Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/142

 PARADISE LOST

��tered age from the imaginative life of a whole nation; but granted the age of so- phistication in which it was produced, it did in a remarkable way seize and draw together the imaginative elements of Eng- lish thought. The Bible was in Milton's day the very centre and substance of that thought. It was for many years almost the only book accessible to the nation at large, and that too at a time when intellectual curiosity was profoundly stirred by the im- pulses of the Renaissance. The stories of the Bible, its cosmogony, its chronology, its imagery, had sunk into the tissue of English thought like a rich and sombre dye. When Milton adopted the story of Genesis as his subject, he was seizing with true epic in- stinct upon material genuinely national, much more national than the story of King Arthur or any of the historical British kings could have been, because not only the belief but the passion of the race was engaged by it.

Unfortunately for one part of Milton's appeal, the fabric upon which he wrought had in it elements of decay of which no one of his generation, and he least of all, had an inkling. As we have come to appre- hend more clearly the essentials of reli- gious truth as distinguished from its acci- dental outlines, one great hold which the poem had over the minds of readers has failed.

But in this case "less is more." Our fathers saw in Paradise Lost a system of irrefragable truth such as we cannot see, but as a consequence of this falling away of the veil of dogma, we see in it qualities of beauty which escaped their pious gaze. No crash of systems can drown its noble music, and the fading away of dogma leaves the splendor of its symbolism only the more essentially worthy of regard. Then, too, as we get farther away from the conditions which gave the poem birth, its human meaning takes on a pathos which the very sternness of their belief prevented our forefathers from seeing.

��It is style, both in the broad and in the narrow sense, which gives Paradise Lost its surest claim to enduring admiration. Everywhere there is an indefinable distinc- tion of thought and image; the imagina- tion speaks with a divine largeness of idiom. Or if not quite everywhere, if Christ's marking off of the creation with golden compasses, if the description of Sin and Death as guardians of the gates of Hell, if the cannonading of the celestial armies in Heaven, are instances of unplastic im- agination, these exceptions serve only to throw into relief a myriad other pictures of commanding vitality and splendor. It is questionable whether any other poem ex- cept the Divine Comedy affords so many unforgettable pictures. Milton's blindness, which at first thought might be deemed crushingly against him here, really helped him. Cut off forever from the light of the sun, he turned his imagination passion- ately in upon the memories of color and form which he had carried with him into darkness, and took delight in giving to the obscure shades of hell and the vague glo- ries of heaven a startling concreteness and actuality. And these pictures, almost without exception, possess a quality very rare in the history of imagination, a quality which can only be hinted at by the abused epithet "sublime." Even the pictures of Dante, placed beside them, have an every- day colloquial look. Milton's all " dilated stand like Teneriffe or Atlas." De Quincey was right in declaring that the pervading presence of this quality gives Paradise Lost its unique worth, and makes of it a work which, if lost, could not be guessed at from the work of other minds. And to .match this quality in the manner of thought there is everywhere present a correspond- ing quality of expression, a diction and a rhythm so large that they seem made for more than mortal lips to tell of more than earthly happenings, yet so harmoniously adjusted to their task that their largeness is felt less than their justice. William Blake,

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