Among the jottings which Milton made in 1640-41 of possible subjects for poems, were several from the life of Christ, such as Christ Born, Christ Bound, Christ Crucified, and Christ Risen. He contemplated also a drama dealing with the agony in the garden, under the title Christus Patiens, suggested by Hugo Grotius's drama of the same name. Although the subject of Paradise Regained, the temptation in the Wilderness, was suggested by Ellwood's chance remark in returning the manuscript of Paradise Lost, the lesser poem was doubtless a result of a long period of thought, though of a less conscious and centred kind than evolved Paradise Lost. Milton's long brooding, during the composition of Paradise Lost, on the subject of the origin of evil and the fall of man, included by implication much reflection on the final triumph of good and the reinstatement of fallen humanity in its favored station. The very fact that his thought on these subjects was conventional, and straitly bound by scriptural authority, imposed upon him all the more imperatively the need of rounding out the system which Paradise Lost had left incomplete. It is almost safe to say, therefore, that even without the young Quaker's "pleasant" hint, Milton would sooner or later have felt the need of supplementing the story of the first temptation with that of the second, in order to close the circle of his theology.

Paradise Regained is, then, so far as its matter goes, a continuation of Paradise Lost; but in point of manner it is remarkably different, - so different, indeed, that there seems some ground for refusing to it the title of epic altogether. In his Reason of Church Government, Milton speaks of

"that Epic form, whereof the two Poems of Homer and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the Book of Job a brief, model," and it has been suggested that in Paradise Regained he essayed the "brief" epic, modelling it more or less consciously upon the precedent of Job. Certainly the form of the English and the Hebrew poem is similar. In the latter, after a short narrative introduction Job begins a series of colloquies with his friends and with the Lord which occupy the entire remainder of the poem except the short narrative conclusion. So in Paradise Regained, the body of the poem is dialogue, with narrative introduction and conclusion, and with narrative interludes between the various stages of the temptation. Strictly speaking, therefore, both poems are disguised dramas, the epic element being little else than expanded stage directions. In both, too, the drama is a spiritual one; the scene of conflict is in the hearts and minds of the protagonists, and the external world exists only as picturesque accessory and illustration.

The parallel is a damaging one for Milton, for it throws into relief his fatal fault in dealing with biblical material, — lack of simplicity. His account of the Creation in the seventh book of Paradise Lost shows this fault most glaringly. Milton's Creation is an elaborate function, the inauguration of a great celestial show; it has none of the simple awe, the lonely majesty, of Genesis, whereby we are made to feel the vague stirring of the Abyss pregnant with mortal shapes and passions. The touching anthropomorphism of the Hebrew God and the Hebrew Heaven too often becomes grotesque under his elaborating hand. Like

66

wise, in Paradise Regained, the story of Christ's hunger and temptation in the wilderness, so strangely moving in the bare apostolic account, suffers a change into something ample and grandiose almost beyond recognition. The trial of hunger, in which Christ is bidden to turn the stone into bread, occupies in the original but two short verses. Upon the working up of this simple passage of few notes" Miltou exhausts the resources of his orchestration. He pictures forth a feast to tempt a prince in the Arabian Nights. In the trial of ambition, again, Milton transmutes the single phrase "the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" into a vast panorama of Persian and Roman imperialism, and enlarges the theme still more by including in his picture Athens, as a type of the imperialism of mind. Out of the apostle's rude drawing he makes a mighty tapestry heavy with threads of gold, gorgeous and sombre with far-brought dyes. Here, as elsewhere, he shows the stamp of the later Italian Renaissance. He works over the earnest meagre traits of the apostolic story in a manner at once massive and rococo, just as the later Italian painters were wont to treat the subjects which they drew from the same source. And to match this physical elaboration in the setting of the dialogue, there is an intellectual elaboration in the dialogue itself, a parry and thrust of debate, a refinement of forensic device, which is thoroughly unbiblical, yet admirably in harmony with Milton's whole conception of his artistic problem.

The tenable objection against this elaboration is not that it falsifies the original, (for every artist must be allowed to translate his material into his own idiom, and Milton's idiom happened to be magniloquent and orotund,) but that it lowers the moral tension of the original. Satan's suggestion to Christ, that he shall turn the stone into bread, is a subtle temptation, appealing at once to physical distress and to reason.

