No More Learning

They still took European consciousness as an
affair of geography and race rather than simply as a triumphant stage in
the general progress of man's knowledge of himself. Their time imposed a
duty on them; that they clearly understood. But they did not clearly
understand what the duty was; partly, no doubt, because they were both
strongly influenced by mediaeval religion. And so it is atmosphere, in
Tasso and Camoens, that counts much more than substance; both poets seem
perpetually thrilled by something they cannot express--the _non so che_
of Tasso. And what chiefly gives this sense of quivering, uncertain
significance to their poetry is the increase of freedom and decrease of
control in the supernatural. Supernaturalism was emphasized, because
they instinctively felt that this was the means epic poetry must use to
accomplish its new duties; it was disorderly, because they did not quite
know what use these duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all the
splendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic poetry, as it were,
consciously dissatisfied--knowing that its future must achieve some
significance larger and deeper than anything it had yet done, and
knowing that this must be done somehow through imagined supernaturalism.
It waited nearly a hundred years for the poet who understood exactly
what was to be done and exactly how to do it.

In _Paradise Lost_, the development of epic poetry culminates, as far as
it has yet gone. The essential inspiration of the poem implies a
particular sense of human existence which has not yet definitely
appeared in the epic series, but which the process of life in Europe
made it absolutely necessary that epic poetry should symbolize. In
Milton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest task
laid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task was
perhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not the
greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first. " The epigram
might just as reasonably have been the other way round. But nothing
would be more unprofitable than a discussion in which Homer and Milton
compete for supremacy of genius. Our business here is quite otherwise.
With the partial exception of Tasso and Camoens, all epic poetry before
Milton is some symbolism of man's sense of his own will. It is simply
this in Homer; and the succeeding poets developed this intention but
remained well within it. Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic of
individual merged into social will--not even Virgil went outside it. In
fact, it is a sort of _monism_ of consciousness that inspires all
pre-Miltonic epic. But in Milton, it has become a _dualism_. Before him,
the primary impulse of epic is an impassioned sense of man's nature
_being contained_--by his destiny: _his_ only because he is in it and
belongs to it, as we say "_my_ country. " With Milton, this has
necessarily become not only a sense of man's rigorously contained
nature, but equally a sense of that which contains man--in fact,
simultaneously a sense of individual will and of universal necessity.
The single sense of these two irreconcilables is what Milton's poetry
has to symbolize. Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man's
modern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But this
consciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed.
_Paradise Lost_ is inspired by intense consciousness of the eternal
contradiction between the general, unlimited, irresistible will of
universal destiny, and defined individual will existing within this, and
inexplicably capable of acting on it, even against it. Or, if that seems
too much of an antinomy to some philosophies (and it is perhaps possible
to make it look more apparent than real), the dualism can be unavoidably
declared by putting it entirely in terms of consciousness: destiny
creating within itself an existence which stands against and apart from
destiny by being _conscious_ of it. In Milton's poetry the spirit of man
is equally conscious of its own limited reality and of the unlimited
reality of that which contains him and drives him with its motion--of
his own will striving in the midst of destiny: destiny irresistible, yet
his will unmastered.

This is not to examine the development of epic poetry by looking at that
which is not _poetry_. In this kind of art, more perhaps than in any
other, we must ignore the wilful theories of those who would set
boundaries to the meaning of the word poetry. In such a poem as
Milton's, whatever is in it is its poetry; the poetry of _Paradise Lost_
is just--_Paradise Lost_!