"The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."
{160} Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, in which the Bible had anticipated him a hundred times, admitted of no novelty in itself; and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these high matters. But what he could do he did. The matter of the speech he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard before: but after this manner he has not heard it. In passing through Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.
Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as actors in his drama. But the escape could only be partial. It is true that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a verbose and argumentative Deity. Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all, cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree. "Let thy words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him. Milton's God suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.
Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in part unperceived, inherent in the subject of Paradise Lost. One more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry is a human art and its subject is human life. In the story Milton set himself to tell there are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends, without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves? The answer is twofold. It is partly that they do fail to provide that material. The Paradise Lost has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less variety of action, than the Iliad and Odyssey. This was probably unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention. It was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary people in everyday life. The line which he most often repeats in Paradise Lost is the very opposite of those which are repeated so often in the Iliad, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs together: such as—
hos oi men toiauta pros allêlous agoreuon
What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his stateliest lines, the magnificent—
"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."
The choice is characteristic of the man. His "natural port," as Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures." So it may well be that this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it would have done with most poets. But he was not altogether blind to it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now. His action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not increase the number of actors. Yet into the mouths of this tiny group of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own experience. This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any poet. By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall. So, after the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm—
"Thus they their doubtful consultations dark
Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief;
{164}
As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread
Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element
Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower,
If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."
Note how large and general it is. Its method is the classical appeal to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth. Matthew Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of the greatness of the ancient poets. This is the truth: and not only for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress—the "sure and flawless perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind, for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.