ce of Milton whose sins in
these matters have always been exaggerated by his ecclesiastical and
political opponents. But the effect, good or bad, which a great poem
produces on opinion is a mere by-product: its essential business is
nothing of that sort but the production in the minds of competent
readers of the pleasure proper to a great work of the imagination. And
this is the criterion by which the _Paradise Lost_, like every other
work of the kind, must primarily be judged.

The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed result of an intention
formed in Milton's strangely ripe and resolute youth. Before he was
thirty he spoke openly to his friends of writing a great poem which
was, as he shortly afterwards had no hesitation in telling the public,
to be of the sort that the world does not willingly let die. At first
the subject was to have been the Arthurian legend which {149} poets of
all ages have found so fruitful. But that was soon abandoned,
apparently for the reason that a little examination of the authorities
convinced the poet that it was not historically true. This fact has a
literary as well as a biographical importance. Great artist as Milton
was, he seems to have confused truth of art with truth of fact. He
preferred a Biblical subject because it was his belief that every
statement in the Bible was literally true. This belief, except from
the emotional fervour it inspired in him, was a positive disadvantage
to him as a poet. It circumscribed his freedom of invention, it
compelled him to argue that the action of his drama as he found it was
already reasonable and probable instead of letting his imagination work
upon it and make it so; it made him aim too often at producing belief
instead of delight in his hearers. This, of course, had obvious
drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard the first chapters of
Genesis as a literal prose record of events which actually happened.
For a hundred and fifty years many people read the _Paradise Lost_ and
supposed themselves to be enjoying the poem when what they were really
enjoying was simply the pleasure of reading their own beliefs expressed
in magnificent verse. In the same way many {150} religious people
imagine that they enjoy early Italian art when they in fact enjoy
nothing but its religious sentiment. But neither art nor poetry can
live permanently on these extraneous supports. So when less interest
came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were fe