Our language has no finer poem than "Samson
Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere dignity or in the
skill with which the poet's personal experience is generalized into a
classic tragedy.
Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem to show him, he had in
him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of the haughty and
defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michel Angelo. In no other English
author is the man so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty
conception of himself enters into all he says and does. Always the
necessity of this one man became that of the whole human race for the
moment. There were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when _he_
wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary Powell, the
cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster
_incompatible_ and leave it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an
easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If _he_ is blind, it is with
excess of light, it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with
angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted among the prophets
because they, too, had lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of
more account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he was past
fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes "the
invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre.
Pages:
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419