rts
and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have
started with that advantage. A dangerous advantage because, as we have
seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to
go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an
advantage. Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting
element in the old poets had been greatly overdone. The most
interesting parts of the _Iliad_ for us to-day are not battles, but
such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene
between Priam and Achilles. Where the fighting still moves us, as in
the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is
mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest
altogether above its own. The miscellaneous details of weapons and
wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally
tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates
them. They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155}
from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.

So far Milton had some justification for preferring his own subject to
those of Homer and Virgil. But, so far as we can judge, he was
entirely unconscious of its disadvantages: as well of those which it
shares with the _Iliad_ and _Aeneid_ as of those peculiar to itself.
Of the former, the most conspicuous is that inevitably involved in the
introduction of divine persons into the action. Everybody feels that
Homer's gods constantly spoil the interest and probability of his
story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity. One never understands
why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action.
Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the
whole ineffective. Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational:
they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even
Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background. Their
interventions only make the struggle seem unfair or unreal, and we are
glad to be rid of them.

Milton is still more deeply involved in the same difficulty. All his
personages except two are superhuman. It is his great disadvantage as
compared with Dante that the {156} main lines of his story are all
scriptural and therefore outside the influence of his invention, that
his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless beings, and therefore such
as can provide little of the uncerta