Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 19 



that the faculties are suppressed by a cross wind, or a cloudy sky, the 

 day is given up without resistance ; for who can contend with the course 

 of nature ? 



"From such prepossessions Milton seems not to have been free. There 

 prevailed in his time an opinion that the world was in its decay, and that 

 we have had the misfortune to be produced in the decrepitude of Nature. 

 It was suspected that the whole creation languished, that neither trees 

 nor animals had the height or bulk of their predecessors, and that every- 

 thing was daily sinking by gradual diminution. Milton appears to sus- 

 pect that souls partake of the general degeneracy, and is not without some 

 fear that his book is written in an age too late for heroic poesy. 



"Another opinion wanders about the world, and sometimes finds re- 

 ception among wise men ; an opinion that restrains the operations of the 

 mind to particular regions, and supposes that a luckless mortal may be 

 born in a degree of latitude too high or too low for wisdom or wit. From 

 this fancy, wild as it is, he had not cleared his head, when he feared lest 

 the climate of his country might be too cold for flights of imagination. 



"Into a mind already occupied by such fancies, another not more rea- 

 sonable might easily find its way. He that could fear lest his genius had 

 fallen upon too old a world, or too chill a climate, might consistently 

 magnify to himself the influence of the seasons, and believe his faculties 

 to be vigorous only half the year. 



"His submission to the seasons was at least more reasonable than his 

 dread of decaying Nature, or a frigid zone ; for general causes must oper- 

 ate uniformly in a general abatement of mental power ; if less could be 

 performed by the writer, less likewise would content the judges of his 

 work. Among this lagging race of frosty grovellers he might still have 

 risen into eminence by producing something which they sliotild not tvill- 

 ingly let die. However inferior to the heroes that were born in better 

 ages, he might still be great among his contemporaries, with the hope of 

 growing every day greater in the dwindle of posterity. He might still be 

 the giant of the pigmies, the one-eyed monarch of the blind.'" 



The passage, though in a sense exceptional, is indicative. It 

 shows Johnson's aim, if not his average achievement. What is 

 extraordinary about it is its chiaroscuro, its evident effort to sug- 

 gest something more than can be defined and yet to do so without 

 imperilling the common sense and sanity proper to prose. Such 

 echoes as these had not been wakened in English for many a day. 

 "These bursts of light and involutions of darkness ; these tran- 

 sient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention" — 



^Johnson. Lives of the Poets, Milton. 



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