The Dress of Words: Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond
Year: 1981
Type: article
Abstract: In iiis first invocation to the muse inParadise Lost, and again in subsequent invocations, Milton quite definitely sets himself up against all previous epic writers as one who is determined to outgo them.His stated reliance is on his Christian theme that contains revealed truth unknown to the ancients and is therefore automatically superior to any subject they could have chosen for treatment.At the same time, Milton strove to outgo his classical models not alone in theme but also in the art of literary composition.That is, he deliberately invited comparison with Homer and Virgil in his utilization of their structural and rhetorical devices, but always with a difference.The initial invocation is greatly extended and splendidly deepened, and, uniquely, other and even more personal pleas for enlightenment and support are voiced at crucial intervals.The epic similes are enlarged in scope as forms of prolepsis, irony, and characterization, and they are carefully shaped to achieve a previously unenvisaged coherence of elements in the two parts of the extended comparisons.Obviously, the formulas of epics needed to be enlarged to do justice to Milton's great subject.Yet as a literary artist he deliberately invited the reader's attention to the vitality and meaningfulness with which he had infused these traditional formulas that in lesser hands would have been palely imitative.In the last paragraph of his preface to Samson Agonistes, also, he implicitly invites a comparison of his achievement with the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides by challenging only those readers to judge him who are acquainted with these "three Tragic Poets unequall'd yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write Tragedy."Milton would not have been Milton if he had failed to believe that in the view of judicious readers he would come off from the comparison not without honor.In matching himself against the Greek tragic writers Milton would again have trusted to his theme, which by the support of religious truth could not in his mind fail to surpass the dramatic subjects of the pagan world, its heroic history and its gods.But as he had done in Paradise Lost, one would expect Milton in Samson to adapt the various conventions of Greek tragedy to die superior grandeur of his theme and to inform them with new life, not alone from the influence of his biblical subject but also by means of his own artistic invention finding new and more meaningful variations on the formulas of tragic drama.Milton's preface to Samsan Agonistes is more respectful to the tragedy of The Dress of Words the Greeks than the comparisons of his own work with classical epic in Paradise Lost, It is not inappropriate to speculate that his admiration for ancient drama was higher than for ancient epic: we must not forget that when contemplating a work that would in effect justify his life of preparation, his first thoughts had turned to tragedy.At any rate, I take it that we do not observe in Samson so many of the technical innovations in traditional form that had marked Paradise Lost.Instead, we find within a framework of almost exact parallelism in external structure a conscious deepening of the significance, a new light on the means by which Greek conventions could be adapted to shadow forth the high significance of his theme, the relations of God to man in the working out of divine purpose.I suggest that in the end the new charge of energy that in Samson Agonistes runs through the old formulaic conventions transforms this dramatic structure by a sea-change in no less innovative a manner than the more technical alterations of epic formula with which he had experimented in Paradise Lost.Indeed, I am bold to assert that in its Christian vitalizing of ancient tragic form Samson Agonistes produced a greater and more original triumph than the Christian epic of Paradise Lost.Two related problems face any critic of Samson Agonistes.The first is the precise nature of the misunderstanding diat Samson and the other characters have of God's purpose for him, a purpose not finally manifested until the catastrophe.The second is the exact means, as dramatically represented, by which the misunderstanding is eliminated and a reconciliation is brought about.One minority group of critics, perhaps basing their thesis on Dr. Johnson's famous pronouncement that Samson Agonistes is a play without a middle, sees Samson as another Prometheus, the victim of extreme punishment, whose virtue is stoic or heroic suffering, simple endurance on the model of Job, until he recognizes the possibility for action offered by the feast of Dagon, seizes it, and achieves a mighty revenge for die indignities the Philistines had heaped upon him.Obviously, if this summary were true, the play would merely mark time by celebrating the virtues of stoic endurance up to the moment that Milton was ready to introduce what would have been the unmotivated catastrophe.That the ways of God to men would have been any further clarified by this dramatic program than in the relatively primitive and non-redemptive Old Testament ethos of the story of Job is doubtful, and that Milton would have engaged himself to such a theme that controverts the message of Paradise Lost and then had the effrontery to claim for it the reader's "new acquist of true experience from this great event" is scarcely to be credited.Fortunately it is more often held that Samson earns his way back to a reconciliation with God and that the action dramatizes this reconciliation as Bowers: Samson Agonistes 3 the central theme of the play.This view makes of Samson Agonistes a redemptive tragedy not on the Greek but on the Shakespearean model, in which the hero after his tragic error wins through to a death in victory that justifies such a trust as Horatio's that flights of angels will sing Hamlet to his rest.Redemptive tragedy has its own special dramatic structure.However, at the moment the question is the nature of the misunderstanding that is turned to understanding in the reconciliation.That in the catastrophe God rescinds his estrangement and Samson once again becomes the champion of God and of Israel is certainly Milton's intention, one finally understood by Manoa and the Chorus and through them communicated to the audience in the magnificent close of the tragedy.What does not seem to be so clear to critics are the special terms of the reconciliation and the reason why these special terms impose the penalty of death on Samson.The intention of Samson Agonistes does not differ from that of Paradise Lost in centering on the justification of the ways of God to men, a familiar quotation that can be read in two complementary ways: to make clear the justice of God's ways in dealing with man and to make clear to man the fact that God's ways are just.The lesson of