The very simplicity of the thing

demanded, the naturalness of the relief offered, gives the words a devilish insinuation. One holds one's breath before the outcome. But when Satan falls back upon steaming trenchers, cakes and dainties, silver plate and dance-girls, to accomplish his end, the moral tension disappears. The temptation is one to conquer a school-boy or a prodigal. It is strange that Milton, ascetic and arch-idealist, should have fallen into such an error. For it is a moral error, though springing from an artistic source. The "motivation" of the poem is injured by it; the spiritual intensity falls away in exact proportion as the decorative richuess increases. The spiritual defect of Paradise Lost lies in the fact that both Satan's sin and Adam's are offences against positive edicts, not essential moral laws such as appeal to the universal conscience. The spiritual defect of Paradise Regained lies in the fact that, given Christ's nature, the temptations are not tempting.

And just as the elaboration of the physical accessories lowers the moral tension, so does the elaboration of the argument lower the imaginative tension. Between Satan's words in the scriptural account, "To whomsoever I will I will give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine," and Christ's reply, "It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God," the mind hangs in awe-struck suspense. But when the Christ of Milton's poem begins to argue the point we lose interest. The air is nc longer tense with the strain of mute decisions. In the flow of words the sense of spiritual catastrophe evaporates; we are in a world of second thoughts, and can wait. Milton the controversialist has once more defeated Milton the artist.

But Paradise Regained is, after all, a great work of art, and it is great by virtue of the inexplicable quality of voice which must so often be Milton's sufficient justification. This force of style is most obviously shown in the gorgeous descriptive interludes of the poem; but much more noteworthy is

the way in which it plays over and through the grey dialogue. Few persons can read this dialogue without a sense of the tiresomeness of its matter; no one with any feeling for style can read it without a conviction - an almost vexing conviction under the circumstances that every word proceeds out of the mouth of a poet, “skilled to sing of time and eternity." This, however, is merely to say that the style of Paradise Regained is Miltonic; we must not leave out of the account the specific difference which marks off the style of this poem from that of Paradise Lost. The difference is remarkable. Paradise Lost leaves as a whole an impression of tireless energy. The rhythms, for all their massiveness, are buoyant; the mighty periods march with lifted front and banners streaming. Paradise Regained leaves an impression of strength overborne by a weight of weariness. The language, with the exception of two or three purple patches, is neutral tinted, and the rhythms, though unconquerable as of old, move heavily, under some ghostly burden. The whole effect of the poem is sombre, nor does the sombreness seem to proceed from the subject, but to be suspended cloud-like over it. The effect is, in other words, due to a temperamental condition on Milton's part, subtly finding expression in style.

And it is this sombreness of style, halfway between the martial elateness of Paradise Lost and the profound depression of Samson Agonistes, which redeems the shortcomings of Paradise Regained, giving dignity to the dialogue, and majesty to the interludes. What is meant will be made clear by comparing Giles Fletcher's treatment of the Temptation in his epic of Christ's Victory, a poem from which Milton drew valuable hints. Fletcher, a true Spenserian, elaborates his subject with every artifice of decoration and amplification, and thus sins against the sincerity of the biblical story as grievously as does Milton; but unlike Milton he fails to re

deem his treatment by throwing the whole elaborate picture into shadow. His descriptions are open-hearted as a child's, and his poem, for all its lovableness, remains queerly vacant of the tragic sense. Milton, having lost the tragic sense by elaboration, proceeds to reinvoke it mysteriously by means of a shadowed, tragic style.

As Lycidas stands between Milton's youth and his manhood and gathers to itself the grace of the one and the strenuousness of the other, so Paradise Regained stands between his manhood and his old age. His poetic maturity is past; the autumnal touch is everywhere; the picture settles rapidly into brown and grey. But here and there the frost has come only to glorify with scarlet and purple and bronze. Indeed, there occasionally falls across the page a ray of delicate light like spring:

"The field all iron cast a gleaming brown" then without warning the poet merges into the dialectician who uses the poet for a mouthpiece:

"Saidst thou not that to all things I had right? And who withholds my power that right to use? Shall I receive by gifts what of my own, When and where likes me best, I can command?

Less perhaps than any other work of Milton's can Paradise Regained stand the test to which modern criticism is more and more prone to subject the literature of the past. When we cast aside conventions and ask the simple human question, "Does this