They see a style stripped of almost all ornament especially in the speeches of our Lord: the poet deliberately walking always on the very edge of the gulf of prose and yet always as one perfectly assured that into that gulf his feet can never fall. Here and there, as when we come upon such lines as
"I never liked thy talk, thy offers less,"
we are nervous as we watch: but the poet passes on his way serenely unconscious of our fears, and in the very next speech is on the heights of poetry with the great description {209} of Athens. Once only, perhaps, in the reply to Satan after the storm—
"Me worse than wet thou find'st not,"
we feel that the cunningly maintained balance has failed and that the limit has been passed which divides the severe from the grotesque.
The truth is that, if the narrowness of its subject and the austerity of its style be admitted, Paradise Regained is a poetic achievement as great as it is surprising. It cannot be Paradise Lost, of course, and that is the fault for which it has not been forgiven. And its fine things are even less evident, much less evident, at a first reading than those of Paradise Lost. But Milton has left nothing more Miltonic. He did greater things but nothing in which he stands so entirely alone. There is no poem in English, perhaps none in any language of the world, which exhibits to the same degree the inherent power of style itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any of its visible accessories. There are in it, of course, some passages of characteristic splendour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision of Rome, and others; but a large part of the poem is as bare as the mountains and, to the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and forbidding. Its grave Dorian music, scarcely {210} heard by the sensual ear, is played by the mind to the spirit and by the spirit to the mind. Ever present as its art is, it is an art infinitely removed from that to which all the world at once responds and surrenders. It is not at first seen to be art at all. The verse which in truth dances so cunningly appears to the uninitiated to stumble and halt. The music, which the common ear is so slow to catch, makes us think of those Platonic mysteries of abstract number seen only in their perfection by some godlike mathematician who lives rapt above sense and matter in the contemplation of the Idea of Good.
But, if there is much in an art so consummate as Milton's which escapes analysis, there are also elements which can be measured and weighed. Here as in the Paradise Lost students of metre can count and compare his stresses and pauses, and set out some finite portion of the infinite variety of rhythms which, even more needed here than in Paradise Lost, sustain the poem in its difficult flight over so apparently barren a country. The art of the poet as distinct from the musician is less difficult to trace. An avowed sequel has to recall its predecessor and yet not to recall it too much. Paradise Regained recalls Paradise Lost by its central action, a {211} temptation, by its council of devils, by its assembly of the heavenly host, by a hundred echoes of phrase and circumstance. But though the heavenly host is itself unchanged, though it is still the old "full frequence bright Of Angels" yet there is now no real council. The Son, the only spokesman who can address the Father, is no longer present, and even the hymn of the angels gets no more than a vague description. A greater change has come over the infernal council: scarcely any longer infernal, for their leader can now open his address to them with
"O ancient Powers of Air and this wide World,"
and the meeting is held in mid air and no longer in hell. Nor is any rivalry attempted with the great debate of Paradise Lost: only enough to awaken its memory in the reader and to enable the poet to find a place in the second meeting for the most obvious of temptations which yet reverence forbade him to introduce into the main action. And note how this contains at least one of those small dramatic touches for which, except from Mr. Mackail, Milton has got too little credit. Satan asks how he is to assail the new enemy: and Belial, who stands for the sensualist man of the world, at once offers his suggestion. {212} He is sure, as such men always are, that the lowest motive is invariably the true mainspring and explanation of all human actions: there is no beating about the bush with him: he is frank and cynical, and begins at once without shame, apology or preface—
"Set women in his eye and in his walk."