d balance are
so minutely exact that it just stands, and no more. But that it should
stand at all is the marvel, seeing that it is spanned on frail arches
over the abyss of the impossible, the unnatural, and the grotesque. Let
it be granted that, in its main features, the system of _Paradise Lost_
does correspond with what was and is the religious creed of not a few
people. There is many a religious creed, strongly held, which is
convincing enough until the imagination begins to work it out in detail,
to try to realise it, in a clear light, as a connected whole. Then either
the imagination or the creed must give way. The remarkable thing about
Milton's achievement is that _Paradise Lost_ is both a creed and a
cosmical scheme of imagination, and that, except here and there, it is
impossible to point to parts of the poem and say, "Here he ceased to
believe," or "Here he gave up the effort to imagine." He both imagined
and believed throughout; he projected himself, like a sleep-walker, into
the mammoth caves of his antediluvian dreams, and lived among his own
radiant and shadowy creations. We need not, therefore, be surprised to
find that, in the first place, his daughters ran wild, and neither liked
nor understood their father; and that, in the second place, for the
rendering of his thought he invented a system of preternaturally majestic
diction, perfectly fitted for the utterance of his own conceptions, but,
when divorced from those conceptions, so monstrously artificial in
effect, that his imitators and followers, hoisting themselves on the
Miltonic stilts, brought the very name of "poetic diction" into a
contempt that has lasted for more than a century, and is not yet wholly
extinct.

CHAPTER IV
PARADISE LOST: THE ACTORS. THE LATER POEMS

The difficulties which Milton felt and conquered in the making of his
epic masterpiece had their origin, for the most part, in the intractable
and barren nature of his chosen theme. The dangers that beset him, and
sometimes tripped his feet, arose, on the other hand, from his own
declared intention in the handling of that theme:--

That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men.

The pursuit of this argumentative end led him through strange passes. A
less courageous or a more sensitive man might well have hesitated at the
entrance. But Milton hesitated at nothing. The ultimate mysteries of
human exist