These were constitutional elements of that
aloofness from men which characterised all his utterance. These
disposing causes became inexorable fate, when, by the turn of the
political wheel of fortune, he found himself alone amid the mindless
dissipation and reckless materialism of the Restoration. He felt
himself then at war with human society as constituted around him, and
was thus driven to withdraw himself within a poetic world of his own
creation.
In this antagonism of the poet to his age much was lost; much energy
was consumed in what was mere friction. The artist is then most
powerful when he finds himself in accord with the age he lives in. The
plenitude of art is only reached when it marches with the sentiments
which possess a community. The defiant attitude easily slides into
paradox, and the mind falls in love with its own wilfulness. The
exceptional emergence of Milton's three poems, _Paradise Lost,
Regained_, and _Samson_, deeply colours their context. The greatest
achievements of art--in their kinds have been the capital specimens of
a large crop; as the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are the picked lines out of
many rhapsodies, and Shakespeare the king of an army of contemporary
dramatists.
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