With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes, As one great furnace, flamed; yet from those flames Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed. As far removed from God and light of heaven, And thence in heaven call'd Satan, with bold words If thou beest he; but oh, how fallen! how changed From him, who in the happy realms of light, Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest From what height fallen, so much the stronger proved Can else inflict, do I repent or change, Though changed in outward lustre, that fix'd mind, That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring, And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy So spake the apostate angel, though in pain, Whether upheld by strength, or chance, or fate, That with sad overthrow and foul defeat Hath lost us heaven, and all this mighty host As far as gods and heavenly essences : Can perish for the mind and spirit remain Though all our glory extinct, and happy state But what if he our Conqueror, whom I now Of force believe Almighty, since no less Than such could have c'erpower'd such force as ours, Have left us this our spirit and strength entire, Strongly to suffer and support our pains, That we may so suffice his vengeful ire, Whereto with speedy words the arch-fiend replied: Save what the glimmering of these livid flames What reinforcement we may gain from hope; Thus Satan, talking to his nearest mate, political environments, and (what is here the most important of all) of poetic purpose and performance—is almost fatiguingly conspicuous and uniform. An ordinary mind contemplating Milton can realize to itself the feeling of the Athenian who resented hearing Aristides for ever styled "the Just." Such a mind feels a little and excusably provoked at the serene and severe loftiness of a Milton, and casts about to find him blameworthy in his very superiority -an exacting husband and father, an over-learned writer, cumbrous or stilted in prose, and pedantically accoutred in verse, a political and religious extremist. There may be something in these objections, or the smaller kind of souls will please themselves by supposing there is something in them. Honour is the predominant emotion naturally felt towards Milton-hardly enthusiasm-certainly not sympathy. Perhaps a decided feeling of unsympathy would affect many of us, were it not for the one great misfortune of the poet. Nature had forbidden him to be infirm in himself, but gave him a crown of accidental or physical infirmity, and bowed him somewhat-a little lower than the angels-towards sympathy. This Aristides was blind. Any one who has even a small inkling of self-knowledge must feel, two centuries after the death of Milton, that to pretend to say much about the quality of his poetry would be an impertinence. Admiration and eulogium are long ago discounted: objections sound insolent, and are at any rate supererogatory. One's portion is to read and reverence. Still, something remains to be defined by an independent appreciator, however deeply respectful. I shall reduce this something to a minimum: and have indeed, in the preceding general observations about Milton's personal and intellectual character, indicated most of the points which seem to deserve some sort of expression with regard to his poetry. Among Milton's many great attributes, his mastery of the sublime is the one which has probably received the most frequent and most emphatic laudation. For my own part, I think it open to question whether, even in this preeminent possession of a most preeminent poetic gift, he shows so signal a superiority as he does in point of utterance (as it may be called), or sonority. His power over language, in its beauty and its majesty, his mastery of form and of verse, his dominance over all persuasion and all stress and sustainment of sound, its music and loveliness, its resources and charms, its dignity, austerity, and awe,-these form perhaps the most marked distinction of Milton, and his most genuinely and widely felt appeal. It seems conceivable that some readers, not strictly destitute of suscepti bility to poetry, might remain cold and obtuse to the sublimity of Milton, or might acknowledge without truly admiring it but anybody who has read Milton with some moderate degree of attention, and who yet fails to feel the noble delight of his diction and music-his "numbers," as an elder generation of critics used happily to phrase it— must be pronounced deficient in the primary sense of poetry. From a certain point of view, there is no poet more difficult to estimate than Milton-salient and unmistakeable as his leading characteristics are to the least expert student of poetry. To appraise Milton is to appraise Paradise Lost; or, conversely, to appraise Paradise Lost is in the main to appraise Milton. Now Paradise Lost is an enormously difficult book to give a fair account of even to one's own instincts or intuitions-much more to one's critical or reasoning faculties, or, through the medium of words, to the like faculties of the reader. The great difficulty consists in this: That Paradise Lost is so interwoven with the religion and religious associations of the people, and is written from a standard of conception so lofty and ideal in many respects, that one can hardly bring oneself to apply any different standard to it, and yet one feels that in numerous instances the product is not commensurate with that standard. Not so much that it falls below it (though this also is indisputably true in a sense) as that it deviates entirely. To measure some things in the poem by the ideal standard is like trying chemical substances by the wrong test: they yield no response to the demandant. Hence, I think, some disappointment to the prepossessed reader of Paradise Lost, or to the reader who, being unprepossessed, has the courage also to be candid: the poem ought, he fancies, to be as true as a divine oracle, unswerving from the severe and impeccable ideal line, and behold it is considerably otherwise. The fault, or part of the fault, lies with the reader. There is no final reason why the spiritual afflatus which wrapped Milton, the atmosphere of ideas and data in which he lived, should be closer to ultimate truth and right, to the sublime of a divine equity, than those of Homer or any other great poet. The inextinguishable laughter of Olympus is alien to us, but has a poetic value of its own not likely soon to perish: the scholastic harangues of Jehovah and Messiah, or the cannonades of Satan and Moloch, may also be alien to us, and it is only our prejudices which, perceiving them to be thus alien, refuse to allow the fair consequence-that these things must be dismissed as having any connexion with supernal truth, and must henceforth be regarded as merely so much surplusage |