Not
content with being the poet of men, and with describing human passions
and ordinary events, he aspired to present the destiny of the whole
race of mankind, to tell the story of creation, and to reveal the
councils of heaven and hell. And he would raise this structure upon no
unstable base, but upon the sure foundation of the written word. It
would have been a thing incredible to Milton that the hold of the
Jewish Scriptures over the imagination of English men and women could
ever be weakened. This process, however, has already commenced. The
demonology of the poem has already, with educated readers, passed from
the region of fact into that of fiction. Not so universally, but with
a large number of readers, the angelology can be no more than what the
critics call machinery. And it requires a violent effort from any
of our day to accommodate their conceptions to the anthropomorphic
theology of _Paradise Lost_. Were the sapping process to continue at
the same rate for two more centuries, the possibility of epic illusion
would be lost to the whole scheme and economy of the poem. Milton
has taken a scheme of life for life itself.
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