One last point in Milton's treatment must not be left unnoticed. Much adverse criticism has been spent on his allegorical figures of Sin and Death. There is good classical precedent for the introduction of such personified abstractions among the actors of a drama; and, seeing that the introduction of sin and death into the world was the chief effect of his main action, Milton no doubt felt that this too must be handled in right epic fashion, and must not be left to be added to the theme as a kind of embroidery of moral philosophy. In no other way could he have treated the topic half so effectively. There is enough of his philosophy in Milton's Heaven to damp our desire for more of it on his Earth or in his Hell. And when once we have given him license to deal only in persons, we are amply rewarded. His management of the poetic figure of personification is superb. It is a figure difficult to handle, and generally fails of effect through falling into one of two extremes. Either the quality, or the person, is forgotten. The figures in the Romaunt of the Rose are good examples of the one type, of the minute materialistic personifications of the Middle Ages, pictorial rather than literary in essence, like the illuminated figures in a psalter. The feeble abstractions that people Gray's Odes, where, as Coleridge remarked, the personification depends wholly on the use of an initial capital, are examples of the other. Neither has the art of combining the vastness and vagueness of the abstract with the precise and definite conception of a person, as is done in the great figure of Religion drawn by Lucretius, as is done also in those other figures--the only creations of English poetry which approach the Latin in grandeur--the horrible phantoms of Sin and Death.
These, then, here outlined slightly and imperfectly, are some of the most noteworthy features of Milton's style. By the measured roll of his verse, and the artful distribution of stress and pause to avoid monotony and to lift the successive lines in a climax; by the deliberate and choice character of his diction, and his wealth of vaguely emotional epithets; by the intuition which taught him to use no figures that do not heighten the majesty, and no names that do not help the music of his poem; by the vivid outlines of the concrete imaginations that he imposes on us for real, and the cloudy brilliance that he weaves for them out of all great historical memories, and all far-reaching abstract conceptions, he attained to a finished style of perhaps a more consistent and unflagging elevation than is to be found elsewhere in literature. There is nothing to put beside him. "His natural port," says Johnson, "is gigantick loftiness." And Landor: "After I have been reading the Paradise Lost, I can take up no other poet with satisfaction. I seem to have left the music of Handel for the music of the streets, or, at best, for drums and fifes." The secret of the style is lost; and no poet, since Milton's day, has recaptured the solemnity and beauty of the large utterance of Gabriel, or Belial, or Satan.
The success of Paradise Lost, when it was published in 1667, was immediate and startling. Some of the poet's biographers have shed tears over the ten pounds that was all Milton ever received for his greatest work; others, magnanimously renouncing the world on his behalf, have rejoiced in the smallness of the sum paid him for a priceless work. Lament and heroics are both out of place. London was a small town, and it may well be doubted whether any modern provincial town of the same size would buy up in eighteen months thirteen hundred copies of a poem so serious and difficult and novel as Paradise Lost. Moreover, before the close of the century, six editions had appeared, three of them in folio, and so--judged by the number of editions--Milton's epic had outrun Shakespeare's plays in popularity. The folio edition of 1695, with notes and elucidations by one Patrick Hume, a Scottish scholar, appeared fourteen years before Nicholas Rowe produced the first critical edition of Shakespeare. The literary world quickly came to the opinion expressed by Dryden in the year of Milton's death, that the Paradise Lost was "one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." Barely twenty years later the editors of the Athenian Mercury were asked to determine "Whether Milton and Waller were not the best English Poets; and which the better of the two?" Their verdict, reflecting, no doubt, the average opinion of the time, ran thus: "They were both excellent in their kind, and exceeded each other, and all besides. Milton was the fullest and loftiest; Waller the neatest and most correct poet we ever had." Long before Addison wrote the papers on Paradise Lost in the Spectator, Milton had received full recognition in the literary handbooks of that age. Langbaine, in his Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), takes notice of Dryden's debts to Samson Agonistes, and, with an effort to be just, remarks of Milton:--" Had his Principles been as good as his Parts, he had been an Excellent Person." Sir Thomas Pope Blount, in his De Re Poetica (1694), and Bysshe in his Art of English Poetry (1702), bear witness, in their several ways, to Milton's great and assured fame. Indeed, Thomas Rymer, of Gray's Inn, Esquire, who in 1677 had sneered at "that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a Poem," and William Winstanley, who, in the Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687), had remarked of Milton that "his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink," were almost alone among the voices of their time. They were still under the influence of the old political prejudice, but they did battle for a doomed opinion, and, among judges not illiterate, they are the poet's last detractors.
The singular thing to note is that the eighteenth century, which broke with almost every other seventeenth-century poet before Dryden, did not break with Milton. "Who now reads Cowley?" Pope asked: Cowley, whose works ran through so many editions that no modern reprint has been called for. If he had asked, "Who now reads Milton?" the answer must have been, "Every writer of English verse"; and so it has continued from the time of Milton's death to the present day. The choice of blank verse for Paradise Lost established that metre in formidable rivalry to the heroic couplet, so that it became the usual metre for long poems of a reflective or descriptive cast. Professed imitations of Milton's verse were many; among them, Addison's Translation of a Story out of the Third Aeneid, Broome's experiment in the translation of the Eleventh Odyssey, Fenton's fragments of two books of the Iliad, and Christopher Pitt's paraphrase of Psalm cxxxix. In the first year of the eighteenth century John Philips showed, in his Splendid Shilling, how the style of Milton might be applied, for the purposes of burlesque, to humble subjects, a lesson which he further illustrated, with no ostensible comic intent, in his later poems, Cyder and Blenheim. Gay, in Wine, a Poem, Somerville in The Chase, Armstrong in The Oeconomy of Love and The Art of Preserving Health, Christopher Smart in The Hop-Garden, Dyer in The Fleece, and Grainger in The Sugar-Cane, all followed where Philips' Cyder had led, and multiplied year by year what may be called the technical and industrial applications of Milton's style. Among the many other blank verse poems produced during the middle part of the century it is enough to name Thomson's Seasons; Blair's Grave; Glover's Leonidas; Shenstone's Economy, The Ruined Abbey, and Love and Honour; Young's Night Thoughts; Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination; Thomas Warton's Pleasures of Melancholy; Mallet's The Excursion, and Amyntor and Theodora; Cooper's The Power of Harmony; and Lyttelton's Blenheim. The influence of Milton is not equally apparent in all of these, but in none is it wholly wanting; in most it is visible on every page. The mere invocation often tells a tale. Thus Akenside:--
Thou chief, Poetic Spirit, from the banks
Of Avon, whence thy holy fingers cull
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
Where Shakespeare lies, be present. And with thee
Let Fiction come; on her aërial wings