Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/215

Rh at any rate for a Protestant audience, to introduce the supernatural machinery without incongruity and absurdity. When in Tasso's poem God commissions Gabriel to incite Godfrey to renew the war, it is not the human which is elevated, but the divine which is depressed. Paradise Lost is the exception which proves Boileau's rule that the supernatural beings of the Christian religion are not available as epic machinery, for, in Paradise Lost, the requisite harmony is secured by raising everything to the level of the superhuman—a level from which it is only "in rare moments of rest and reprieve" that the poet descends.

Yet that even Milton suffered from the seventeenth century's entanglement in the tradition of a conventional epic is hardly to be denied. The greatest fault of Paradise Lost, regarded simply as a work of art, is that the interest steadily subsides as the poem proceeds. The first plunge in medias res is overwhelming in its grandeur. Than the first book no sublimer poem in its special kind was ever written. We feel that we have travelled a long way from its originality and splendour of invention, when we find ourselves in the middle of Michael's pedantic résumé of Old Testament history. The substance of these books was an afterthought. Milton's intention, when he sketched his drama, was to follow Du Bartas and Grotius and adumbrate the consequences of the Fall allegorically. He might have done well to abide by his original intention and make Adam's visions more general and suggestive, less detailed and didactic.

The most serious fault, however, that modern