The Course of English Poetry – 4 95he has not seen God and heaven and man or the soul embodied
in humanity, at once divine and fallen, enslaved to suffering and
evil, striving for redemption, yearning for a forfeited bliss and
perfection. On this side there is no inner greatness in the poetic
interpretation of his materials. In other words, he has ended by
stumbling over the rock of offence that always awaits poetry
in which the intellectual element is too predominant, the fatal
danger of a failure of vision: he has tried to poetise the stock ideas
of his religion and not reached through sight to a living figure of
Truth and its great expressive thoughts or revelatory symbols.
This failure extends itself to all the elements of his later
work; it is definitive and he never, except in passages, recovered
from it. His language and rhythm remain unfalteringly great
to the end, but they are only a splendid robe and the body
they clothe is a nobly carved but lifeless image. His architec-
tural structure is always greatly and classically proportioned;
but structure has two elements or two methods, — there is the
schematic form that is thought out and there is the incarnating
organic body which grows from an inward artistic and poetic
vision. Milton’s structures are thought out; they have not been
seen, much less been lived out into their inevitable measures and
free lines of inspired perfection. The difference will become evi-
dent if we make a simple comparison with Homer and Dante or
even with the structural power, much less inspired and vital than
theirs, but always finely aesthetic and artistic, of Virgil. Poetry
may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having a strong in-
tellectual strain in it and of putting forward as its aim the play of
imaginative thought in the service of the poetical intelligence; but
that must be supported very strongly by the quickening emotion
or by the imaginative vision to which the idea opens. Milton’s
earlier work is suffused by his power of imaginative vision; the
opening books ofParadise Lostare upborne by the greatness
of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and
sound and by the greatness of its sight. But in the later books and
still more in theSamson Agonistesand theParadise Regained
this flame sinks; the thought becomes intellectually externalised,
the sight is obvious and on the surface. Milton writing poetry