Paradise Lost, John Milton - C. S. Lewis (essay date 1942)
C. S. Lewis (essay date 1942)
SOURCE: “From A Preface to Paradise Lost,” in Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Arthur E. Barker, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 92-100.
[In the following essay, which originally appeared in his highly influential full-length treatment of Paradise Lost, Lewis calls Satan “the best drawn of Milton's characters” but insists that the poet did not admire his creation.]
Before considering the character of Milton's Satan it may be desirable to remove an ambiguity by noticing that Jane Austen's Miss Bates could be described either as a very entertaining or a very tedious person. If we said the first, we should mean that the author's portrait of her entertains us while we read; if we said the second, we should mean that it does so by being the portrait of a person whom the other people in Emma find tedious and whose like we also should find tedious in real life. For...
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