How to believeJohn Milton This article is more than 12 years oldJohn Milton, part 5: the devil's best lines
This article is more than 12 years oldJessica MartinSatan is the great salesman of Paradise Lost, who can talk his way past everyone – except himselfSatan is the first figure to speak in Paradise Lost. His address (to his second-in-command Beelzebub) is the kind of thing a politician has to say to his party after a defeat. It combines persuasion with virtuoso emotional manipulation – and it works, shifting seamlessly from lamentation and condolence to a restatement of united defiance to which Beelzebub instinctively responds. It works so well that we scarcely notice, then or later, that the gift of the gab is virtually Satan's only resource.
But the gift of the gab is a lot. It's enough. It gets him the fealty of his own defeated army (a difficult achievement smoothly managed); it gets him out of hell; it gets him past the throne of Chaos; it gets him entry to Earth; it gets him Eve's attention; it gets him the Fall. At each one of these points Satan has to talk someone into something, and at each one of these points he succeeds. As for Shakespeare's poisonous rhetorician Iago, so here: verbal mastery is the whole route to ruin. The period's endless guides to the art of rhetoric are fond of pointing out that if you know how to say something well enough you can defeat an army without shedding a drop of blood. Evidently Satan (for whom violence has failed) has taken the advice to heart.
Milton knew about political power and the place in it for skilful speech. As Cromwell's Latin secretary he was at the diplomatic centre of the Commonwealth's power base – the modern equivalent might be a senior foreign office post. He brings his contemporary experience to bear on his portrait of Satan; but he is at least as informed by the politics of ancient Rome. As Satan squares up to tackle Eve, Cicero, among others, is at his back:
"As when of old some Orator renoundIn Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence
Flourishd, since mute, to some great cause addrest,
Stood in himself collected, while each part,
Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue
Sometimes in highth began, as no delay
Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right.
So standing, moving, or to highth upgrown
The Tempter all impassiond thus began" (IX.670-8)
The epic simile seems barely a simile at all; at this point we see Satan as such an orator, so moved by the rightness of his cause that he cuts straight to the chase without any warmup (or "preface"). But it's not true. It's a piece of acting: "The Tempter … new part puts on" (IX.665, 667) and actually there is a perfectly good preamble coming (addressed to the fruit) before he ever gets round to addressing Eve directly. What the simile points up is an ironic difference; Satan is not a man transported by zeal for the common good, but a self-seeking immortal animated by a grudge to prey on innocence.
Milton thinks the common good is of surpassing importance. His opposition to kings is based upon a conviction that monarchies, being fatally vulnerable to the power held in the hands of one flawed individual, cannot benefit nations. The only flawless king is God, therefore no human being should usurp God's empty throne. Republics, with their checks and balances, are a much better option; but Milton is perfectly alive to the ways in which naked ambition can pervert republics, too. He has read his Tacitus, his Plutarch and his Suetonius. From this, and his personal experience, he has concluded that the heart of tyranny is individualism.
So Milton shows a Satan deeply isolated by his desires, because he cannot bear to put the common good before those desires. He exemplifies all that is dangerous about personal charisma, and his rhetorical dominance is bound up with that charisma.
When Satan makes speeches to other people, he is always manipulative, always instrumental. He obtains an unobtrusive ascendancy in the initial debate between the fiends in Book II simply by speaking last, after they have argued themselves to a standstill. He has primed Beelzebub to set him up this way. Then, "with Monarchal pride" (II.428) he claims the position of subversive champion for man's Fall, and with it "Imperial Sov'ranty" (II.446) in his own realm, bought with pain and danger.
Beyond the bounds of hell his tricksily protean self-presentation becomes a visual metaphor too; he is a shape-shifter, sometimes cherub, sometimes toad, sometimes serpent. In the latter form he first addresses Eve with courtly circumlocutions at least as elaborate as his serpent-shape, that shape of "rising foulds, that tourd/fould about fould a surging Maze" (IX.498-9). When he is finally defeated, in Book X, his defeat is represented as a rhetorical one, his speech of triumph to the fiends of hell met not with applause but "a dismal universal hiss, the sound/Of public scorn" (X.508-9). Actually this is because they have all been turned into snakes and have lost the power of language, but it is the shame of the failed speech which bites deepest:
"Thus was the applause they meantTurn'd to exploding hiss, triumph to shame
Cast on themselves from their own mouths" (X.545-7)
And because Satan views all his relationships as instrumental, in terms of their means to power, he must be beyond measure lonely: "my self" he declares to himself "am Hell" (IV.75). Only the reader is allowed to witness – to overhear, really – a few rare moments when he speaks truth in isolation. These are, as critics have remarked, very seductive for the reader; but they are not, as on a stage they would be, shared moments. They are eavesdropping. We spy on him spying on the mutual love of Eve and Adam and we hear what he thinks about it:
"Thus these twoImparadis't in one anothers arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy thir fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy, nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfill'd with pain of longing pines" (IV.505-11)
Satan, king of words, will never be able to risk the self-abandonment of true conversation. For Milton, the judgment is damning.
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