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Early Milton
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good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the
World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing
good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the
state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what
continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? . . .
Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so
necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of
error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with
less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity that by reading all
manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the
benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people
‘free by nature’ had a right to overthrow a tyrant; a subject that recalls
vividly the questions examined by Shakespeare in his major tragedies
about fifty years before.
Milton continued to defend his ideals of freedom and republicanism.
But at the Restoration, by which time he was blind, he was arrested.
Various powerful contacts allowed him to be released after paying a
fine, and his remaining years were devoted to the composition – orally,
in the form of dictation to his third wife – of his epic poem on the fall
of humanity, Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667.
It is interesting that – like Spenser and Malory before him, and like
Tennyson two centuries later – Milton was attracted to the Arthurian
legends as the subject for his great epic. But the theme of the Fall
goes far beyond a national epic, and gave the poet scope to analyse
the whole question of freedom, free will, and individual choice. He
wished, he said, to ‘assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of
God to men’. This has been seen as confirmation of Milton’s arrogance,
but it also signals the last great attempt to rationalise the spirit of the
Renaissance: mankind would not exist outside Paradise if Satan had
not engineered the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. For many
critics, including the poets Blake and Shelley, Satan, the figure of the
Devil, is the hero of the poem. Satan asserts his own freedom in his
reasoning between heaven, from which he is expelled (as Adam and
Eve are from the Garden of Eden), and hell, where he will be free and
reign supreme: