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Review

"Sublime Milton":
An Eighteenth-Century Fiction?

Michelle Volpe

Leslie E. Moore begins her book Beautiful Sublime: The Making of Paradise Lost, 1701-1734 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990; 235 pp.; $35.00) by quoting Annie Dillard's description of the total eclipse of 1979: "It had clobbered us, and now it roared away . . . . It was as though an enormous loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth's face" (1). Paradise Lost, Moore holds, had a similar effect on its early-eighteenth-century readers. Faced with this poem of epic magnitudes, writers like Joseph Addison were overcome by Milton's ambitious yet successful--in fact, sublime--rendering of his religious subject; Addison, like the witnesses of the eclipse, "had been struck, 'clobbered' by the 'loping God in the sky'" (1). With this in mind, Moore sets out to show how and why Milton was elevated to "sublime" and "beautiful" heights, how this conception of Milton and Paradise Lost has affected literary history, and to illuminate the works of writers who have been overlooked despite their fresh and provocative analyses of Milton's poem. Her inquiries are more complex and compelling than may be evident; as Moore notes, "[t]he 'sublime Milton' may well be a fiction of eighteenth-century criticism, but it functions as a near truth in literary history" (2).

Aside from Addison, the writers Moore explores (John Dennis, Jane Adams, Anne Finch, and Jonathan Richardson) generally have been overlooked or "obscured because of gender, profession, or class" (15). Moore writes that "all [of these writers] contributed to the contexts shaping the thought of 'major' eighteenth-century writers--and perhaps contributed even more to the traditions leading to modern work on Paradise Lost" (15). She aims to understand their definitions of sublime and beautiful and how they apply them to Milton and his works, but notes that [End Page 143] there was not agreement on what exactly "sublime Milton" meant to this era (6). Moore defines the eighteenth-century understanding of sublime as "marked [by] excess and instability . . . transcendence, the breaking of known boundaries, rules, and laws . . . ." (3); and the beautiful for them is synonymous with the common, the human, and with epic conventions. These two words, paradoxical in meaning to eighteenth-century critics and readers, were being brought together in order to define emerging generic changes (12).

Beautiful Sublime is divided into four chapters, based on the main aesthetic concerns of the writers she studies: Admiration, the Beautiful, Terror, and Mediation. These aesthetic categories are derived from early critics' attempts to understand the characters ("celestial, human, infernal, and imaginary") and the landscapes ("heaven, hell, earth, and chaos") Milton juxtaposes and intermingles in Paradise Lost, for a theory had yet to be developed that could handle such unusual and sublime relationships (13-14). This unusual interplay, Moore explains, brought about questions of genre and aesthetics for these readers, including the functions of and the relationship between the heroic and divine. Sometimes authors went as far as contriving theories or conforming Paradise Lost to fit their conceptions of proper poetic form, the subject at hand, or of Milton himself (6).

A striking example of how the early critics contrived theories in order to preserve or propel their notion of the sublime Milton is in Moore's discussion of Dennis's and Richardson's reactions to Milton's treatment of angels in Paradise Lost. She notes that neither Dennis nor Richardson (nor most eighteenth-century readers) felt comfortable with Milton's description of angels, specifically, the implication that they are composed of matter. This idea not only challenged conventional Christian notions that angels are pure, spiritual beings, but it complicated generic considerations: if angels are material, then they can be likened to the "machines" of traditional epics, and therefore can be brought into the realm of the traditional epic (30). This gesture allowed them to understand Milton's imagination better, for it placed these new concepts into a familiar structure. In response to the angels, Dennis basically contrived a theory whereby angels are allowed "voluntary meta morphosis"--they are spirits, but they can "assume Bodies" when needed (24). Richardson reconciled this issue in a similar manner by suggesting that angels are an "inferior sense of spirit, a spiritualized matter," an idea that modern readers still advocate (24). Moore writes that their reactions to the angels "[show] the metaphor of 'sublime epic' at work . . . and suggests the limits of early exploration of Miltonic sublimity" (30).

