"Sublime Milton": An Eighteenth-Century Fiction?

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 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...