THE SPECTATOR.

No. 315.] Saturday, March 1, 1711-12.

Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindic nodus
Inciderit
Hor. Ars Poet. v. 191.
Never presume to make a god appear
But for a business worthy of a god.-Roscommon.

man) with great energy of expression, and in a clearer and stronger light than I ever met with in any other writer. As these points are dry in themselves to the generality of readers, the concise and clear manner in which he has treated them is very much to be admired, as is HORACE advises a poet to consider thorough-likewise that particular art which he has made ly the nature and force of his genius. Milton use of in the interspersing of all those graces seems to have known perfectly well wherein of poetry which the subject was capable of rehis strength lay, and has therefore chosen a ceiving.

subject entirely conformable to those talents The survey of the whole creation, and of of which he was master. As his gehius was every thing that is transacted in it, is a proswonderfully turned to the sublime, his subject pect worthy of Omniscience, and as much is the noblest that could have entered into the above that in which Virgil has drawn his Juthoughts of man. Every thing that is truly piter, as the Christian idea of the Supreme Begreat and astonishing has a place in it. The ing is more rational and sublime than that whole system of the intellectual world; the of the Heathens. The particular objects on chaos, and the creation: heaven, earth, and which he is described to have cast his eye, hell; enter into the constitution of his poem. are represented in the most beautiful and liveHaving in the first and second books re-ly manner: presented the infernal world with all its horrors, the thread of his fable naturally leads him into the opposite regions of bliss and glory.

Now had th' Almighty Father from above
(From the pure empyrean where he sits
High thron'd above all height) bent down his eye,
His own works and their works at once to view.
About him all the sanctities of heaven

Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv'd.
Beatitude past utterance. On his right
The radiant image of his glory sat,
His only Son. On earth he first beheld.
Our two first parents, yet the only two
Of mankind, in the happy garden plac'd
Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love.
Uninterrupted joy, unrivall'd love,

In blissful solitude. He then survey'd
Hell and the gulf between, and Satan there
Coasting the wall of heav'n on this side night,
In the dun air sublime; and ready now
To stoop with wearied wings and willing feet
On the bare outside of this world, that seem'd
Firm land imbosom'd without firmament;
Uncertain which, in ocean or in air.
Him God beholding from his prospect high,
Wherein past, present, future he beholds,
Thus to his only Son foreseeing spake.

If Milton's majesty forsakes him any where, it is in those parts of his poem where the divine persons are introduced as speakers. One may, I think, observe, that the author proceeds with a kind of fear and trembling, whilst he describes the sentiments of the Almighty. He dares not give his imagination its full play, but chooses to confine himself to such thoughts as are drawn from the books of the most orthodox divines, and to such expressions as may be met with in scripture. The beauties, therefore, which we are to look for in these speeches, are not of a poetical nature, nor so proper to fill the mind with sentiments of grandeur, as with thoughts of devotion. The passions which they are designed to raise, are a divine love and religious fear. The particular beauty of Satan's approach to the confines of the creathe speeches in the third book, consists in that tion is finely imaged in the beginning of the shortness and perspicuity of style, in which speech which immediately follows. The efthe poet has couched the greatest mysteries of fects of this speech in the blessed spirits, and, Christianity, and drawn together, in a regular in the divine person to whom it was addressed, scheme, the whole dispensation of Providence cannot but fill the mind of the reader with a with respect to man. He has represented all secret pleasure and complacency: the abstruse doctrines of predestination, freewill and grace, as also the great points of incarnation and redemption, (which naturally grow up in a poem that treats of the fall of VOL. II.

Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance filľa
All heav'n, and in the blessed spirits elect
Sense of new joy ineffable diffus'd.
Beyond compare the Son of God was seen
1

Most glorious; in him all his Father shone,
Substantially express'd; and in his face
Divine compassion visibly appear'd,

Love without end, and without measure grace.

they were the gods who thus transformed them. It is this kind of machinery which fills the poems both of Homer and Virgil with such circumstances as are wonderful but not im

