work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it. 196 As a drama it is deficient. The action is not probable. A Masque, in those parts where supernatural intervention is admitted, must indeed be given up to all the freaks of imagination; but so far as the action is merely human it ought to be reasonable, which can hardly be said of the conduct of the two brothers, who, when their sister sinks with fatigue in a pathless wilderness, wander both away in search of berries too far to find their way back, and leave a helpless Lady to all the sadness and danger of solitude. This however is a defect over-balanced by its convenience. 197 198 199 200 What deserves more reprehension is that the prologue spoken in the wild wood by the attendant Spirit is addressed to the audience; a mode of communication so contrary to the nature of dramatick representation that no precedents can support it1. The discourse of the Spirit is too long, an objection that may be made to almost all the following speeches; they have not the spriteliness of a dialogue animated by reciprocal contention, but seem rather declamations deliberately composed and formally repeated on a moral question. The auditor therefore listens as to a lecture, without passion, without anxiety". The song of Comus has airiness and jolity3; but, what may recommend Milton's morals as well as his poetry, the invitations to pleasure are so general that they excite no distinct images of corrupt enjoyment, and take no dangerous hold on the fancy. 4 The following soliloquies of Comus and the Lady are elegant, but tedious. The song must owe much to the voice, if it ever can delight. At last the Brothers enter, with too much tranquillity; and when they have feared lest their sister should be in danger, and hoped that she is not in danger, the Elder makes a speech in praise of chastity3, and the Younger finds how fine it is to be a philosopher ❝. ''Johnson makes an unanswerable objection to the prologue.' LANDQR, Imag. Conver. iv. 284. 27Yet he listens with elevation and delight.' T. WARTON, Milton's Poems, p. 262. 1. 93. 51. 418. 41. 230. • 1. 476. Then descends the Spirit in form of a shepherd'; and the 201 Brother, instead of being in haste to ask his help, praises his singing, and enquires his business in that place. It is remarkable that at this interview the Brother is taken with a short fit of rhyming. The Spirit relates that the Lady is in the power of Comus, the Brother moralises again, and the Spirit makes a long narration, of no use because it is false, and therefore unsuitable to a good Being. In all these parts the language is poetical and the sentiments 202 are generous, but there is something wanting to allure attention. The dispute between the Lady and Comus3 is the most ani- 203 mated and affecting scene of the drama, and wants nothing but a brisker reciprocation of objections and replies, to invite attention and detain it. The songs are vigorous and full of imagery; but they are 204 harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers. Throughout the whole the figures are too bold and the language 205 too luxuriant for dialogue: it is a drama in the epick style, inelegantly splendid, and tediously instructive*. The Sonnets were written in different parts of Milton's life upon 206 different occasions. They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad, and perhaps only the eighth and the twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendations. The fabrick of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours, 1. 490. 3 11. 659-813. 4 According to Dr. Warton there were at the end of the eighteenth century many who thought The Fairy Queen, Palamon and Arcite, The Tempest, and Comus 'childish and romantic.' Warton's Pope's Works, Preface, p. 55. 'Johnson must have lost all the senses that are affected by poetry when he calls the whole drama tediously instructive. There is, indeed, here and there prolixity; yet refreshing springs burst out profusely in every part of the wordy wilderness.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 284. Johnson admits that in all its parts it is 'truly poetical.' Ante, MILTON, 195. Ante, MILTON, 55, 152. 'Milton's sonnets are in several places incorrect, and sometimes uncouth in language, and, perhaps, in some, inharmonious; yet, upon the whole, I think the music exceedingly well suited to its end; that is, it has an energetic and varied flow of sound crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of.' WORDSWORTH, Memoirs, i. 287. 'and when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand [he blew The Thing became a trumpet, whence Soul-animating strains-alas too few!' WORDSWORTH, Poet. Works, ii. 309. 'A few of Milton's sonnets are extremely bad; the rest are excellent.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 285. 207 208 which, having greater variety of termination, requires the rhymes to be often changed. Those little pieces may be dispatched without much anxiety; a greater work calls for greater care. I am now to examine Paradise Lost, a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second, among the productions of the human mind '. By the general consent of criticks the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions". Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. Epick poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner. History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatick energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact bounds and different shades of vice and virtue; from policy and the practice of life he has to learn the discriminations of character and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined; and physiology3 must supply him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to poetical use is required an imagination capable of painting nature and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has 1 Ante, MILTON, 109. The first place among our English poets is due to Milton.