In France the question had been as zealously discussed, and had been illustrated by experiments no less elaborate. In 1657, a year after the appearance of Cowley's Davideis, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin brought out his sacred poem of Clovis, with a great flourish of trumpets, and a long prose demonstration that its theme was the grandest a French poet could choose. The real supernatural of the Christian religion, so he argued, is a subject much nobler for poetry than the pagan mythology, as the sunlight is brighter than the shadow. The controversy dragged on till 1673, when Boileau, in the third book of his Poetic, settled the question for the nonce, and fixed the opinion of the succeeding generation of critics. He casts an equal ridicule upon Clovis and upon the theory which it was designed to illustrate:--
The arts of fiction give the air of lies
Even to the most unquestioned verities;
And what a pious entertainment, too,
The yells of Satan and his damnèd crew,
When, proud to assail your Hero's matchless might,
With God himself they wage a doubtful fight.
So the burial of Clovis was hastened by ridicule. Yet every one of the arguments brought against that poem by Boileau holds equally good against Paradise Lost, which Milton, knowing as little of Boileau as Boileau knew of him, had published some six years earlier. Paradise Lost, it might almost be said, is superior to Clovis in nothing, except the style. By the force of his genius and the magic of his style, Milton succeeded in an attempt thought hopeless by the best critical judges of his century, and won his way through a ravine that was strewn with the corpses of his epic predecessors.
His courage and originality are witnessed also by the metre that he chose for his poem. To us blank verse seems the natural metre for a long serious poem. Before Milton's day, except in the drama, it had only once been so employed--in an Elizabethan poem of no mark or likelihood, called A Tale of Two Swannes. While Milton was writing Paradise Lost the critics of his time were discussing whether the rhymed couplet or some form of stanza was fitter for narrative poetry, and whether the couplet or blank verse better suited the needs of drama. As no one, before Milton, had maintained in argument that blank verse was the best English measure for narrative poetry dealing with lofty themes, so no critic had ever been at the pains to refute that opinion. In the year of the publication of Paradise Lost, Dryden delivered his judgment, that the rhymed couplet was best suited for tragic passages in the drama, and that blank verse should be employed chiefly for the lighter and more colloquial purposes of comedy. Some echo of the courtly dispute then in progress between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, probably reached Milton's ear through his bookseller, Samuel Simmons; for it was at the request of his bookseller that he added the three Miltonic sentences on "The Verse," by way of preface. With his accustomed confidence and directness of attack he begs the question in his first words:--"The measure is English heroic verse without rime"; and in his closing words he takes credit to himself for his "example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming."
In these two cardinal points, then--the matter and the form of his poem--Milton was original. For the one there was no true precedent in English; for the other there was no precedent that might not rather have been called a warning. His matter was to be arranged and his verse handled by his own ingenuity and at his own peril. He left a highroad behind him, along which many a tuneful pauper has since limped; but before him he found nothing but the jungle and false fires. In considering his style, therefore, it is well to treat the problem as it presented itself to him, and to follow his achievement as he won step by step out of the void.