תמונות בעמוד
PDF
ePub

Their fancies like our bushy-points appear,
The poets tag them, we for fashion wear.
I too transported by the mode offend,

And while I meant to praise thee must commend.
Thy verse created like thy theme sublime,

In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.

ANDREW MARVEL.

THE measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some, both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note, have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight: which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned Ancients, both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem, from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming,

UPON THE

PARADISE LOST.

BY

MR. ADDISON.

Cedite Romani Scriptores, Cedite Graii.

PROPERT:

THERE is nothing in nature more irksome than general discourses, especially when they turn chiefly upon words. For this reason I shall wave the discussion of that point which was started some years since, whether Milton's Paradise Lost may be called an Heroic Poem? Those who will not give it that title, may call it, (if they please) a Divine Poem. It will be sufficient to its perfection, if it has in it all the beauties of the highest kind of poetry; and as for those who allege it is not an heroic poem, they advance no more to the diminution of it, than if they should say Adam is not Æneas, nor Eve Helen.

I shall therefore examine it by the rules of epic poetry, and see whether it falls short of the Iliad or Æneid, in the beauties which are essential to that kind of writing. The first thing to be considered in an epic poem is the Fable, which is perfect or imperfect, according as the action which it relates is more or less so. This action should have three qualifications in it. First it should be but one action. Secondly, it should be an entire action; and Thirdly, it should

be a great action. To consider the action of the Iliad,

Eneid, and Paradise Lost, in these three several lights. Homer, to preserve the unity of his action, hastens into the midst of things, as Horace has observed: had he gone up to Leda's egg, or begun much later, even at the rape of Helen, or the investing of Troy, it is manifest that the story of the poem would have been a series of several actions. He therefore opens his poem with the discord of his princes, and artfully interweaves, in the several succeeding parts of it, an account of every thing material which re

lates to them, and had passed before this fatal dissention, iAfter the same manner, Æneas makes his first appearance n the Tyrrhene seas, and within sight of Italy, because the action proposed to be celebrated was that of his settling himself in Latium. But because it was necessary for the reader to know what had happened to him in the taking of Troy, and in the preceding parts of his voyage, Virgil makes his hero relate it by way of episode in the second and third books of the neid: the contents of both which books come before those of the first book in the thred of the story, though for preserving of this unity of action, they follow it in the disposition of the poem. Milton, in imitation of these two great poets, opens his Paradise lost with an infernal council plotting the fall of Man, which is the action he proposed to celebrate; and as for those great actions, the battle of the Angels, and the creation of the world, (which preceded in point of time, and which in my opinion, would have entirely destroyed the unity of his pri cipal action, had he related them in the same order that they happened) he cast them into the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, by way of episode to this noble poem.

Aristotle himself allows, that Homer has nothing to boast of as to the unity of his fable, though at the same time that great critic and philosopher endeavours to palliate this imperfection in the Greek poet, by imputing it in some measure to the very nature of an epic poem. Some have been of opinion, that the neid also labours in this particular, and has episodes which may be looked upon as excrescencies rather than as parts of the action. On the contrary, the poem, which we have now under cur consideration, hath no other episodes than such as naturally arise from the subject, and yet is filled with such a multitude of astonishing incidents, that it gives us at the same time a pleasure of the greatest variety, and of the greatest simplicity; uniform in its nature, though diversified in the

execution.

I must observe also, that, as Virgil in the poem which was designed to celebrate the original of the Roman em pire, has described the birth of its great rival, the Carthaginian commonwealth: Milton, with the like art in his

poem on the fall of Man, has related the fall of those An gels who are his professed enemies. Beside the many other beauties in such an episode, its running parallel with the great action of the poem, hinders it from breaking the unity so much as another episode would have done, that had not so great an affinity with the principal subject. In short this is the same kind of beauty which the critics admire in the Spanish Fryar, or the Double Discovery, where the two different plots look like counterparts and copies of

one another.

The second qualification required in the action of an epic poem is, that it should be an entire action: an action is entire when it is complete in all its parts; or as Aristotle describes it, when it consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Nothing should go before it, be intermixed with it, or follow after it, that is not related to it. As on the contrary, no single step should be omitted in that just and regular progress which it must be supposed to take from its original to its consummation. Thus we see the anger of Achilles in its birth, its continuance, and effects; and Æneas's settlement in Italy, carried on through all the oppositions in his way to it both by sea and land. The action in Milton excels (I think) both the former in this particular; we see it contrived in Hell, executed upon Earth, and punished by Heaven. The parts of it are told in the most distinct manner, and grow out of one another in the most natural order.

The third qualification of an epic poem is its greatness. The anger of Achilles was of such consequence, that it embroiled the kings of Greece, destroyed the heroes of Asia, and engaged all the Gods in factions. Æneas's settlement in Italy produced the Cæsars, and gave birth to the Ronian empire. Milton s subject was still greater than either of the former; it does not determine the fate of single pelscns or nations, but of a whole species. The united powers of Hell are joined together for the destruction of mankind, which they effe&ed in part, and would have completed, had not Omnipotence itself interposed. The principal actors are Man in his greatest periection, and Woman in her highest beauty. Their enemies are the fallen Angels: the

« הקודםהמשך »