The confusion of spirit and matter, which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven, fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected, as knowledge is increased.
After the operation of immaterial agents which cannot be explained, may be considered that of allegorical persons, which have no real existence. To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus fame tells a tale, and victory hovers over a general, or perches on a standard; but fame and victory can do no more. To give them any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity. In the Prometheus of Aeschylus, we see violence and strength, and in the Alcestis of Euripides, we see death brought upon the stage, all as active persons of the drama; but no precedents can justify absurdity.
Milton's allegory of sin and death is, undoubtedly, faulty. Sin is, indeed, the mother of death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That sin and death should have shown the way to hell, might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan's passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The hell assigned to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local than the residence of man. It is placed in some distant part of space, separated from the regions of harmony and order by a chaotick waste and an unoccupied vacuity; but sin and death worked up "a mole of aggravated soil," cemented with "asphaltus;" a work too bulky for ideal architects.
This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the poem; and to this there was no temptation but the author's opinion of its beauty.
To the conduct of the narrative some objections may be made. Satan is, with great expectation, brought before Gabriel in Paradise, and is suffered to go away unmolested. The creation of man is represented as the consequence of the vacuity left in heaven by the expulsion of the rebels; yet Satan mentions it as a report "rife in heaven" before his departure.