did not fail in
it. They see a poem of two thousand lines whose single subject is the
attempt of a devil who knows himself doomed to defeat to persuade a
divine Person who knows Himself assured of victory to be false to the
law of His being. And into this barren theme they see art and nature,
ethics and politics, luxury and splendour and empire, cunningly
interwoven and

"Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."

They see a style stripped of almost all ornament especially in the
speeches of our Lord: the poet deliberately walking always on the very
edge of the gulf of prose and yet always as one perfectly assured that
into that gulf his feet can never fall. Here and there, as when we
come upon such lines as

"I never liked thy talk, thy offers less,"

we are nervous as we watch: but the poet passes on his way serenely
unconscious of our fears, and in the very next speech is on the heights
of poetry with the great description {209} of Athens. Once only,
perhaps, in the reply to Satan after the storm--

"Me worse than wet thou find'st not,"

we feel that the cunningly maintained balance has failed and that the
limit has been passed which divides the severe from the grotesque.

The truth is that, if the narrowness of its subject and the austerity
of its style be admitted, _Paradise Regained_ is a poetic achievement
as great as it is surprising. It cannot be _Paradise Lost_, of course,
and that is the fault for which it has not been forgiven. And its fine
things are even less evident, much less evident, at a first reading
than those of _Paradise Lost_. But Milton has left nothing more
Miltonic. He did greater things but nothing in which he stands so
entirely alone. There is no poem in English, perhaps none in any
language of the world, which exhibits to the same degree the inherent
power of style itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any of its
visible accessories. There are in it, of course, some passages of
characteristic splendour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision of
Rome, and others; but a large part of the poem is as bare as the
mountains and, to the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and
forbidding. Its grave Dorian music, scarcely {210} heard by the
sensual ear, is played by the mind to the spirit and by the spirit to
the mind. Ever present as its art is, it is an art infinitely removed
from that to which all the world at once responds and surrenders. It
is not at first seen