Taste here receives a shock, because the
incongruity, which before was latent, is forced upon our attention. We
are threatened with being transported out of the conventional world
of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and Paradise, to which we had well adapted
ourselves, into the real world in which we know that such beings could
not breathe and move.
For the world of _Paradise Lost_ is an ideal, conventional world,
quite as much as the world of the _Arabian Nights_, or the world
of the chivalrous romance, or that of the pastoral novel. Not only
dramatic, but all, poetry is founded on illusion. We must, though it
be but for the moment, suppose it true. We must be transported out of
the actual world into that world in which the given scene is laid. It
is chiefly the business of the poet to effect this transportation, but
the reader (or hearer) must aid. "Willst du Dichter ganz verstehen,
musst in Dichter's Lande gehen." If the reader's imagination is not
active enough to assist the poet, he must at least not resist him.
When we are once inside the poet's heaven, our critical faculty may
justly require that what takes place there shall be consistent with
itself, with the laws of that fantastic world.
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