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 262. 'If Milton's Paradise Lost falls short of the Aeneid or Iliad in this respect [the arts of working on the imagination], it proceeds rather from the fault of the language in which it is written than from any defect of genius in the author.' lb. No. 417. 'I recur to the Paradise Lost incessantly as the noblest specimen in the world of eloquence, harmony and genius.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 245. Macaulay thought that 'Milton's fame would have stood higher if only the first four books had been preserved. He would then have been placed above Homer.' Trevelyan's Macaulay, ii. 200. "The most perfect work of poetry, says our master Aristotle, is tragedy [Poetics, xxvii. 15). . But... an heroick poem is certainly the greatest work of human nature.' DRYDEN, Works, xiii. 36. See also ib. xiv. 129. Horace Walpole, perhaps in answer to Johnson, describes an epic poem as 'that most senseless of all the species of poetic compositions, and which pedants call the chef-d'œuvre of the human mind.... When nothing has been impossible to genius in every other walk, why has everybody failed in this but the inventor, Homer? . . Milton, all imagination, and a thousand times more sublime and spirited [than Virgil], has produced a monster.' Letters, viii. 235. attained the whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of phrase, and all the colours of words, and learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation'. Bossu is of opinion that the poet's first work is to find a moral, 209 which his fable is afterwards to illustrate and establish. This seems to have been the process only of Milton: the moral of other poems is incidental and consequent; in Milton's only it is essential and intrinsick. His purpose was the most useful and the most arduous: 'to vindicate the ways of God to man3'; to shew the reasonableness of religion, and the necessity of obedience to the Divine Law. / To convey this moral there must be a fable, a narration 210 artfully constructed so as to excite curiosity and surprise expectations. In this part of his work Milton must be confessed to have equalled every other poet. He has involved in his account of the Fall of Man the events which preceded, and those that were to follow it: he has interwoven the whole system of theology with such propriety that every part appears to be necessary, and scarcely any recital is wished shorter for the sake of quickening the progress of the main action. The subject of an epick poem is naturally an event of great 211 importance. That of Milton is not the destruction of a city, 'In Rasselas, ch. x, Imlac enumerates the qualities needed in a poet. Rasselas exclaims:-'Enough! thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet.' une La première chose par où l'on doit commencer pour faire Fable, est de choisir l'instruction et le point de Morale qui lui doit servir de fond, selon le dessein et la fin que l'on se propose.' LE BOSSU, Traité du Poëme Epique, l. 1. ch. 7. Dryden adopts Le Bossu's rule. Works, xvii. 303. Addison rejects it. The Spectator, No. 369. Voltaire attacks 'cette règle bizarre que le père Lebossu a prétendu établir, c'est de choisir son sujet avant les personnages, et de disposer toutes les actions qui se passent dans le poëme avant de savoir à qui on les attribuera.' Euvres, viii. 371. 'Son Traité sur le Poëme épique a beaucoup de réputation, mais il ne fera jamais de poètes.' lb. xvii. 117. See post, SMITH, 10. 3 'I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.' Paradise Lost, i. 25. Johnson, in his Dictionary, misquoting these lines, gives them under Vindicate. He was misled by Pope's line 'But vindicate the ways of God to man.' Essay on Man, i. 16. 'In the Paradise Lost—indeed in every one of his poems-it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve, are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit.' COLERIDGE, Table Talk, 1884, p. 231. Johnson here borrows something from Addison's Spectator, No. 267. 212 213 214 the conduct of a colony, or the foundation of an empire. His subject is the fate of worlds, the revolutions of heaven and of earth; rebellion against the Supreme King raised by the highest order of created beings; the overthrow of their host and the punishment of their crime; the creation of a new race of reasonable creatures; their original happiness and innocence, their forfeiture of immortality, and their restoration to hope and peace'. Great events can be hastened or retarded only by persons of elevated dignity. Before the greatness displayed in Milton's poem all other greatness shrinks away. The weakest of his agents are the highest and noblest of human beings, the original parents of mankind; with whose actions the elements consented; on whose rectitude or deviation of will depended the state of terrestrial nature and the condition of all the future inhabitants of the globe 2. Of the other agents in the poem the chief are such as it is irreverence to name on slight occasions3. The rest were lower powers; 'of which the least could wield Those elements, and arm him with the force powers which only the controul of Omnipotence restrains from In the examination of epick poems much speculation is commonly employed upon the characters. The characters in the |