was taking the
best means of directing public attention to _Paradise Lost_. But he
would scarcely have tried to do the same for _Samson_. He had wished,
perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed
to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed.
But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had
pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself. He would feel no
need there to take lessons from Milton. Nor is he to be blamed. He
and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but
there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton. They
wrote for the stage. He avowedly did not. They wrote in the spirit of
the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with
a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less
intellectual amusement. He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for
the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for
men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a
great work when they saw it. Besides, his contemporary dramatists
followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or
France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama
is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion. It could take its
place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national
religious festival performed on a holy day. It is like them in the
solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the
issues on which human life hangs. It is like them also in technical
points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242}
spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any
moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in _Comus_, of the Greek
_stichomuthia_, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the
principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort.

There are, indeed, some fundamental differences. They are important
enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that
Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that
Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a
"sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a
superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the
method adopted by Milton in _Samson_. Samson is throughout a free man;
his misfortunes a