I need not point out the beauty of that possible, and so frequently produce in the reacircumstance, wherein the whole host of angels der the most pleasing passion that can rise in are represented as standing mute; nor show the mind of man, which is admiration. If how proper the occasion was to produce such there be any instance in the Eneid liable to a silence in heaven. The close of this divine exception upon this account, it is in the begincolloquy, with the hymn of angels that follows ning of the third book, where Eneas is repreupon it, are so wonderfully beautiful and po-sented as tearing up the myrtle that dropped etical, that I should not forbear inserting the blood. To qualify this wonderful circumstance, whole passage, if the bounds of my paper would give me leave:

No sooner had th' Almighty ceas'd, but all
The multitude of angels with a shout
(Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blest voices) utt'ring joy, heav'n rung
With jubilee, and loud Hosannas fill'd
Th' eternal regions, &c. &c.-

Polydorus tells a story from the root of the myrtle, that the barbarous inhabitants of the country having pierced him with spears and arrows, the wood which was left in his body took root in his wounds, and gave birth to that bleeding tree. This circumstance seems to have the marvellous without the probable because it is represented as proceeding from Satan's walk upon the outside of the uni- natural causes, without the interposition of verse, which at a distance appeared to him of any god, or other supernatural power capable a globular form, but upon his nearer approach of producing it. The spears and arrows grow looked like an unbounded plain, is natural and of themselves without so much as the modern noble; as his roaming upon the frontiers of help of enchantment. If we look into the ficthe creation, between that mass of matter tion of Milton's fable, though we find it full of which was wrought into a world, and that surprising incidents, they are generally suited shapeless unformed heap of materials which to our notions of the things and persons destill lay in chaos and confusion, strikes the scribed, and tempered with a due measure of imagination with something astonishingly great probability. I must only make an exception to and wild. I have before spoken of the Limbo the Limbo of vanity, with his episode of Sin and of Vanity, which the poet places upon this outermost surface of the universe, and shall here explain myself more at large on that, and other parts of the poem, which are of the same shadowy nature.

Aristotle observes, that the fable of an epic poem should abound in circumstances that are both credible and astonishing; or, as the French critics choose to phrase it, the fable should be filled with the probable and the marvellous. This rule is as fine and just as any in Aristotle's whole Art of Poetry.

Death, and some of the imaginary persons in his chaos. These passages are astonishing, but not credible; the reader cannot so far impose upon himself as to see a possibility in them; theyare the description of dreams and shadows not of things or persons. I know that many critics look upon the stories of Circe, Polypheme, the Sirens, nay the whole Odyssey and Iliad, to be allegories; but allowing this to be true, they are fables, which, considering the opinions of mankind that prevailed in the age of the poet, might possibly have been according If the fable is only probable, it differs nothing to the letter. The persons are such as might from a true history; if it is only marvellous, have acted what is ascribed to them, as the it is no better than a romance. The great circumstances in which they are represented secret, therefore, of heroic poetry is to relate might possibly have been truths and realities. such circumstances as may produce in the rea- This appearance of probability is so absolutely der at the same time both belief and astonish-requisite in the greater kinds of poetry, that ment. This is brought to pass in a well chosen Aristotle observes the ancient tragic writers fable, by the account of such things as have made use of the names of such great men as really happened, or at least of such things as had actually lived in the world, though the have happened according to the received opi- tragedy proceeded upon adventures they were nions of mankind. Milton's fable is a master- never engaged in, on purpose to make the subpiece of this nature; as the war in heaven, the ject more credible. In a word, besides the condition of the fallen angels, the state of in-hidden meaning of au epic allegory, the plain nocence, the temptation of the serpent, and literal sense ought to appear probable. The the fall of man, though they are very astonish-story should be such as an ordinary reader ing in themselves, are not only credible, but may acquiesce in, whatever natural, moral, or actual points of faith. political truth may be discovered in it by men of greater penetration.

The next method of reconciling miracles with credibility, is by a happy invention of the Satan, after having long wandered upon the poet; as in particular, when he introduces surface or outermost wall of the universe, disagents of a superior nature, who are capable covers at last a wide gap in it, which led into of effecting what is wonderful, and what is not the creation, and is described as the opening to be met with in the ordinary course of things. through which the angels pass to and fro into Ulysses's ship being turned into a rock, and the lower world, upon their errands to manEneas's fleet into a shoal of water nymphs, kind. His sitting upon the brink of this pasthough they are very surprising accidents, are sage, and taking a survey of the whole face of nevertheless probable when we are told, that nature, that appeared to him new and fresh