Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/129

, agrees that from every 'just heroic poem' some one great moral may be deduced. Paradise Lost teaches us the unexceptionable but simple moral that obedience to the will of God makes men happy. But the metaphysical problem which Milton took himself to be solving was handed over to the directly didactic poets. Addison takes occasion to puff the good Whig Blackmore, whose poem on the 'Creation' confuted Lucretius and supplied the reasoning omitted in the seventh book of Paradise Lost. Pope was to take up the task of 'vindicating' the 'ways of God to man.' He 'vindicates' instead of 'justifies,' as Warburton explains, because he 'has to deal with unbelievers.' The controversies of his day had made it impossible to fuse the theodicy with the epic. The epic poem therefore came to be treated, in spite of Le Bossu's moral, as simply a work of art, to which the justification of Providence is really irrelevant. Homer, Virgil, and Milton, it is assumed, devised the 'fables' and the 'machinery' of their poems by an equally deliberate and artificial process, though in the two first cases the Pagan mythology, and in the last the book of Genesis, supplied the necessary materials. The epic poem, no doubt, was becoming slightly absurd,