[Footnote 1: Give place to him, Writers of Rome and Greece. This
application to Milton of a line from the last elegy (25th) in the second
book of Propertius is not only an example of Addison's felicity in
choice of motto for a paper, but was so bold and well-timed that it must
have given a wholesome shock to the minds of many of the _Spectators_
readers. Addison was not before Steele in appreciation of Milton and
diffusion of a true sense of his genius. Milton was the subject of the
first piece of poetical criticism in the _Tatler_; where, in his sixth
number, Steele, having said that all Milton's thoughts are wonderfully
just and natural, dwelt on the passage in which Adam tells his thoughts
upon first falling asleep, soon after his creation. This passage he
contrasts with the same apprehension of Annihilation ascribed to Eve
in a much lower sense by Dryden in his operatic version of _Paradise
Lost_. In _Tatlers_ and _Spectators_ Steele and Addison had been equal
contributors to the diffusion of a sense of Milton's genius. In Addison
it had been strong, even when, at Oxford, in April, 1694, a young man
trained in the taste of the day, he omitted Shakespeare from a rhymed
Account of the chief English Poets, but of Milton said:
_Whate'er his pen describes I more than see,
Whilst evry verse, array'd in majesty,
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws,
And seems above the critics nicer laws_.
Eighteen years older than he was when he wrote that, Addison now
prepares by a series of Saturday Essays,--the Saturday Paper which
reached many subscribers only in time for Sunday reading, being always
set apart in the _Spectator_ for moral or religious topics, to show
that, judged also by Aristotle and the "critics nicer laws," Milton was
even technically a greater epic poet than either Homer or Virgil. This
nobody had conceded. Dryden, the best critic of the outgoing generation,
had said in the Dedication of the Translations of _Juvenal_ and
_Persius_, published in 1692,
"As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much Justice, his
Subject, is not that of an Heroick Poem, properly so call'd: His
Design is the Losing of our Happiness; his Event is not prosperous,
like that of all other _Epique_ Works" (Dryden's French spelling of
the word Epic is suggestive. For this new critical Mode was one of the
fashions that had been imported from Paris); "His Heavenly Machines
are many, and his Human Persons are but two. But I will not take Mr.
_Rymer's_ work out of his Hands: He has promised the World a Critique
on that Author; wherein, tho he will not allow his Poem for Heroick,
I hope he will grant us, that his Thoughts are elevated, his Words
sounding, and that no Man has so happily copy'd the manner of Homer;
or so copiously translated his Grecisms and the Latin Elegancies of
Virgil. Tis true he runs into a Flat of Thought, sometimes for a
Hundred Lines together, but tis when he is got into a Track of
Scripture ... Neither will I justify _Milton_ for his Blank Verse,
tho I may excuse him, by the Example of _Hanabal Caro_ and other
_Italians_ who have used it: For whatever Causes he alledges for the
abolishing of Rhime (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his
own particular Reason is plainly this, that Rhime was not his Talent;
he had neither the Ease of doing it, nor the Graces of it."
So Dryden, who appreciated Milton better than most of his critical
neighbours, wrote of him in 1692. The promise of Rymer to discuss Milton
was made in 1678, when, on the last page of his little book, _The
Tragedies of the Last Age consider'd and examined by the Practice of the
Ancients and by the Common Sense of all Ages, in a letter to Fleetwold
Shepheard, Esq_. (father of two ladies who contribute an occasional
letter to the _Spectator_), he said: "With the remaining Tragedies I
shall also send you some reflections on that _Paradise Lost_ of
Milton's, which some are pleased to call a Poem, and assert Rhime
against the slender Sophistry wherewith he attaques it." But two years
after the appearance of Dryden's _Juvenal_ and _Persius_ Rymer prefixed
to his translation of Réné Rapin's _Reflections on Aristotle's Poesie_
some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets. Herein he speaks under the
head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of
heroic character; or Spenser, who "wanted a true Idea, and lost himself
by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no
wise proper for our language;" of Sir William Davenant, who, in
_Gondibert_, "has some strokes of an extraordinary judgment," but "is
for unbeaten tracks and new ways of thinking;" "his heroes are
foreigners;" of Cowley, in whose _Davideis_ "David is the least part of
the Poem," and there is want of the "one illustrious and perfect action
which properly is the subject of an Epick Poem": all failing through
ignorance or negligence of the Fundamental Rules or Laws of Aristotle.
