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Amenities of Literature. Disraeli IsaacЧитать онлайн книгу.

Amenities of Literature - Disraeli Isaac


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of Cædmon revolves may only veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed in a DREAM.1

      The ancient, as well as the modern, of these scriptural poets has adopted a narrative which is not found in the Scriptures. The rebellion of Satan before the creation of man, and his precipitation with the apostate angels into a dungeon-gulf of flame, and ice, and darkness, though an incident familiar to us as a gospel text, remains nothing more than a legend unhallowed by sacred writ.

      But the coincidence of the Cædmonian with the Miltonian poem in having adopted the same peculiar subject of the revolt of Satan and the expulsion of the angels, is not the most remarkable one in the two works. The same awful narrative is pursued, and we are startled at the opening of the Pandemonium by discovering the same scene and the same actors. When we scrutinise into minuter parts, we are occasionally struck by some extraordinary similarities.

      Cædmon, to convey a notion of the ejection from heaven to hell, tells that “the Fiend, with all his comrades, fell from heaven above, through as long as three nights and days.” Milton awfully describes Satan “confounded, though immortal,” rolling in the fiery gulf—

Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men.

      Cædmon describes the Deity having cast the evil angel into that “House of perdition, down on that new bed; after, gave him a name that the highest (of the devils which they had now become) should be called Satan thenceforwards.” Milton has preserved the same notice of the origin of the name, thus—

To whom the Arch-Enemy, And thence in heaven called Satan

      Satan in Hebrew signifying “the Enemy,” or “the Adversary.”

      The harangue of Satan to his legions by the Saxon monk cannot fail to remind us of the first grand scene in the “Paradise Lost,” however these creations of the two poets be distinct. “The swart hell—a land void of light, and full of flame,” is like Milton’s—

——yet from these flames No light, but rather darkness visible.

      The locality is not unlike, “There they have at even, immeasurably long, each of all the fiends a renewal of fire, with sulphur charged; but cometh ere dawn the eastern wind frost, bitter-cold, ever fire or dart.” This torment we find in the hell of Milton—

      Adamantine chains and penal fire,

      and

      A dungeon horrible on all sides round.

      But as Satan was to be the great actor, Milton was soon compelled to find some excuse for freeing the evil spirit from the chains which Heaven had forged, and this he does—

Chain’d on the burning lake, nor ever thence Had ris’n or heaved his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others.

      The Saxon monk had not the dexterity to elude the difficult position in which the arch-fiend was


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