he _has a
right to_. And the Jewish Jehovah, after all, is no mean figure. He,
like Milton, was a God of War. He, like Milton, found Will--human
and divine Will--the central cosmic fact. He, like Milton, regarded
Good and Evil, not as universal principles, but as arbitrary
_commands_, issued by eternal personal antagonists! It is one of the
absurd mistakes into which our conceptual and categorical minds so
easily fall--this tendency to eliminate Milton's Theology as mere
Puritanical convention, dull and uninteresting. Milton's Theology
was the most _personal creation_ that any great poet has ever dared
to launch upon--more personal even than the Theology of Milton's
favourite Greek poet, Euripides.

Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of
"God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he
was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He
was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind--an
Individualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothing
in the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cut
Wills, contending against one another.

Milton is the least mystical, the least pantheistic, the least monistic,
of all writers. That magical sense of the brooding Over-Soul which
thrills us so in Goethe's poetry never touches his pages. The
Wordsworthian intimations of "something far more deeply
interfused" never crossed his sensibility; and, as far as he is
concerned, Plato might never have existed.

One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universe
is a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of which
rise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations,
Principalities, and Powers," and in the struggle between these, the
most arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers the
rest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss than
any, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrained
Caprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; and
Man out of the dust of the Earth. Thus it is brought about that what
this God _wills_ is "Good," and what his strongest and most
formidable antagonist wills is "Evil." Between Good and Evil there
is no eternal difference, except in the eternal difference between the
conquering Personality of Jehovah and the conquered Personality of
Lucifer. So, far from it being true that Milton is the dull transcriber
of mer