Lewis, Preface to PL: Quotes, Ch. 13-14

Chapter 13: Satan

For it is a very old critical discovery that the imitation in art of unpleasing objects may be a pleasing imitation. - p. 94

What the Satanic predicament consists in is made clear...by Satan himself. On his own showing he is suffering from a "sense of injur'd merit" (I, 98). This is a well known state of mind which we can all study in domestic animals, children, film-stars, politicians, or minor poets; and perhaps nearer home. Many critics have a curious partiality for it in literature, but I do not know that any one admires it in life. When it appears, unable to hurt, in a jealous dog or a spoiled child, it is usually laughed at. When it appears armed with the force of millions on the political stage, it escapes ridicule only by being more mischievous. - pp. 95-96

In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Satan] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige. - p. 96

What we seen in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything. This doom he has brought upon himself; in order to avoid seeing one thing he has, almost voluntarily, incapacitated himself from seeing at all. And thus, throughout the poem, all his torments come, in a sense, at his own bidding, and the divine judgement might have been expressed in the words "thy will be done." he says "Evil be though my good" (which includes "Nonsense be thou my sense") and his prayer is granted. - p. 99

From hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret service agent, and thence to a thing that peers in at bedroom or bathroom windows, and thence to a toad, and finally to a snake -- such is the progress of Satan. - p. 99

To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books the holiday we try to deny them in our lives. - p.100

But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict, except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be am an much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder. It is in their "good" characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations. Heaven understands Hell and hell does not understand heaven.... - pp. 100-101

Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace "all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth". Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan.... The hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom. Satan, like Miss Bates, is interesting to read about; but Milton makes plain the blank uninterestingness of being Satan. - p. 102



Chapter 14: Satan's Followers

"Mammon... proposes an ordered state of sin with such majesty of pride that we are almost led astray. Perhaps Milton has touched here so essentially the nature of sin that if it were not for the suspicious live to ourselves (II, 254) we should not recognize it as such, so natural is it to man." - p. 104 (quoting Muriel Bentley)

For human beings there is often an escape from this Hell, but there is never more than one -- the way of humiliation, repentance and (where possible) restitution. For Milton's devils this way is closed. The poet very wisely never really allows the question "What if they did repent?" to become actual.... They know that they will not repent. That door out of Hell is firmly locked, by the devils themselves, on the inside.... - pp. 104-5

Anger (Moloch): He cannot bring himself to regard the present misery as unavoidable. There must be a way out of these intolerable sensations; and the way out that occurs to him is rage.... But is fury safe? That does not matter. Nothing can be worse than the present.... Moloch is the simplest of the fiends: a mere rat in a trap. - p. 105

Insensate (Belial): These moments were agony because in them he felt "Heav'n ruining from Heav'n" -- he was still a native of heaven himself, and the traces of honour and love were still in him. It is that state to which, at all costs, he does not want to return. The fires must not be re-awakened: to grow numb, voluntarily to decline on to a lower plane of being, never agin to admit any aspiration, any thought, any emotion which might "dispell the comfortable glooms of Hell", to avoid great literature and noble music and the society of uncorrupted men as an invalid avoids draughts -- this is his cue. Of course, there is no question of happiness, but perhaps the time will pass somehow. - p. 106

Ignorant (Mammon): This is why Mammon is called "the least erected spirit that fell from Heav'n" (I, 679). He has never understood the difference between Hell and Heaven at all. The tragedy has been no tragedy to him: he can do very well without Heaven. The human analogues are here the most obvious and the most terrible of all -- the men who seem to have passed from Heaven to Hell and can't see the difference. - pp. 106-7

Vengeful (Beelzebub): And the reality to which he recalls them is this, that they cannot at all escape from hell nor in any way injure their enemy, but that there is a chance of injuring someone else.... This is sense, this is practical politics, this is the realism of Hell. - p. 107

What else is there for impentient and defeated evil to do but to rage and stamp? But such is Milton's invention that each new speaker uncovers further recesses of misery and evil, new subterfunge and new folly, and gives us fuller understanding of the Satanic predicament. - p. 107