Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/137

 PARADISE LOST

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��ling. He points out the close acquaintance with the public affairs and even with some of the private gossip of the Low Countries, exhibited in Milton's pamphlets against Morus. He proves also that Milton was taught the Dutch language by Roger Wil- liams, during the visit of the latter to Eng- land in 1651-54. He then attempts to show by copious excerpts "not only that the language and imagery of the Lucifer " (the only work of Vondel referred to by previous critics) " exercised a powerful and abiding influence on the mind of Milton, and have left indelible traces upon the pages of Paradise Lost, but that other writ- ings of Vondel have affected in no less de- gree all the great poems of Milton's later life." These other writings are John the Baptist, published in 1661, believed by Mr. Edmuudson to have influenced both Para- dise Lost and Paradise Regained ; Adam in Banishment, published in 1664, and offer- ing "remarkable coincidences with the ninth and tenth books, which were proba- bly written after its appearance;" Reflec- tions on God and Religion, a didactico-reli- gious poem, published in 1661, passages from which are " almost reproduced in portions of the eighth book of Paradise Lost " and Samson, a drama published in 1660, which " exhibits all the features " of Samson Agonistes " which have been re- garded as most peculiar." A good deal must be deducted from all this on the score of pioneer enthusiasm, but after all deductions are made, the bulk of evidence remains considerable.

Professor Masson discredits all investi- gation into the origins of Milton's poetry as futile, and " for the most part laborious nonsense." Surely, however, some good has been achieved in the process. In the first place we have arrived thereby at a far truer understanding of the texture of Mil- ton's mind and of its workings than would otherwise have been possible. It was per- haps the most extraordinarily assimilative mind in the history of poetry. In its ear-

��liest as well as its latest phases, it shows the same sensitiveness to literary impres- sion. Its richness is made up of a hundred borrowed dyes. As Shakespeare's mind held, as in a magic mirror, all the faces and forms of the world of men, Milton's held those of the world of books. The cases noted above are the chief ones in which an influence upon the large outlines of his work can be traced, but on every page, almost in every line, there is an echo of some earlier singer. In one sense Milton is the least original of poets. Over against his haughty independence as a man, we find in him as a poet a supple yielding to the fascination of voice or gesture in those to whom he listened. This is doubt- less the case with all poets in youth ; Mil- ton is unique in having preserved to old age this instinct of eager assimilation.

But if we left the case here, we should leave unstated the essential element of his power, a mysterious element, which it is possible only to suggest by saying that with him the assimilation is complete. The bor- rowed particle is transmuted not only into a different thing, but always into a Miltonic thing ; and after such transmutation, it takes its place in the whole poetic struc- ture, not as something added but as some- thing organic. So that Paradise Lost, in spite of its immense freight of erudition, has a clean-limbed athletic movement very different to go to the drama for a com- parison from that of the Sejanus of Ben Jonson, in whose work a similar vastness of learning is scarcely assimilated at all.

A second worthy outcome of investiga- tion into the sources of Paradise Lost has been to reveal the fact that the subject had for a long time lain upon the imagi- nations of poets throughout Europe with a kind of obsession. In the first half of the seventeenth century at least a score of serious efforts were made, in Italy, Spain, France, the Low Countries, and even in Germany, to grapple in verse with the pro- blem of the origin of evil as set forth in

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