But the world he created has taken possession of the public
mind. Huxley complains that the false cosmogony, which will not
yield, to the conclusions of scientific research, is derived from the
seventh, book of _Paradise Lost_, rather than, from Genesis. This
success Milton owes partly to his selection of his subject, partly to
his skill in handling it. In his handling, he presents his spiritual
existences with just so much relief as to endow them with life and
personality, and not with, that visual distinctness which would at
once reveal their spectral immateriality, and so give a shock to the
illusion. We might almost say of his personages that they are shapes,
"if shape it might be called, that shape had none." By his art of
suggestion by association, he does all he can to aid us to realise
his agents, and at the moment when distinctness would disturb, he
withdraws the object into a mist, and so disguises the incongruities
which he could not avoid. The tact that avoids difficulties inherent
in the nature of things, is an art which gets the least appreciation
either in life or in literature.
But if we would have some measure of the skill which in _Paradise
Lost_ has made impossible beings possible to the imagination, we may
find it in contrasting them with the incarnated abstraction and spirit
voices, which we encounter at every turn in Shelley, creatures who
leave behind them no more distinct impression than that we have been
in a dream peopled with ghosts.
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