Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/39

 MILTON'S LAST YEARS, 1666-1674

��that reason loose his grasp on the large lyre so painfully builded and strung. A chance remark of Elhvood's on returning the manuscript of Paradise Lost had suggested to him a companion subject. " Thou hast said much here," the young Quaker had observed (" pleasantly," as he assures us), " of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found ? " The poet had made no answer, but sat some time in a muse. Had he, after all, completed his task of justifying the ways of God to men ? Satan he had left triumphant, man he had left outcast from Eden, earning his painful bread under the curse. Did not the real justification lie in that part of the cosmic story which he had as yet only vaguely foreshadowed, in the bruising of the Serpent's head by that greater man who should recover Para- dise ? Out of such questioning came, some time in the next two years, Paradise Regained. The poem was finished before the publication of Paradise Lost, but not published until 1671.

In this poem there is noticeable a distinct change from Milton's earlier manner, a sudden purging away of ornament, a falling back on the naked concept, a pre- ference for language as slightly as possible tinctured with metaphoric suggestion. A portion of this change may be due to failing vividness of imagination ; certainly the abandonment of rapid narrative for tedious argumentation marks the increas- ing garrulity of age. Christ and Satan in the wilderness dispute with studied casuistry, until the sense of the spiritual drama in which they are protagonists is almost lost. As this same weakness is apparent also in the later books of Paradise Lost, we must lay it largely to the score of flagging creative energy. But in still greater measure the change seems to be a deliberate experiment in style, or perhaps more truly a conscious reproduction, in language, of that rarefied mental atmo- sphere to which the author had climbed from the rich valley mists of his youth. Unalluring at first, this bareness comes in time to have a solemn charm of its own, comparable, as has been said, to that of mountain scenery above the line of vegeta- tion. Some such beauty as this Milton, himself above all a student and amateur of style, must have prized in Paradise Regained, unless we are to attribute to- a narrow pride his refusal to tolerate the opinion of its inferiority to Paradise Lost. Whether deliberate or not, this same quality of style appears in the dramatic poem of Samson Agonistes. of the same 1671 volume, stripped of discursiveness, and wrought to the hard dark finish of bronze. By reason both of its form and of its content this last work of Milton is of absorbing interest.

Ever since the days of Arcades and Comus, Milton had cherished a fondness for the dramatic form. For several years after his return from Italy he had per- severed in the intention to make his master-work a drama, and even made sev- eral tentative sketches of Paradise Lost in that form. The suppression of stage plays by the Long Parliament he had concurred in, but without loss of sympathy with the theatre, at least as an ideal institution. It was characteristic of the unified purpose of his intellectual life that he should go back now to gather up this, the only one of the main threads of his intention still left hanging. For a subject, too, he went back to a theme pondered thirty years before. Samson Purso-

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