next we note that the difference is not only difference between Shakespeare and Milton; that much of it lies in the form of Art chosen: that Cordelia speaks vividly because that form compels us to see every accessory gesture, to witness the kiss, to watch her fingers as they lift Lear's white locks, as they piteously trace the furrows down the worn cheek, pause when a criss-cross suggest the cross double cut of lightning, stray back to the thin helm, recoil to clench themselves in the cryMine enemy's dog,

Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire.

Lastly we see how the form of the art, being so much more vivid; and the subject being so much more human and intense upon the human heart; force the speech to utter those strange unexpected, yet most befitting words "Alas, poor perdu!"-force Cordelia to seek back and snatch, as it were out of girlhood, out of lost days of kindness, familiar tender images to coo them over that great head brought low

WHEN

MILTON (IV)

I

WHEN Aristotle-worshipping Homer yet not overawed by Homer's authority-declared, in the last chapter of the Poetics, for Tragedy as a higher art on the whole than Epic, he had much to back his daring. Tragedy, even as Epic, dealt with gods, demigods, a few ancient and royal houses. Its human characters all owned something of divine descent and were by consequence exalted in dignity and passion as, circumstantially, by the spectacle of their deeds and downfalls. Tragedy, moreover, came straight out of religious observance and worked upon higher solemnities than Epic, which was a strain sung to the feast in a chieftain's hall, convivial rather than ceremonial; of the dais and the high table. Tragedy moved still around an altar. Yet even Aristotle, in his day, has to start with a defence against those who prefer Epic on the ground that it appeals to a more refined audience; their objection being to the intrusion of actors with their capers and gestures, intended to help out the meaning for common wits. Aristotle's answer amounts to this; that, if it be bad, we must curse the histrions and attach the blame neither upon the tragic writer nor upon the tragic form. And the answer is all very well and sufficient, so far as it goes. But there were

two things Aristotle could not possibly foresee. The first was the social degradation of the theatre. I pass its spectacular decline in Rome, its fatal loss there of all religious and ancestral honour, its not unprovoked persecution by the Fathers of the Church, its exile from society for a thousand years. But I ask you to note that when at length the hussy returned to take men's hearts by storm again, she came back a vagrant, in tawdry finery soiled with her discreditable past. The practitioners of drama were still, by legal definition, "vagabonds" and liable to whipping; it offered in a furtive way allurements that no effrontery could pass off as religious; it trafficked neither with gods nor with demigods, but in human passions; it commanded neither temple nor municipal stage and chorus; it put up for the day in inn-courtyards, or found lodging among the disorderly houses of the Bankside, itself scarcely less disorderly. Not even a Shakespeare could efface the stigma of its old trade, or quite exempt even a Hamlet or a Lear from association in men's minds with cat-calls, nuts and oranges.

Aristotle could as little foresee all this as he could foresee that Epic, continuing respectable under tradition, keeping its proud trailing robe aloof from contact with the skirt of its royal sister turned drab, would increase in estimation by her decrease. But so it happened. Dryden (though himself a prolific writer of drama and critic enough to beware of touching the Poetics otherwise than gingerly) has to write "The most perfect work of Poetry, says our master Aristotle, is Tragedy. . . But an heroick poem is certainly the greatest work of human nature." And to the first édition de luxe of Paradise Lost (published in

1688) he contributed the famous "pinchbeck epigram" -as Mark Pattison calls it

Three Poets, in three distant Ages born. . . etc.

-in which the Epic poet is assumed to stand above all others.

Again, in Addison's famous pages which he devoted to criticising Paradise Lost you will find it tacitly assumed that Epic is the highest form of poetry. When we reach Dr. Johnson-who comes to Paradise Lost, not only with no disposition to do it justice, but even with hands by no means clean', we find him admitting hardily that—

By the general consent of criticks the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions.

In short-and partly no doubt through the success of Paradise Lost-it became the tradition of the penniless literary aspirant to set out for London (as Crabbe did) with an Epic in his pocket. What he found there was not a public who needed him, but, with luck, a patron who patronised him because in that age the rôle of Mæcenas consorted with a British nobleman's ideal construction of himself. Yet there is evidence in plenty that the great man's languid demand for Epic Poetry (with a Dedication) not seldom turned into a brisk defensive movement against the number of clients ready to supply it: and if you study the "poetical remains" of the eighteenth century preserved for

The great doctor could be very loud upon morals. Johnson's share in a conspiracy with the Scotch forger Lauder to blacken Milton as a thief and a plagiarist has never to this hour been explained away.

us in volume after volume of Chalmers's monumental collection, I doubt not your exclaiming, "Small blame to him!" or of your sympathising with Horace Walpole —an eminent victim long before he became fourth Earl of Orford—who, suffering from gout in addition, calls out upon Epic as "that most senseless of all the species of poetic composition, and which"-his testiness, you perceive penetrating to the relative clause-"and which pedants call the chef d'œuvre of the human mind. . When nothing has been impossible to genius in every other walk, why has everybody failed in this but the inventor, Homer? . . . Milton, all imagination, and a thousand times more sublime and spirited [than even Virgil], has produced a monster."

II

Although Aristotle had but one great Epic poet, Homer, from whom to generalise, while he had a number of great exemplars in tragic writing and ranges among them liberally for his precepts and illustrations; and although Homer had lived so long ago, even in Aristotle's time, and still there was no promise of any true successor; let us not pertly blame the great man for not divining and prophesying what time has made so plain to us-that a great epic poem is the rarest of all human achievements; that a literature and a language are blessed indeed and inexpressibly promoted among languages, among literatures, if they possess but one grand Epic Poet. Where is the literature-which speaks, or has ever spoken a language-owning more than one Epic poet unmistakably of the first rank?

Here let me in parenthesis, Gentlemen, stress that word "unmistakably." A deal of stupid moralising has been written at one time and another around the