, he is gon!

The explanation of all this is clear to see. Milton was not, as he has
sometimes been described, a callous and morose Puritan. He was
extraordinarily susceptible to the attractions of feminine beauty and
grace. Adam's confession is his own. But the ideal of character that he
had put before himself caused him passionately to resent this
susceptibility. It was the joint in his harness, the main breach in his
Stoicism, the great anomaly in a life regulated as for his Task-master.
He felt that beauty was a power not himself, unbalancing and disturbing
the rational self-centred poise of his soul. There have been poets whose
service of Venus Verticordia was whole-hearted. But to Milton the power
of Beauty was a magnetism to be distrusted for its very strength. He felt
something of what he makes Satan express, that there is terror in love
and beauty "not approached by stronger hate." The Chorus in _Samson
Agonistes_ makes a similar observation:--

Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power
After offence returning, to regain
Love once possessed.

To escape from the dominion of the tyrant is the duty of a wise man. When
Raphael remarked that "Love ... hath his seat in Reason, and is
judicious," he committed himself to a statement which a longer experience
of the world would have enabled him to correct. But Milton wished it
true; and perhaps even lured himself into a belief of its truth. At any
rate, when Satan, in _Paradise Regained_, expounds his opinion on the
matter, it is found, for once, to be in substantial agreement with
Raphael's:--

Beauty stands
In the admiration only of weak minds
Led captive; cease to admire, and all her plumes
Fall flat, and shrink into a trivial toy,
At every sudden slighting quite abashed.

It is a great loss to literature that Mrs. Millamant, the delightful
heroine of Congreve's comedy, was no reader of Milton. Her favourite
author was Suckling:--

I prithee spare me, gentle boy,
Press me no more for that slight toy,
That foolish trifle of a heart.

If she had a copy of the _Paradise Regained_, doubtless it stood in some
conspicuous place, and was never opened,--like Mrs. Wishfort's "books
over the chimney--Quarles and Prynne, and 'The Short View of the Stage,'
with Bunyan's works, to entertain you." But all unawares she has answered
the contention of Satan:--"O the vanity of these men!--Fainall, d'ye hear
him? If they