put in print a public pledge to execute his design of a great poem in English. 'Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher-fury of a riming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added industriously select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs-till which in some measure be compassed at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them.' It is material to a right judgment on Paradise Lost to come to the study of it with this knowledge of its origin. For it is one of the most artificial poems in the world; having this, among other qualities, in common with the Æneid. It belongs to the class which the Greek critics (and all modern critics have adopted their nomenclature) called 'Epic.' This division of poems into Epic and Dramatic is founded upon a prominent difference in their manner of recital. Both alike present to us a story, or transaction. In the Epic the story is narrated to us by a third person; in the Drama the personages of the story come themselves before us as speaking and acting. This classification, however, though convenient for the purposes of a catalogue, does not reach the essential poetic qualities of composition in verse. Such a division, founded upon poetic quality, we should obtain, if we divided narrative poems into the 'naive,' and the 'artificial.' The poet may be wholly preoccupied with his story, bent upon preserving the memory of events transmitted to him by tradition. Or the story may be a secondary consideration, and only used by him as a medium of producing a given mental impression, and satisfying by choice of language and rhythm the demands of imagination and taste. Paradise Lost is an epic of the latter class. Milton's mind was full to overflowing with vague conceptions of the lofty, the vast, and the sublime, and he cast about for a transaction in which he could embody them. He first thought of some con spicuous event in English history, in which Shakespeare had found his dramatic material. For in order to constitute a national epic, the events narrated must be of general national concernment. They must neither be foreign, nor taken from the byeways of history. Such a topic Milton at first thought he had found in the Arturian legend, the outlines of which are given in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin paraphrase of Tysilio. He afterwards abandoned national history in favour of a scriptural subject, as possessing more universality, being every man's property and concernment, and having also the highest guarantee of truth. Among possible scriptural subjects his choice wavered for some time, but settled at last upon the Fall and Restoration of Man, a subject involving the fortunes of the whole human race from before the world began to be. The merits of this material for a work of art are, that its interest extends to every human being, and is perennial; the struggle of moral freedom against external temptation in combination with fate, or divine decree, presenting the still unsolved problem which is ever urging human speculation to fresh efforts. The form in which Milton adopted the theme, viz. the story as told in Genesis, offers to a poet the further advantage of concreting the eternal conflict of good and evil in two persons, our ancestors, upon whose behaviour the fortunes of us, their descendants, hang trembling in the balance. It is not for Hector or for Dido, that our sympathy is demanded, it is our happiness or misery that is at stake. The disadvantages of the story for epic treatment are, the paucity of agents, and the want of naturalness or verisimilitude, in the events. There are but two human beings in the twelve books. And they are not entirely human till after the Fall, i. e. till after the tragic catastrophe of the plot. The preponderance of superhuman personages, demoniac or divine, creates a demand upon the imagination greater than what any, but poetic natures, can supply. The supernatural is a necessary ingredient of a fictitious history, but to be in credible proportions it must always be sparingly mingled with the ordinary and probable course of events. In a realistic age constantly fed with fiction which dwells among the realities of domestic life, it becomes difficult to assimilate the deities and devils of Paradise Lost, and the heaven and hell, their respective dwelling-places. The defects of the plot or fable have to be redeemed by poetic ornament, language, harmony. And here Milton is beyond com parison the greatest artist who has yet employed our language in verse. Dr. Guest says he 'diligently tutored an ear which nature had gifted with delicate sensibility.... His verse almost ever fits the subject, and so insensibly does poetry blend with this -the last beauty of exquisite versification-that the reader may sometimes doubt whether it be the thought itself, or merely the happiness of its expression, which is the source of a gratification so deeply felt.' If the personages in the two poems are unimaginable, and the situations unnatural, the art of exciting poetic emotion by the employment and collocation of words has never been practised by any English writer with such refinement. Single lines are alive with feeling, and there is a long swell which accompanies us even through the tame and dreary flats of the poem, such as the 5th, 6th, and 7th books. 'There are no such vistas and avenues of verse as Milton's. In reading Paradise Lost one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives. He showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in his earlier productions is of a higher mood as regards metrical construction than anything that had thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent, till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath.' (Lowell.) 