Nor were even the supernatural powers of evil exempt from this
species of satire. For with whatever hatred or horror the evil angels
were regarded, it was one of the conditions of Christianity that they
should also be looked upon as vanquished; and this not merely in their
great combat with the King of Saints, but in daily and hourly combats
with the weakest of His servants. In proportion to the narrowness of the
powers of abstract conception in the workman, the nobleness of the idea
of spiritual nature diminished, and the traditions of the encounters of
men with fiends in daily temptations were imagined with less terrific
circumstances, until the agencies which in such warfare were almost
always represented as vanquished with disgrace, became, at last, as much
the objects of contempt as of terror.

The superstitions which represented the devil as assuming various
contemptible forms of disguises in order to accomplish his purposes
aided this gradual degradation of conception, and directed the study of
the workman to the most strange and ugly conditions of animal form,
until at last, even in the most serious subjects, the fiends are oftener
ludicrous than terrible. Nor, indeed, is this altogether avoidable, for
it is not possible to express intense wickedness without some condition
of degradation. Malice, subtlety, and pride, in their extreme, cannot be
written upon noble forms; and I am aware of no effort to represent the
Satanic mind in the angelic form, which has succeeded in painting.
Milton succeeds only because he separately describes the movements of
the mind, and therefore leaves himself at liberty to make the form
heroic; but that form is never distinct enough to be painted. Dante, who
will not leave even external forms obscure, degrades them before he can
feel them to be demoniacal; so also John Bunyan: both of them, I think,
having firmer faith than Milton's in their own creations, and deeper
insight into the nature of sin. Milton makes his fiends too noble, and
misses the foulness, inconstancy, and fury of wickedness. His Satan
possesses some virtues, not the less virtues for being applied to evil
purpose. Courage, resolution, patience, deliberation in council, this
latter being eminently a wise and holy character, as opposed to the
"Insania" of excessive sin: and all this, if not a shallow and false, is
a smooth and artistical, conception. On the other hand, I have always
felt that there was a peculiar grande