The chapter readers might find most engaging is "The Aesthetic of the Beautiful," which focuses on early-eighteenth-century women's reactions to Paradise Lost. Moore notes that women's general reaction to the poem was "a blend of admiration and restraint," which is exemplified in female poets' tendencies to borrow from, yet simultaneously question, many of Milton's assumptions, ideas, and formal choices in Paradise Lost (58). These poets respond most often to the characterization of Eve and her relationship to Adam as explained by Milton and male commentators: essentially, that Eve inhabits the realm of the beautiful, and thus is the antithesis to the sublime (including Adam). She does, however, provides the names of many female poets who exemplify these responses, Moore focuses on Adams and Finch who, she says, "provide the most thoughtful exploration of Eve's character and position" (60). By questioning Eve's portrayal in Paradise Lost, these poets reevaluate the aesthetic and generic issues of their time, and are able to present an Eve who is both beautiful and sublime, or at least show why she did not exist as beautiful and sublime in Milton's poem. For instance, in Jane Adams' poem "Adam on the Formation [of] Eve," Adam does not witness Eve's creation as he does in Book 8, thereby preventing him from "deem[ing] himself her co-creator" and decreasing his level of sublimity (79). And in "Adam's First Address to Eve," she has Adam "transported by the first signs of Eve's reason, by the sign that he will share with her a 'mutual Interchange of Thought'" (81), not simply a physical relationship. In Finch's poem "Fanscomb Barn," she shows how the epic conventions lauded by critics like Addison widen the divide between Adam and Eve, and males and females in general (87-89). Despite these women's efforts (and those of the classical scholar, Richard Bentley), the [End Page 144] conception of Eve as the beautiful and Adam as the sublime "has been one of the most enduring pronouncements in the history of Milton criticism" (62).

Moore shows that Richardson is equally as innovative and insightful as the female poets in his thoughts regarding aesthetics and genre, as is exemplified in his conception of the Mediator metaphor in Paradise Lost. The figure of the Medi ator--his term for the Son of God--allows him "to mediate a new aesthetic between sublimity and beauty" (136) and to "[provide] a transition between the pure sublime, unapproachable awe, and human imagination" needed to understand the poem (157). With these ideas informing his thoughts regarding the poem's genre, Richardson concludes that Milton's religious subject and projections into the past and the future necessitate deviations from conventional epic form (156); a new genre was needed to accommodate the poet's inherently sublime subject. However, Moore notes the downside of his ideas: "Richardson tries to have it both ways: Milton created a poem celebrating aesthetic reconciliation even as he imagined conceptions beyond the ken of the average reader"--though allowing the potential for comprehension, the "subliming" of the poem and the need of a mediator distanced the reader from the poem (157). Moore shows that many of Richardson's ideas conflict with those of Addison and other previous prominent critics. For instance, whereas Addison separates Books 11 and 12 from the rest of the poem for their supposed inferiority, Richardson declares the sublimity of last four books. But she also shows that Addison's view is the one that has persisted throughout time: "[n]o division of the poem has been more influential, as the modern treatment of Books 11 and 12 indicates" (150; paraphrase from 152-54).

Moore's discussions and conclusions are engrossing and intelligent. Her book effectively rediscovers the comments and analyses of early, overlooked writers of Paradise Lost in forms ranging from poems to Richard son's biography of Milton, and she consistently relates these writers' ideas to modern criticism. Though, I would like to have seen more discussion regarding these writers' direct or indirect influence on their contemporaries' views of the poem, as is implied in Moore's Prologue ("[all of] these writers . . . have contributed to the contexts shaping the thought of 'major' eighteenth-century writers"). This is, however, a secondary concern, and should not undermine her otherwise thorough, perceptive analyses. Some might question her relatively brief discussion of the female reaction to the poem as I did initially; but focusing on the female writers is not Moore's main intention. In order to clarify how the eighteenth century ensured Milton's and Paradise Lost's sublime reputation and their placement in the canon, she has to focus on the writers who had--or had the potential to have--clout with the literary establishment.

Beautiful Sublime was sent to us relatively late; regardless of its publication date (1990), the compelling subject and the book's research value warrant attention. Moore fully acknowledges and explores the indictments against the eighteenth century of "misreading," "blantant[ly] misun derstanding," and actually "dropping or revising the final lines of" Paradise Lost (5), but she exhibits an understanding of their contexts and concerns and is able to present the value and influence of their work in our time. Moore's clear presentation of the concerns of eighteenth-century readers does indeed reveal how Milton's most famous work startled and fascinated them--as though an eclipse had graced their sky.

Ohio University