7. Paradise Regained was written, in whole, or in part, during the poet's retirement to Chalfont S. Giles' from the Great Plague, 1665 -6. Ellwood, Milton's young quaker friend, tells us that he himself was the person who first suggested this subject. But, without questioning the literal exactness of Ellwood's report of his conversation with Milton, it is probable that Milton originally conceived the subject of his great work-the Fall and Recovery of Man-in one, and only when he came to write, found that the two parts of the drama of humanity must be separately treated. He therefore contented himself with a prophetic reference to the recovery, and the Messiah, in an awkward supplement, Book 12 of Paradise Lost. From Ellwood's suggestion, too, Milton has taken no more than the title of his poem. For though he calls it Paradise Regained, the subject of the poem is the Temptation; and this would have been its proper title. It is observed by the critics that the later epic has, in every country, a tendency to pass into the drama. Paradise Regained cannot be ranked as an epic, as not being full enough of personages or events. At the same time, it is not a drama, as the one transaction of which it consists is narrated to us by the poet, and not performed before us by the only two actors introduced. The bulk of the poem consists of dialogue. It is an astonishing feat of amplification, that more than 2000 lines should have been constructed out of some twenty verses of the synoptical gospels, without our anywhere having the sense of circumlocution and weakened effect, which paraphrases ordinarily produce. Paradise Regained is undoubtedly inferior in interest to Paradise Lost. This is owing to its exaggerating the defects of the former poem, which were too little action, too few agents, and the superhuman character of those few. The language of the later poem is also less ornate, less charged with subtle suggestion than was that of Paradise Lost. But, though barren of human interest, and denuded of all verbal ornamentation, the patient student of Paradise Regained will find himself impressed by it with a sense of power which awes all the more because it is latent. Phillips tells us that the poet himself 'could not bear with patience' to hear that it was inferior to Paradise Lost. Johnson, with his habitual carelessness, converted this statement into the different one that 'his last poetical offspring was his favourite.' This is not warranted by the authority which Johnson quotes, that of Phillips. But it is remarkable that two poets of the early part of our century, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have each given expression to a similar opinion. Wordsworth says: 'Paradise Regained is the most perfect in execution of anything written by Milton;' Coleridge, that in its kind it is the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest.' 8. With Samson Agonistes, written 1667, published 1671, Milton closed his authorship as poet. In composing this piece he fulfilled more than one cherished intention. Samson is a drama, and though Milton had, after mature deliberation, chosen the epic form for his chief work, it was not without secretly reserving the intention to repeat the experiment of a drama, in which the Greek model should be even more closely adhered to than in Comus Milton's taste had been offended by the want of art and regularity of the English drama, and he tried to give a specimen of a tragedy in conformity with the severest type. In Samson not only are the unities of time and place observed, but dialogue is varied by choral odes; no division of act or scene is made, but the transitions are managed by the intervention of a chorus of compatriots and sym pathisers. How much, in composing this piece, Milton's thoughts were occupied with the question of form, is proved by his choosing to preface it by some remarks with a bearing on that point only. He says nothing, in this preface, which could point the references to his own fate and fortunes. The prefatory remarks are apologetic, and explain why he has adopted the dramatic form, in spite of the objection of religious men to the stage, and why he has modelled his drama after the ancients and Italians. Besides reviving the more correct form of drama, Milton's inten tion, in Samson, is to offer one which in substance is free from the coarse buffooneries of the Restoration stage. Though taste and friendship both forbade his naming Dryden, or any living dramatist, we see of whom he is thinking, when he 'would vindicate tragedy from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day, with other common interludes, suffering through the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons; which by all judicious hath been counted absurd, and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.' Lastly, under the story of Samson, as here presented, the poet has adumbrated his own fate-the splendid promise of his Goddedicated youth, in contrast with the tragic close in blind and forsaken age, poor, despised, and if not a prisoner himself, witness of the captivity of his friends, and the triumph of the Philistine foe— all this is distinctly imaged throughout this piece. The resemblance is completed by the scene with Dalila, in which we see how bitter, even at the distance of five and twenty years, is Milton's remembrance of what he suffered in his first marriage with the daughter of a Philistine house. When we remember that the line, 'with fear of change Perplexes monarchs,' in Paradise Lost had staggered a not unfriendly censor, we may wonder that the unmistakable allusion in Samson— 'their carcasses To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captiv'd; should have passed unchallenged in 1671. VOL II. X MARK PATTISON. |