elty in itself;
and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these
high matters. But what he could do he did. The matter of the speech
he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard
before: but after this manner he has not heard it. In passing through
Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the
consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.

Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the
difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as
actors in his drama. But the escape could only be partial. It is true
that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but
greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a
verbose and argumentative Deity. Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno
may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but
we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept
him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all,
cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree. "Let thy
words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of
words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him. Milton's God
suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which
destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural
being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different
way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances
and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.

Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in
part unperceived, inherent in the subject of _Paradise Lost_. One
more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry is a human art and its
subject is human life. In the story Milton set himself to tell there
are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in
isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends,
without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or
memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of
death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and
health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest
beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves? The answer is twofold. It
is partly that they do fail to provide that material. The _Paradise
Lost_ has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less
variet