Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/278

Rh 268 POETRY &quot; At last his sail-broad vans He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted, spurns the ground ; thence many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failiug, meets A vast vacuity ; all unawares, Fluttering his pinions vain, plumb down he drops Ten thousand fathoms deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ILL CHANCE, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft.&quot; In Milton s case, however, the truth is that he made the mistake of trying to disturb the motive of a story for artistic purposes, a fatal mistake as we shall see when we come to speak of the NiJbelungenlied in relation to the old Norse epic cycle. Though Venders mystery play of Lucifer is, in its execution, rhetorical more than poetical, it did, beyond all question, influence Milton when he came to write Paradise Lost. The famous line which is generally quoted as the key-note of Satan s character &quot; Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven &quot; seems to have been taken bodily from Vondel s play, and Milton s entire epic shows a study of it. While Marlowe s majestic movements alone are traceable in Satan s speech (written some years before the rest of Paradise Lost, when the dramatic and not the epic form had been selected), Milton s Satan became afterwards a splendid amalgam not of the Mephistopheles but of the Faustus of Marlowe and the Lucifer of Vondel. Vondel s play must have possessed a peculiar attraction for a poet of Milton s views of human progress. Defective as the play is in execution, it is far otherwise in motive. This motive, if we consider it aright, is nothing less than an explanation of man s anomalous con dition on the earth spirit incarnate in matter, created by God, a little lower than the angels in order that he may advance by means of these very manacles which imprison him, in order that he may ascend by the staircase of the world, the ladder of fleshly conditions, above those cherubim and seraphim who, lacking the education of sense, have not the knowledge wide and deep which brings man close to God. Here Milton found his own favourite doctrine of human development and self-education in a concrete and vividly artistic form. Much, however, as such a motive must have struck a man of Milton s instincts, his intellect was too much chained by Calvinism to permit of his treating the subject with Vondel s philosophic breadth. The cause of Lucifer s wrath had to be changed from jealousy of human progress to jealousy of the Son s proclaimed superiority. And the history of poetry shows that once begin to tamper with the central thought around which any group of incidents has crystallized and the entire story becomes thereby re-written, as we have seen in the case of the Ajnmemnon of vEschylus. Of the motive of his own epic, after he had abandoned the motive of Vondel, Milton had as little permanent grasp as Virgil had of his. As regards the Odyssey, however, we need scarcely say that its motive is merely artistic, not philosophic. And now we come to philosophic motive. Philo- The artist s power of thought is properly shown not in the direct enunciation of ideas but in mastery over motive. Here yEschylus is by far the greatest figure in Western poetry, a proof perhaps among many proofs of the Oriental strain of his genius. (As regards pure drama, however, important as is motive, freedom, organic vitality in every part, is of more importance than even motive, and in this freedom and easy abandonment the concluding part of the Oresteia is deficient as compared with such a play as Othello or Lear.} Notwithstanding the splendid exception of yEschylus, the truth seems to be that the motive. faculty of developing a poetical narrative from a philosophic thought is Oriental, and on the whole foreign to the genius of the Western mind. Neither in Western drama nor in western epic do we find, save in such rare cases as that of Vondel, anything like that power of developing a story from an idea which not only Jami but all the parable poets of Persia show. In recent English poetry, the motive of Shelley s dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound is a notable illustra tion of what is here contended. Starting with the full intent of developing a drama from a motive starting with a universalism, a belief that good shall be the final goal of ill Shelley cannot finish his first three hundred lines without shifting (in the curse of Prometheus) into a Manichaeism as pure as that of Manes himself : &quot; Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this curse, 111 deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good ; Both Infinite as is the universe. &quot; According to the central thought of the poem human nature, through the heroic protest and struggle of the human mind typified by Prometheus, can at last dethrone that supernatural terror and tyranny (Jupiter) which the human mind had itself installed. But, after its dethrone ment (when human nature becomes infinitely perfectible), how can the supernatural tyranny exist apart from the human mind that imagined it ? How can it be as &quot; infinite as the universe &quot; 1 The motive of Paradise Lost is assailed with much vigour by Victor Hugo in his poem Religions et Religion. But when M. Hugo, in the after parts of the poem, having destroyed Milton s &quot; God,&quot; sets up an entirely French &quot;Dieu&quot; of his own and tries &quot;to justify&quot; him, we perceive how pardonable was Milton s failure after all. Compare such defect of mental grip and such nebulosity of thought as is displayed by Milton, Shelley, and M. Hugo with the strength of hand shown in the &quot; Salaman &quot; and &quot; Absal &quot; of Jami, and indeed by the Sufi poets generally. There is, however, one exception to this rule that The Ore Western poetry is nebulous as to motive. There is, besides Norther the Iliad, one epic that refuses to be classified, though 6 P 1C&amp;gt; for entirely different reasons. This is the Niblung story, where we find unity of purpose and also entire freedom of movement. We find combined here beauties which are nowhere else combined which are, in fact, at war with each other everywhere else. We find a scheme, a real &quot;acorn of thought,&quot; in an epic which is not the self- conscious work of a single poetic artificer, but is as much the slow growth of various times and various minds as is the Mahubharata, in which the heart-thought is merely that the Kauravas defeated their relatives at dice and refused to disgorge their winnings. This Northern epic-tree, as we find it in the Icelandic sagas, the Norns themselves must have watered ; for it combines the virtues of the epic of growth with those of the epic of art. Though not written in metre, it may usefully be compared with the epics of Greece and of India and Persia. Free in movement as the wind, which &quot; bloweth where it listeth,&quot; it listeth to move by law. Its action is that of free-will, but free-will at play within a ring of necessity. Within this ring there throbs all the warm and passionate life of the world outside, and all the freedom apparently. Yet from that world it is enisled by a cordon of curses by a zone of defiant flames more impregnable than that which girdled the beautiful Bry nhild at Hindt ell. Natural laws, familiar emotions, are at work everywhere in the story ; yet the &quot; King of Andvari,&quot; whose circumference is but that of a woman s finger, encircles the whole mimic world of the sagaman as the Midgard snake encircles the earth. For this artistic perfection in an epic of growth there are.