Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/216

196 criticism has found with Paradise Lost, concerns it not so much as a poem but as a professedly religious poem. The interest in Milton's dramatis personæ is in the inverse ratio of their religious rank. Nothing in his poem is greater than his treatment of the fallen angels. One need only turn to Tasso's and Marino's grotesque infernal conferences to appreciate with gratitude the dignified presentation of Satan and his peers debating of war, or solacing themselves with song and converse high

"Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute."

Elizabethan tragedy has no more dramatic figure than Satan in these opening scenes, or a situation of sublimer pathos than when he faces his fallen host, and

"Thrice he essayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn,             Tears such as angels weep burst forth."

Satan may be, as Mr Courthope has said, the last great representative of the Macchiavelian politician whom Marlowe and Kyd and Shakespeare brought upon the stage, but there is a pathos in his ruined virtue which none of his prototypes possess. Almost accidentally, moreover, he has acquired some of the heroic resolution of the Calvinistic Hollander who refused to bow before the tyranny of Spain, the pride of those who brought Charles to the scaffold and vindicated that deed to a startled Europe. Vondel saw a resemblance between Lucifer and Cromwell which Milton would not have allowed. But Vondel's