Abstract
The assortment of Devils, as they contemplate their plight in Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost, fully supports this statement. Thus, in his Homeric list of Satan’s generals, Milton starts with Belial, whose name in Hebrew means worthlessness, and whose
“thoughts were low, To vice industrious but to nobler deeds Timorous and slothful.”52
52 II. 115.
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References
C. S. Lewis puts this well when he wrote that the “door out of Hell is firmly locked, by the devils themselves, on the inside” for the devils know that they will not repent. A Preface to Paradise Lost (OUP) (1942; 1961), p. 105.
Perhaps deliberately following Matthew 12, 24, where Beëlzebub is called “the prince of the devils”.
Again, Mammon himself admits to that when he states that “Nor want we skill or art from when to raise Magnificence;” II. 272.
Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment (1992), pp. 197 ff.
See Peter Gray’s “The Father’s Revenge” in the Miller Essays, pp. 70 ff.
David Cairns, Mozart and His Operas (2006), pp. 155–56.
The point is made powerfully and in detail by David Cairns, Mozart and His Operas (2006), p. 164.
Whether she was actually raped or not by Don Giovanni is unclear from the text, some commentators (such as Alfred Einstein in his Mozart: His Character, his Work (Engl. translation, by Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder, 1946) arguing that she has, while others taking a different view. As far as the play is concerned, Donna Elvira may also fall into this (ambiguous) category for, while courted and repeatedly humiliated in the play, any sexual violence against her seems to have preceded the events portrayed in the opera.
On which see Lawrence Lipking’s interesting piece “Donna Abbandonata” in the Miller Essays, pp. 36 ff.
Joseph Kerman, “Reading Don Giovanni”, in The Miller Essays, 108, at 123.
Bernard Williams, “Don Juan as an idea”, in Julian Rushton (ed.), Don Giovanni, Cambridge Opera Handbook (1981), pp. 81–91.
Op. cit., pp. 1009, 1011.
“Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool”, Essays. Penguin ed. (1970), pp. 401, 404.
“Ce n’est pas dans Montaigne mais dans moi que je trouve tout ce que j’y vois.” Fragment 583.
A Preface to Paradise Lost (OUP 1942).
Armand Himmy, John Milton (Paris 2003), pp. 480–81.
For instance, Balachandra Rajan, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth-Century Reader (Chatto and Windus 1947), pp. 95 ff.
A Preface to Paradise Lost (1961), chap. 13.
Cited by Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “The Politics of Paradise Lost” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (1987), pp. 204, 221.
Professor Stanley Fish (and others), however, in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, second edition (1997), pp. XXIX ff. finds that asking the question “why does Satan think himself into a state of impairment?” to be “tautological and unhelpful.” I would respectfully submit that to a contemporary reader, not feeling bound by religious thinking, the reason is obvious and, indeed, is hinted by Satan himself. I elaborate this modern interpretation in the text.
“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, reproduced in Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (eds), Blake’s Poetry and Designs (W. N. Norton & Company 1979), p. 90.
T. S. Eliot.
See, inter alia, the comments of the late E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (11th ed. 1966, reprinted 1967) at p. 228: “The poems he wrote show that he was troubled by doubts as to whether his art had been sinful, while his letters make it clear that the higher he rose in the esteem of the world, the more bitter he became”.
Albert Alschuler, Law Without Values. The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (2000), pp. 10, 11 and, especially, chapter three and, to some extent, four.
Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990), p. 130.
Op. cit., note 65, above, at p. 89.
For further details on this aspect see Sigmund Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion (vol. IX).
On this see Milton A. Mays, “Oblomov as Anti-Faust,” Western Humanities Review, 21 (Spring 1967).
The famous Russian critic Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov was the first to see Oblomov’s character in this light and this view has prevailed since. See, however, Yvette Louria and Morton I Seiden, “Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov: The Anti-Faust as Christian hero,” Canadian Slavic Studies, 3 (Spring 1969) where a careful analysis of the novel, coupled with the fact that Goncharov was a committed conservative (senior) censorship committee member of his time, lead them to see a thoroughly Christian soul, in direct opposition to Goethe’s Faust, who has the misfortune of finding himself to be out of tune with his times. But as I explain further down this is one of the features of all the superfluous men except that some (like Oblomov) cannot move with his times whereas others (like Turgenev’s Bazarov) are ahead. Thus, for me, the interest of the Louria/Seiden study lies mainly in the authors ability to see “good” and “bad” in the characters and, indeed, the names of all the characters of the novel. On this see the analysis at pp. 58 ff.
Ibid. at p. 56, drawing on Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English literature (1952).
A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), p. 93.
William Empson, Milton’s God (1961).
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), especially the Proverbs of Hell.
A Defense of Poetry (1821).
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, from the Introduction of the Oxford World’s Classics by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, p. xii.
Taken from A Defence of Poetry (reprint), ibid. pp. 674, 692.
Fish, op. cit. p. 70.
Kenneth Gross, “From Satan and the Romantic Satan: A Notebook” in Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (eds), Re-Membering Milton. Essays on the Texts and the Traditions (1988).
The Life of John Milton (2000), p. 468.
Thus note his statement (Faust, Pt. I, line 1759) “Nur rastlos bedädigt sich der Mann”, an attribute which Milton’s Satan seems to share.
For helpful hints of this see Goethe’s last, confessional work with his Secretary, Gespräche mit Eckermann, 6 May 1827.
See his words at the end of “Prologue in Heaven,” lines 350–53: “Von Zeit zu Zeit seh ich den Alten gern,/Und hüte mich mit ihm zu brechen./Es ist gar hübsch von einem großen Herrn,/So menschlich mit dem Teufel selbst zu sprechen”.
Published by C.U.P. in 1967, at p. 144.
Grey, my dear friend, is all that theory is, and green the golden tree of life. Faust, Part I, lines 2038–39.
Faust, Part I (Insel Vertrag, 16): “For man must strive, and striving he must err.”
Milton provides us with an excellent illustration of this just after the end of the famous “What though the field be lost?” speech. For, just a few lines further down-I, 125-6-he concludes: “So spake th’Apostate Angel, though in pain,/Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair.” Likewise, before the famous Nymphates speech he is described as being in “Horror and doubt distract” and full of “troubled thoughts:” IV. 19–20. For more see A. J. A. Waldock “Satan and the Technique of Degradation” in Paradise Lost and Its Critics (1947).
In Lord Radcliffe’s beautiful imagery, the “anthropomorphic conception of justice”: Davis Contractors Ltd. v. Fareham UDC [1956] AC 686, 728.
Hall v. Brooklands Racing Club [1931] 1 KB 205, 224.
Hall v. Brooklands Club [1933] 1 KB 205 at 224, per Greer L. J.: “...the man who takes the magazines at home, and in the evening pushes the lawnmower in his short sleeves.” For American reactions see, inter alia, Harper, James Jr. and Gray, The Law of Torts (2nd ed., 1986), pp. 389–9.
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(2007). The Appeal of the Characters. In: Good and Evil in Art and Law. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-49919-1_3
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