But we may not begin by
objecting that it is impossible that such a world should exist. If,
in any age, the power of imagination is enfeebled, the reader becomes
more unable to make this effort; he ceases to co-operate with the
poet. Much of the criticism on _Paradise Lost_ which we meet with
resolves itself into a refusal on the part of the critic, to make
that initial abondonment to the conditions which the poet demands;
a determination to insist that his heaven, peopled with deities,
dominations, principalities, and powers, shall have the same material
laws which govern our planetary system. It is not, as we often hear it
said, that the critical faculty is unduly developed in the nineteenth
century. It is that the imaginative faculty fails us; and when that
is the case, criticism is powerless--it has no fundamental assumption
upon which its judgments can proceed,
It is the triumph of Milton's skill to have made his ideal world
actual, if not to every English mind's eye, yet to a larger number of
minds than have ever been reached by any other poetry in our language.
Popular (in the common use of the word) Milton has not been, and
cannot be.
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