No More Learning

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_! Its pomp of divine syllables and glorious
images is no more the poetry of Milton than the idea of man which he
expressed. But the general manner of an art is for ever similar; it is
its inspiration that is for ever changing.
We need never expect words
and metre to do more than they do here:

they, fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit
Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed,
Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws,
With soot and cinders filled;

or more than they do here:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.

But what Homer's words, and perhaps what Virgil's words, set out to do,
they do just as marvellously. There is no sure way of comparison here.
How words do their work in poetry, and how we appreciate the way they do
it--this seems to involve the obscurest processes of the mind: analysis
can but fumble at it. But we can compare inspiration--the nature of the
inmost urgent motive of poetry. And it is not irrelevant to add (it
seems to me mere fact), that Milton had the greatest motive that has
ever ruled a poet.

For the vehicle of this motive, a fable of purely human action would
obviously not suffice. What Milton has to express is, of course,
altogether human; destiny is an entirely human conception. But he has to
express not simply the sense of human existence occurring in destiny;
that brings in destiny only mediately, through that which is destined.
He has to express the sense of destiny immediately, at the same time as
he expresses its opponent, the destined will of man. Destiny will appear
in poetry as an omnipotent God; Virgil had already prepared poetry for
that. But the action at large must clearly consist now, and for the
first time, overwhelmingly of supernatural imagination. Milton has been
foolishly blamed for making his supernaturalism too human. But nothing
can come into poetry that is not shaped and recognizable; how else but
in anthropomorphism could destiny, or (its poetic equivalent) deity,
exist in _Paradise Lost_?

We may see what a change has come over epic poetry, if we compare this
supernatural imagination of Milton's with the supernatural machinery of
any previous epic poet.