Paradise Lost is that God's will cannot be controverted by Satan or by Adam.Since God's will is to good, what seems to be thwarting of that will by the success of evil is not a true thwarting.At best it is permitted and it is temporary, since the effect of evil is always to promote the good that obliterates the specific evil of the Fall and its effects on mankind up to the ultimate healing of the breach of faith in the Last Judgment when good will reign forever and evil be permanently imprisoned.Samson Agonistes has a more concentrated aim: to dramatize a concrete and derived example of Adam's disobedience and fall and the estrangement that follows.But the apparent thwarting by human means of God's Providence is there concluded in the triumphant demonstration that God always turns evil to good in a reconciliation with repentant man and in the resulting action that fulfills God's original purpose.As the first disobedience of Adam is a paradigm for Samson, so Samson may serve as a paradigm for any individual in the audience who must necessarily face the same problems of sin, punishment, and reconciliation.In this paradigm there is a crucial element that mystifies man.This is the apparent severity of the punishment that is linked with estrangement when man fails in his mission of fulfilling God's purposes.Actually, it is not the severity of the punishment itself for failure so much as the harsh estrangement that puzzles man's understanding of the paradoxical ways of a loving God.Specifically, the estrangement appears to confirm God's abandonment of His The Dress oj Words against God's by attempting an escape.Thus his actions, though negative and without hope of redemption, are actually positive in dieir result, and from die point of view of die audience-diough not of Samson-his state at the end of the Manoa episode differs from that at the beginning, I suggest diat what die audience sees happening is a dramatization of the three stages of repentance as worked out in Book J of Spenser's Faerie Oueene in accord with die conventional teachings of the church.We should remember that to Milton Spenser was a better teacher than Aquinas. 1 Like Samson, the Red Cross Knight after his breach of faith with Ducssa and his encounter with Despair is in no condition to attempt the conquest of the dragon until he has been inwardly healed and thus qualified for the dispensation of mercy.Fidelia brings him to die first stage of this process of 'trew repentance' by instructing him in the nature of sin so that That wretched world he gan for to abhore, And mortal life gan loadi, as thing forlore, Greev'd with remembrance of his wicked wayes, And prickt widi anguish of his sinnes so sore, That he desirde to end his wretched dayes: So much the dart of sinful!guilt the soule dismayes.(].10.21)The difference between this dismay and the form allegorized in the earlier dispute with personified Despair is important.Red Cross had encountered Despair in full confidence but was abruptly brought low by arguments based entirely on the principle of retributive justice that offered no hope of forgiveness for die irremediable hcinousness of his sin, Against this argument he had no defence, for he lacked the protection of formal repentance against the hopelessness of his position now so pervertcdly thrust home.It is true that, on the surface, under Fidelia's guidance Red Cross also feels a horror and an anguish that make him wish to end his life.But it is crucial that it is Faith who instills this recognition of the real nature of his crime and so the purpose is not retributive but, instead, the necessary preliminary to the redemptive process, By church teaching, a sinner can prepare himself for mercy only by first understanding die nature of his sin.This preliminary, I suggest, is represented in Samson's opening soliloquy in which he is assailed by his restless thoughts like a swarm of hornets.Wc must take it that despite his acceptance of full blame for his fall, Samson is not "repentant" in any fulfilled sense as Spenser saw it; and Milton powerfully illustrates his bewildered state of mind by the fevered questionings which foster only despair.Spenser makes it clear that this same state of mind in the Red Cross Knight The Dress of Words Appoint not heavenly disposition, Father, Nothing of all these evils hath befall'n me But justly; I my self have brought them on, Sole Author I, sole cause.(373-376) Samson recognizes that the present base degree to which I now am fall'n, These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base As was my former servitude, ignoble, Unmanly, ignominious, infamous, True slavery, and that blindness worse then this, That saw not how degenratly I serv'd.(414-419) His acdon in refusing Manoa's offer of a retirement to soft ease is instinctively correct in that it is not his right to decide when the punishment shall end.Since Samson sdll sees the punishment as purely retributive, he intends to bear it until his hoped-for death, which alone will offer peace.On the other hand, the patience that he derived from his interview with the Chorus enables him to understand more clearly than before the exact nature of his crime, which he correctly imputes to effeminacy (or lack of fortitude) following on pride.By insisting on the endurance of his humiliation so long as God wills it, he is showing in the only way he knows his sorrow and remorse, and he has definitely moved into the second stage, that of penance.The final stage of repentance, I suggest, is dramatized in the Dalila visitation where two very important decisions are made.The first consists of Samson's refusal to repeat his former sin, the effeminate subjection of his will to Dalila's, No more telling proof could be given of his repentance, his hatred of the sin that caused his downfall, than this rejection of the opportunity to repeat the same temptation.This is the theological rest of his fitness for redemption.To my mind, however, the second decision-the forgiveness of Dalila-is equally important, no matter how ironic the terms in which he delivers it.If Samson cannot forgive an enemy-the audience knows from the biblical injunction-God cannot forgive him, Samson has no hint of the true significance of this action, nor does he even recognize it as significant, perhaps, hut it is crucial.Without it his salvation is impossible, for his hatred of his own sin must not be confused with an unforgiving hatred of the imperfect woman who tempted him to his fall.It is by no means entirely implausible that Milton had some understanding of die modern psychological doctrine that forgiving the one who brought disaster is forgiving oneself.As I understand it, this self-forgiveness means that a person is prepared to accept himself for
Source: South Atlantic Review
DOI: 10.2307/3199324
Authors: Paula R. Backscheider, Robert B. White
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Royal Society
OpenAlex ID: W1492707928