Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/140

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��PARADISE LOST

��eation tempts one to an ungenerous urging of discrepancies. How, one may ask, is the idea of the ladder and the chain to be reconciled with the idea of the revolving motion of the world-spheres ? And how, if the outer shell of the Universe is non- transparent, can Satan liken it to a star hanging by the moon ? Of course this is to inquire too curiously. For the purposes of his action the delineation is consistent enough, and although to our minds, accus- tomed to the spacial immensities and har- monious physical law which the modern astronomy has demonstrated, Milton's cos- mology seems, when thus stripped to its skeleton, curiously arbitrary and wooden, his handling makes it august enough.

The question remains an interesting one whether Milton still held as true the Ptole- maic astronomy, or whether he adopted it because of its hold on the popular imagi- nation and its adaptability to poetic treat- ment. A famous passage in the poem (Book VIII., 15-178) seems to betray a wavering state of mind, a distrust of the new system coupled with dissatisfaction over the arbitrariness and complexities of the old. We should have expected Milton, with his intellectual daring, his radical temper, and his virile imagination, to be the first to welcome the new theories, espe- cially after his meeting with Galileo in Italy. But he was held back by the most powerful of checks. The whole passion of Puritanism went to dignify the individual, to place man face to face with his Creator, and to make his salvation or damnation the Almighty's chief concern. The degra- dation of the earth from its proud station immovable at the centre of ten ministrant spheres, to the position of an insignificant satellite of the sun, would have seemed to belittle Man, to deny his spiritual preroga- tive. This aspect of the new cosmology could not but make it peculiarly repellent to a mind like Milton's, in which the Pu- ritan conception of human dignity and responsibility was unusually stern. It is

��probable that he shut his mind more or less deliberately to the rational appeal of the Copernican theory.

We cannot be sorry that he did so. The lack of definite outline in the new cosmo- logy would have rendered it difficult for concrete treatment, even if it had been pos- sible for the poet to assimilate suddenly ideas involving such a complete restate- ment of his thought-world. In reading the poem, there are two things which a reader has to do, first, to visualize in all its concreteness the picture of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and the Universe, as the poet has given them physical embodiment; second, to accept his reservation that these are pictures merely, symbols made tangible to human sense, of mysteries which are spiritual.

IV

It was in Italy, as we have seen, that Milton's vague literary ambitions crystal- lized, and it was the Italian heroic poems which turned his thoughts toward the epic form. The influence of the romantic po- etry of the south came to him while he was still in the Elizabethan mood, and, reinfor- cing as it did the glamour of Spenser with the spell of Italian syllables, sank so deeply into his mind that it lingered on after the native romance of his temperament had evaporated. It is curious to see how re- collections of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso throw even across the umber and gray of Paradise Regained purpureal illuminations, the unexpectedness and incongruity of which are almost ghostly. The epic sub- ject which he determined upon while in Italy, the adventures of King Arthur and his knights, was perhaps the nearest paral- lel in British legend to the themes which these poets had treated, though its greater ethical possibilities made a special appeal to Milton's nature. He rejected, in the end, this purely romantic material, but he did not reject the romantic manner of treatment learned in the southern school

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