wer readers for _Paradise
Lost_. But the readers who were lost were not those that matter. For
it is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that the fact
that the story of _Paradise Lost_ was once believed and now is so no
longer is fatal to the interest of the poem. That is not so for the
right reader: or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's fault and
not that of his subject. The _Aeneid_ loses no more by our disbelief
in the historical reality of Aeneas or Dido than _Othello_ loses by our
ignorance whether such a person ever existed. The difficulty, so far
as there is one, is not that many readers disbelieve the story of
Milton's poem: it is that he himself passionately believed it. If he
had been content with offering us his poem as an imaginative creation,
if he had not again and again insisted on its historical truth and
theological importance, no changes in the views of his readers, no
merely intellectual or historical criticism, could have touched him
more than they can Virgil. As a poet he is {151} perfectly
invulnerable by any such attacks: it is only so far as he deserted
poetry for the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of prose that he
fails and irritates us. All the poetry of _Paradise Lost_ is as true
to-day as when it was first written: it is only the science and logic
and philosophy, in a word the prose, which has proved liable to decay.
There is always that difference between the works of the imagination
and those of the intellect. A hundred theories about the Greek legends
of the Centaurs or the Amazons may establish themselves, have a vogue,
undergo criticism and finally be exploded as absurdities: that is the
common fate of intellectual products after they have done their work.
But the Centaurs of the Parthenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum are
immortally independent of all changes of opinion.

This is the first disadvantage of the subject chosen by Milton, that he
believed in it too much. The fact that he did so and thought its prose
truth all-important at once limited the freedom of his imagination and
diverted him from the single-minded pursuit of the proper end of
poetry. He was evidently quite unaware of this drawback and it has
been little, if at all, noticed by his critics. {152} On the other
hand, he was perfectly aware of what would appear to other people to be
the disadvantages involved in the choice of a subject so unlike those
of previous epics. He sp