Now to the English
reader of the seventeenth century--and the same holds good to this
day--there were only two cycles of persons and events sufficiently
known beforehand to admit of being assumed by a poet. He must go
either to the Bible, or to the annals of England. Thus far Milton's
choice of subject was limited by the consideration of the public for
whom he wrote.
Secondly, he was still farther restricted by a condition which the
nature of his own intelligence imposed upon himself. It was necessary
for Milton that the events and personages, which were to arouse and
detain his interests, should be real events and personages. The mere
play of fancy with the pretty aspects of things could not satisfy him;
he wanted to feel beneath him a substantial world of reality. He
had not the dramatist's imagination which can body forth fictitious
characters with such life-like reality that it can, and does itself,
believe in their existence. Macaulay has truly said that Milton's
genius is lyrical, not dramatic. His lyre will only echo real emotion,
and his imagination is only stirred by real circumstances. In his
youth he had been within the fascination of the romances of chivalry,
as well in their original form, as in the reproductions of Ariosto
and Spenser.
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