and to exultation in this manifestation of the Almighty's triumph upon his enemies.

As thus interpreted Samson Agonistes fits closely into the scheme of Milton's major works. It is-in a different sense to be sure from Paradise Regained but hardly less significantly-a counterpart of Paradise Lost. Lines 1059-62 of the Ninth Book of the latter poem show that Milton was conscious of an analogy between the sin of Adam and that of Samson. The last phase of the Hebrew champion's career provides a concrete illustration of the power of a free but erring will to face its sin, maintain itself in obedience, and be restored to grace: The drama, like the epics, is an assertion of eternal Providence and a justification of the ways of God to man.

Artistically the poem needs no paraphernalia of critical or biographical interpretation to insure its effect. Its monumental dignity, its consummate expression of the anguish of the human spirit, its extraordinary subtlety of metrical and rhetorical effect-these in themselves are sufficient to make it for many readers the most impressive of Milton's works. Yet it gains from association with our picture of Milton himself in the last days of his heroic life, blind and alone amid the alien society of the Restoration, confronted with the apparent failure of the cause for which he had battled, but seeking in religious faith the assurance that God

will not long defer

To vindicate the glory of his name

Against all competition, nor will long

Endure it, doubtful whether God be Lord
Or Dagon.

The analogy between his own position and that of his protagonist must have been vividly present to his mind, and into the representation of Samson he has undoubtedly put more of himself than into any other of his imaginative creations. The sense of power and dignity, the "plain heroic magnitude of mind," the will toward championship -are Milton. So, too, is the consciousness of deprivation in the loss of sight ("The sun to me is dark and silent as the moon"), and the sense of physical helplessness (“In power of others, never in my own"). In many passages the personal note is far too clear to be mistaken. Thus, in the great lament of Samson, beginning with line 608, the phrases, "Unjust tribunals under change of times," "Their carcasses to dogs and fowls a prey," are certainly echoes of the Restoration, with its brutal trials of men like Sir Harry Vane and the indignities to which the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton were subjected. The parallel and not less wretched fate of poverty and disease is Milton's own. He goes so far as almost to specify the rheumatic ills from which he suffered “painful diseases and deformed"-with the bitter reflection that the afflictions, justly the fruit of dissipation, may come also to those who, like himself, have lived in temperance. We must beware, however, of making the identification of Samson and Milton too complete. Unlike his hero Milton himself was conscious of no fault, and even where Samson's expressions of suffering are appropriate enough in their application to his own case, we must remember that all is heightened and idealized for purposes of art. The tragic gloom and flat despair of Samson, the wretchedness of pain, the distaste of life are the embodiments of an aesthetic mood which owes as much to literature as it does

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to personal experience. Milton doubtless realized in himself the baleful force of such emotions, but he had against them the sure guidance of religious faith and the consoling power of poetry. The very expression of them, under the shield of dramatic objectivity, must have been a kind of deliverance from sorrow, a means of securing for himself the serenity of soul which, in spite of all, he evidently possessed throughout his later days.

CHAPTER VI

MILTON'S STYLE AND VERSIFICATION

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO "PARADISE LOST"

ILTON, of all English writers, is the greatest in

MIL

novator in the matter of expression. It is not merely that his style is individual as that of Shelley or Wordsworth or Browning is individual. It is, in effect, a new and unique medium forged out of various materials and marked by bold departures from the English literary usage of his own or any time. The most interesting features of Miltonic expression are those that are most clearly the result of the individual temper and the peculiar mental habit of its author; those, also, which serve most definitely to suggest his predilections and affinities. We may note first that his style, despite his employment of a verse form identical with the Elizabethan dramatists, stands at an opposite pole from that of Shakespeare and his colleagues. Milton's language, unlike theirs, has little relish of the speech of men. Where their anomalies are colloquial and idiomatic, his are the product of a preference for the unusual and recondite in vocabulary and construction, which leads him to archaism on the one hand, and to the substitution of foreign idiom, particularly Latin, for native on the other. Sometimes not even classical or earlier English example can be alleged. Milton is simply carving for himself, remoulding and creating with

fine disregard for precedent. In general, Milton's style may be described as almost uniquely literary and intellectual. Freighted with learned and bookish phrase, elaborate in construction, and alien in vocabulary, it achieves a uniform effect of dignity and aloofness and becomes a perfect medium for the restrained and elevated yet intensely passionate personality of its author.

When we come to consider specific characteristics of Miltonic English, we are confronted with a large and difficult task. The nearest approach to systematic treatment is that of David Masson in the third volume of his edition of the Poetical Works. The detail of this is too elaborate for presentation here, and much of it is simply a statement of peculiarities of sixteenth and seventeenth century usage in general. Professor Havens1 has given a simpler classification of the characteristics of Miltonic style which were thought in the eighteenth century to distinguish it from other poetry and which the poets of the period felt obliged to reproduce when they wrote blank verse. Though not pretending to completeness or scientific accuracy, this list is a very serviceable statement of the obvious differentia of Milton's poetic speech in his blank verse poems. It includes, besides the vaguer items of dignity, stateliness, the "organ tone," the following concrete characteristics :2

I. Inversion of the natural order of words and phrases;

2 I have slightly modified some of Havens's statements and have retained in each case only one or two of his many illustrations.