Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/141

 PARADISE LOST

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��Paradise Lost is the last great episode in the movement of imagination of which Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, Camoens in Portugal, and Spenser in England, are ex- emplars. With one of these, indeed, Cam- oens, Milton stands in a peculiarly inter- esting relation. The Lusiad of Camoens treats of the voyages of the famous Portu- guese navigators ; its theme, therefore, is taken from recent, almost contemporary, history. This theme, however, is treated, one may say, centrif ugally, the imagination of the poet circling out in such a way as to invest it with all manner of religious and mythopceic suggestion. Milton, on the other hand, starting with a great religious and mythic theme, impressed upon it, con- sciously or unconsciously, the traits of the Puritan revolution in England.

For not only are the theology of the poem and its doctrine of social relations entirely Puritan, but, as has often been remarked, its chief figure and real hero, Lucifer, is an embodiment of that very spirit of revolt against arbitrary authority which swept Charles I. from the throne. Roughly speaking, Satan is an unsuccess- ful Cromwell, refusing to bow before the tyranny of irresponsible might, and Jeho- vah is a triumphant Stuart, robed in the white light of omnipotence. The theology and the politics of the poet are at vari- ance, and this fact introduces into much of the poem an unconscious insincerity. The words of the rebel angel have an intense eloquence, and the account of his doings and of his domain a persuasive vividness and majesty, which contrasts oddly with the pedantic woodenness of many of the passages consecrated to the Deity. It was largely in the attempt to overcome this paradox by which his villain insisted upon being his hero, that Milton lost himself in those long disquisitions that make some of the later books of the poem rather dreary reading.

Perhaps another fact contributing to the same result was that the writing of Para-

��dise Lost was, as Taine suggests, really a feat of anachronism. Milton was produ- cing a cosmology in an age of psychology. The whole tendency of Puritanism had been to make men look within, to fix attention upon the individual spirit and its respon- sibilities ; Bunyan's Grace Abounding was therefore the significant book for the times, significant, at least, for one half the nation; the other half was drifting fast toward the spirit of pure criticism. It is not strange, under these conditions, that Milton felt a constant temptation to abandon the picture for the sermon. His solemnly avowed intention to "justify the ways of God to men " was in the end a serious drag upon him.

There lurked in the subject another dif- ficulty. The title Paradise Lost, although it suggests the central point about which the action moves, does not adequately sug- gest that action itself. The fall of man from innocence is only the point of con- vergence for a cosmic drama, the theatre of which is all space, and the time of which extends far back into the abyss be- fore Time was. In this unimaginable vastness the earth hangs a mere drop, and the little drama of the Garden of Paradise dwindles necessarily almost into insignifi- cance. Milton was never able to over- come this fault of perspective ; however much he lingers over the human pair he is never able to centre our interest there. It is as if our eyes, accustomed to the glooms of Hell and the glories of Heaven, had lost their power to see the temperate small sights of earth with keenness.

When all deductions are made, however, Paradise Lost remains for us one of the greatest of poems. With the exception of Beowulf, which by its language and sub- ject lies remote from our every-day ap- preciation, it is the only English poem with sufficient largeness of theme and breadth of treatment to deserve the name of epic. It is of course not an epic of the Homeric type, springing spontaneously in an unlet-

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