But he contemptuously passes over Milton without mention. Réné Rapin,
that great French oracle of whom Dryden said, in the Preface to his own
conversion of _Paradise Lost_ into an opera, that he was alone
sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the Art of
Writing, Réné Rapin in the work translated and introduced by Rymer,
worshipped in Aristotle the one God of all orthodox critics. Of his Laws
he said,
There is no arriving at Perfection but by these Rules, and they
certainly go astray that take a different course.... And if a Poem
made by these Rules fails of success, the fault lies not in the Art,
but in the Artist; all who have writ of this Art, have followed no
other Idea but that of Aristotle.
Again as to Style,
to say the truth, what is good on this subject is all taken from
Aristotle, who is the only source whence good sense is to be drawn,
when one goes about to write.
This was the critical temper Addison resolved to meet on its own ground
and do battle with for the honour of that greatest of all Epic Poets to
whom he fearlessly said that all the Greeks and Latins must give place.
In so doing he might suggest here and there cautiously, and without
bringing upon himself the discredit of much heresy,--indeed, without
being much of a heretic,--that even the Divine Aristotle sometimes fell
short of perfection. The conventional critics who believed they kept the
gates of Fame would neither understand nor credit him. Nine years after
these papers appeared, Charles Gildon, who passed for a critic of
considerable mark, edited with copious annotation as _the Laws of
Poetry_ (1721), the Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry, Roscommon's
Essay on Translated Verse, and Lord Lansdowne on Unnatural Flights in
Poetry, and in the course of comment Gildon said that
Mr. Addison in the _Spectators_, in his criticisms upon Milton, seems
to have mistaken the matter, in endeavouring to bring that poem to the
rules of the epopoeia, which cannot be done ... It is not an Heroic
Poem, but a Divine one, and indeed of a new species. It is plain that
the proposition of all the heroic poems of the ancients mentions some
one person as the subject of their poem... But Milton begins his poem
of things, and not of men.
The Gildon are all gone; and when, in the next generation after theirs,
national life began, in many parts of Europe, strongly to assert itself
in literature against the pedantry of the French critical lawgivers, in
Germany Milton's name was inscribed on the foremost standard of the men
who represented the new spirit of the age. Gottsched, who dealt French
critical law from Leipzig, by passing sentence against Milton in his
Art of Poetry in 1737, raised in Bodmer an opponent who led the revolt
of all that was most vigorous in German thought, and put an end to
French supremacy. Bodmer, in a book published in 1740 _Vom Wunderbaren
in der Poesie_, justified and exalted Milton, and brought Addison to his
aid by appending to his own work a translation of these Milton papers
out of the _Spectator_. Gottsched replied; Bodmer retorted. Bodmer
translated Paradise Lost; and what was called the English or Milton
party (but was, in that form, really a German national party) were at
last left masters of the field. It was right that these papers of
Addison should be brought in as aids during the contest. Careful as he
was to conciliate opposing prejudices, he was yet first in the field,
and this motto to the first of his series of Milton papers, Yield place
to him, Writers of Greece and Rome, is as the first trumpet note of the
one herald on a field from which only a quick ear can yet distinguish
among stir of all that is near, the distant tramp of an advancing host.
[Footnote 2: [so irksom as]]
[Footnote 3: say]
[Footnote 4: Aristotle, _Poetics_, III. § I, after a full discussion of
Tragedy, begins by saying,
with respect to that species of Poetry which imitates by _Narration_
... it is obvious, that the Fable ought to be dramatically
constructed, like that of Tragedy, and that it should have for its
Subject one entire and perfect action, having a beginning, a middle,
and an end;
forming a complete whole, like an animal, and therein differing,
Aristotle says, from History, which treats not of one Action, but of one
Time, and of all the events, casually connected, which happened to one
person or to many during that time.]
[Footnote 5: _Poetics_, I. § 9.
Epic Poetry agrees so far with Tragic as it is an imitation of great
characters and actions.
Aristotle (from whose opinion, in this matter alone, his worshippers
departed, right though he was) ranked a perfect tragedy above a perfect
epic; for, he said,
all the parts of the Epic poem are to be found in Tragedy, not all
those of Tragedy in the Epic poem.]
[Footnote 6:
Nec reditum Diomedis ab interitu Meleagri,
Nec gemino bellum Trojanum orditur ab ovo,
Semper ad eventum festinat, et in medias res,
Non secus ac notas, auditorem rapit--