Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/136

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��PARADISE LOST

��Dn Bartas, the Adamus Exul of Grotius, the Scena Tragica d' Adamo ed Eva of Lance tt a, the Bellum Angelicum of Taub- inanii, and the Sospetto d' Herode of Cra- shaw, we may put aside as exhibiting vague, slight, or merely verbal resem- blances. A few books, however, remain, which are so closely connected with Milton's work that some consideration of them is imperative. They are taken up here in the order in which Milton probably encoun- tered them.

1. In 1627, while Milton was still at Cam- bridge, there was published a long poem in Latin entitled Locustce, and an English version of the same under the title of The Apollyonists. The author was Phineas Fletcher, a Cambridge man, better known as the author of The Purple Island. He was already a poet of considerable fame, especially in academic quarters, and his book could hardly have escaped falling into Milton's hands at once; nor can it have failed to make a strong impression, both because of its vigor and of its timely sub- ject. It deals with the origin and culmi- nation of the Gunpowder Plot, tracing the conspiracy to the newly-founded order of Jesuits, who are represented as urged on by infernal powers. The opening cantos nar- rate the gathering of the fallen angels in council, and their deliberations. The de- scription of the gathering, and the argu- ments put forth by the various chiefs in the course of debate, the final selection of Apollyon to be sent forth on the errand of guile, and the breaking up of the Satanic parliament, all bear remarkable resem- blance to well-known passages in the open- ing books of Paradise Lost. The earlier picture placed beside the later is like some odd laborious German woodcut beside an altar-piece of Tintoretto; but the curious similarity of the main traits in each com- pels the belief that the impression made by Fletcher's poem upon Milton's mind at its most sensitive period emerged as a de- termining force in his imagination thirty

��years later, when he began to write his epic. The belief is strengthened by a similar correspondence between Paradise Regained and the Christ's Victory of Phineas Fletcher's brother Giles. The relations traceable between Paradise Lost and the Sospetto d' Herode of another Cambridge poet, Richard Crashaw, are, compared with those just mentioned, insignificant.

2. Voltaire, while residing in England in 1727, stated positively, though without giving his authority, that Milton had seen at Florence a comedy called Adamo, by one Andreini, and that " piercing through the absurdity of that performance to the hidden majesty of the subject," he had taken "from that ridiculous trifle the first hint of the noblest work which human im- agination has ever attempted, and which he executed twenty years after." Voltaire could not have read the play in question, for it is neither a comedy nor a ridiculous trifle, but a sacred drama of no little dig- nity, in spite of some minor lapses in taste. It goes over the whole ground covered by Paradise Lost except the fall of the Angels and the creation of the world, which events have already taken place when the action opens. Two circumstances lend weight to the theory of Milton's indebtedness to An- dreini: the first is that after his return from Italy, when Andreini's play would have been still fresh in his mind, he pro- posed to treat the subject of Adam's fall in dramatic form, though he had thought only of the epic form for the Arthurian legends; the second is that in the early drafts of the proposed drama various alle- gorical personages appear, corresponding in some cases precisely to those profusely employed by Andreini, and so long before abandoned by serious dramatists in England that their presence in Milton's sketch points forcibly to an outside influence.

3. The indebtedness of Milton to the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel was in 1885 investigated by Mr. George Edmund- son, whose conclusions are somewhat start-

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