Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/214

194 The fact is that by 1641 Milton had outlined very fully in his schemes for a drama the contents of Paradise Lost. All the principal moments are present in the sketches which he drew up—the fall of the angels, the creation of the world, the Temptation, and the consequences of the Fall in history. But none of them could be presented on the stage. All were necessarily relegated to choral ode, descriptive speech, or the symbolism of the Morality. Grotius had dramatised the scene of the Temptation, but Milton's sense of dramatic propriety evidently shrank from a scene in which one of the actors was to be a serpent. Consideration of these limitations, as well as of the necessary exclusion of God from all direct participation in the action, is sufficient to explain Milton's preference for the epic form. There is nothing, as Dr Nicholas Beets has pointed out, from which Vondel's Lucifer suffers more than from the fact that the action is left entirely to secondary agents. One of the finest "strokes" in Milton's description of the war in heaven is that the ultimate victory over Lucifer belongs to the Son of God alone.

For the artistic ideal which he thus set before him, the harmonious reproduction of the different elements of the Virgilian epic, Milton could have chosen no more appropriate theme, and none better suited to the sublime cast of his own mind. Only with a Scriptural theme, and with none so harmoniously as this central and transcendent one,—in which the human element is so small and of so unique a character,—was it possible,