Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/293

 PARADISE REGAINED

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��the way in which it plays over and through the grey dialogue. Few persons can read this dialogue without a sense of the tire- someness of its matter ; no one with any feeling for style can read it without a convic- tion an almost vexing conviction under the circumstances that every word pro- ceeds out of the mouth of a poet, " skilled to sing of time and eternity." This, how- ever, is merely to say that the style of Paradise Regained is Miltonic ; we must not leave out of the account the specific difference which marks off the style of this poem from that of Paradise Lost. The dif- ference is remarkable. Paradise Lost leaves as a whole an impression of tireless energy. The rhythms, for all their massiveuess, are buoyant ; the mighty periods march with lifted front and banners streaming. Par- adise Regained leaves an impression of strength overborne by a weight of weari- ness. The language, with the exception of two or three purple patches, is neutral tinted, and the rhythms, though unconquer- able as of old, move heavily, under some ghostly burden. The whole effect of the poem is sombre, nor does the sombreness seem to proceed from the subject, but to be suspended cloud-like over it. The effect is, in other words, due to a temperamental condition on Milton's part, subtly finding expression in style.

And it is this sombreness of style, half- way between the martial elateness of Par- adise Lost and the profound depression of Samson Agonistes, which redeems the short- comings of Paradise Regained, giving dig- nity to the dialogue, and majesty to the interludes. What is meant will be made clear by comparing Giles Fletcher's treat- ment of the Temptation in his epic of Christ's Victory, a poem from which Mil- ton drew valuable hints. Fletcher, a true Spenserian, elaborates his subject with every artifice of decoration and amplifica- tion, and thus sins against the sincerity of the biblical story as grievously as does Milton ; but unlike Milton he fails to re-

��deem his treatment by throwing the whole elaborate picture into shadow. His descrip- tions are open-hearted as a child's, and his poem, for all its lovableness, remains queer- ly vacant of the tragic sense. Milton, hav- ing lost the tragic sense by elaboration, pro- ceeds to reinvoke it mysteriously by means of a shadowed, tragic style.

As Lycidas stands between Milton's youth and his manhood and gathers to itself the grace of the one and the strenuousness of the other, so Paradise Regained stands be- tween his manhood and his old age. His poetic maturity is past ; the autumnal touch is everywhere; the picture settles rapidly into brown and grey. But here and there the frost has come only to glorify with scarlet and purple and bronze. Indeed, there occasionally falls across the page a ray of delicate light like spring:

" Faery damsels met in forest -wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore."

In this poem, too, the two men of whom Milton was composed find their clear ex- pression in style. Occasionally we come upon a line which shows the poet pure :

" So they in heaven their odes and vigils tuned "

or:

" Morning fair Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice grey "

or, incomparable for visual truth:

" The field all iron cast a gleaming brown "

then without warning the poet merges into the dialectician who uses the poet for a mouthpiece :

" Saidst tli on not that to all things I had right ? And who withholds my power that right to use ? Shall I receive by gifts what of my own, When and where likes me best, I can com- mand ?"

Less perhaps than any other work of Milton's can Paradise Regained stand the test to which modern criticism is more and more prone to subject the literature of the past. When we cast aside conventions and ask the simple human question, " Does this

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