place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains endure to accomplish its end”….but he also managed to invest his character with “a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendor, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity” (qtd. in Steadman 258).
The Romantic response to Paradise Lost marks the ongoing debate between reason and passion: traditionally, the emotions and passions were seen as selfish desires which needed to be
repressed and refused by the force of reason. In contrast to the Christian virtues of self-denial and abstinence, the Romantics eagerly sought out new forms of pleasurable experience. And this is not just a Romantic fallacy or outdated reading: while the Faustian tendency to boldly seek out personal desires continues to be frowned upon by most organized religions, it has nevertheless become the fully justified and nearly universal ambition of contemporary culture.
For William Hazlitt, Satan seemed “the most heroic subject that was ever chosen for a poem; and the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. . . His ambition was the greatest; but his fortitude was as great as his sufferings. His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body. He was not the Principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil – but the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate” (qtd. in Steadman 258).
The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, “rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air” [1.226], it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed—
but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god.
However, Hazlitt also notes the “problem” of Milton, that some might think he carried his liberality too far, and “injured the cause he professed to espouse by making [Satan] the chief person in his poem.” Hazlitt believes, due to his faith in religion and love for rebellion, “each of these motives had its full share in determining the choice of his subject (qtd. in Wittreich 384).
Milton’s Satan was reimagined, thanks to Lord Byron, as a particular type of literary character that came to be known as the Byronic hero. According to historian and critic Lord Macaulay, “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection” (qtd. in Christiansen 201). To defend his own characters, like Manfred or Cain, against the charge of blasphemy, Byron asks “Are these people more impious than Milton’s Satan? or the Prometheus of Aeschylus?” (qtd. in Teskey 289).
In 1825 the orthodox reading of Paradise Lost took a blow with the publication of De Doctrina Christiana, which clearly marks Milton as an Arian (denial of the equality and co-eternity of the Son with the Father). Although this is a notable feature in Paradise Lost, Milton could be excused for making an artistic choice necessary for the plot of his epic; but was now revealed as a firm believer in heresy.
Willmot, in Lives of the Sacred Poets (1838), notes the difficulty in both praising the poet, and recognizing that “the nervous energy of his intellect is never more fully developed than in the daring attitudes of defiance,” and that Milton was openly critical of both church and king:
“Every word seems to be inspired by the heart of the writer; and those tremendous declamations, which Cicero called the thunderbolts of Demonsthenes, were never hurled with more terrific impetuosity than the anathemas of Milton against the king and the episcopacy” (80). Although Willmot recognized that God can be found anywhere, he nevertheless warns against using Milton as an excuse against church attendance.
Let none, therefore, plead the example of Milton in extenuation of their neglect, for with all the purity of his heart, and all the dignity of his character, his conduct awakes regret, as well as triumph. The pride of reason, which constituted so marked a feature
humbler men; yet from the lips of the weakest of God’s servants he might have gathered precepts of meekness and forgiveness, that would have softened the asperities of his disposition. (62)
Lord David Cecil writes that, as an exposition of Christian belief, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are failures. Milton “was a philosopher rather than a devotee. His imagination was lucid and concrete, unlit by heavenly gleams . . . nor was his moral sensibility a Christian one.
The stoic virtues, fortitude, temperance, above all, moral independency, were what he valued. He did not live by faith, scorned hope, and was indisposed to charity, while pride, so far from being the vice which Christianity considers it, was to Milton the mark of a superior nature” (qtd. in Werblowsky 39).
Bagehot comments in 1859 that the conflict between Milton’s morality and his true sympathy is a great defect. As Professor Grierson will comment a century later, “If Paradise Lost (and even Paradise Regained) seems to many people to-day imperfectly Christian in spirit, it is not because of any explicitly heretical doctrine… but because Milton’s scale of values is not that of the orthodox and sincere Christian, Evangelical or Catholic (qtd. in Grierson 99-100).
The Romantic (or “satanic”) reading which recognized Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost triumphed by the end of the nineteenth century over the orthodox, religious reading.
According to Victorian critic Walter Raleigh, Satan “unavoidably reminds us of
Prometheus, and his very situation as the fearless antagonist of Omnipotence makes him either a fool or a hero.” Raleigh continues, “Milton is far indeed from permitting us to think him a fool.
The nobility and greatness of his bearing are brought home to us in some half-dozen of the finest poetic passages in the world” (qtd. in Werblowsky 47).
In the 1882 introduction to Paradise Lost, David Masson writes “Satan. . . as all critics
poem” (qtd. in Bryson 20). In 1925, Denis Saurat’s Milton, Man and Thinker claims Milton as
“emotionally of the Devil’s party” whether deliberately or not, and that there is “no lack of sympathy on intellectual subjects between Satan and Milton” (qtd. in Bryson 21).
As such, Paradise Lost became a difficult and dangerous text to religious readers. It would soon be the target of a massive campaign to reclaim it for orthodoxy.