them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected
by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in
reality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the
pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the
inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem
pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to
assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as
if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of
the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. To
represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus
misrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton,
may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton's
imagination. "The Infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet gives
him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to
depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly
takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is
surprised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs up
in his own form there, as the "grisly king," he mourns most his beauty
lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least,
so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend
sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of
art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and
joy should he preserved.

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so
constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in
the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and
in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those
which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional
calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often
breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more
settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was
reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered,
too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into
the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the
spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its
degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our deve