These
Drafts Also Contain A Chorus, Such As Salandra Has Placed In His Drama,
And A Great Number Of Mutes, Who Do Not Figure In The English Epic, But
Who Reappear In The 'Adamo Caduto' And All Similar Works.
Even Satan is
here designated as Lucifer, in accordance with the Italian Lucifero; and
at the end of one of Milton's drafts we read 'at last appears Mercy,
comforts him, promises the Messiah, etc.,' which is exactly what
Salandra's Misericordia (Mercy) does in the same place.
Milton no doubt kept on hand many loose passages of poetry, both
original and borrowed, ready to be worked up into larger pieces; all
poets are smothered in odd scraps of verse and lore which they 'fit in'
as occasion requires; and it is therefore quite possible that some
fragments now included in 'Paradise Lost' may have been complete before
the 'Adamo Caduto' was printed. I am referring, more especially, to
Satan's address to the sun, which Philips says was written before the
commencement of the epic.
Admitting Philips to be correct, I still question whether this
invocation was composed before Milton's visit to Naples; and if it was,
the poet may well have intended it for some other of the multitudinous
works which these drafts show him to have been revolving in his mind, or
for none of them in particular.
De Quincey rightly says that Addison gave the initial bias in favour of
'Paradise Lost' to the English national mind, which has thenceforward
shrunk, as Addison himself did, from a dispassionate contemplation of
its defects; the idea being, I presume, that a 'divine poem' in a manner
disarmed rational criticism. And, strange to say, even the few faults
which earlier scholars did venture to point out in Milton's poem will be
found in that of Salandra. There is the same superabundance of allegory;
the same confusion of spirit and matter among the supernatural persons;
the same lengthy astronomical treatise; the same personification of Sin
and Death; the same medley of Christian and pagan mythology; the same
tedious historico-theological disquisition at the end of both poems.
For the rest, it is to be hoped that we have outgrown our fastidiousness
on some of these points. Theological fervour has abated, and in a work
of the pure imagination, as 'Paradise Lost' is now - is it
not? - considered to be, there is nothing incongruous or offensive in an
amiable commingling of Semitic and Hellenic deities after the approved
Italian recipe; nor do a few long words about geography or science
disquiet us any more. Milton was not writing for an uncivilized mob, and
his occasional displays of erudition will represent to a cultured person
only those breathing spaces so refreshing in all epic poetry. That
Milton's language is saturated with Latinisms and Italianisms is
perfectly true. His English may not have been good enough for his
contemporaries. But it is quite good enough for us. That 'grand manner'
which Matthew Arnold claimed for Milton, that sustained pitch of kingly
elaboration and fullness, is not wholly an affair of high moral tone; it
results in part from the humbler ministrations of words happily
chosen - from a felicitous alloy of Mediterranean grace and Saxon mettle.
For, whether consciously or not, we cannot but be influenced by the
colour-effects of mere words, that arouse in us definite but
indefinable moods of mind.
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