Had he, in the choice of
subject, remembered the principle of the Aristotelean Poetic (which
he otherwise highly prized), that men in action are the poet's proper
theme, he would have raised his imaginative fabric on a more permanent
foundation; upon the appetites, passions, and emotions of men, their
vices and virtues, their aims and ambitions, which are a far more
constant quantity than any theological system. This perhaps was what
Goethe meant, when he pronounced the subject of _Paradise Lost_, to be
"abominable, with a fair outside, but rotten inwardly."
Whatever fortune may be in store for _Paradise Lost_ in the time to
come, Milton's choice of subject was, at the time he wrote, the only
one which offered him the guarantees of reality, authenticity, and
divine truth, which he required. We need not therefore search the
annals of literature to find the poem which may have given the first
suggestion of the fall of man as a subject. This, however, has been
done by curious antiquaries, and a list of more than two dozen authors
has been made, from one or other of whom Milton may have taken either
the general idea or particular hints for single incidents.
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