inty of issue or variety of temper
and experience which are the stuff of drama. He is hampered by having
constantly to assert the true free will and responsibility of Satan for
his rebellion and of Adam for his disobedience, even to the extent of
putting argumentative soliloquies confessing it into their own mouths.
So far he succeeds: both are felt to be free in their fatal choice.
But the war in heaven can arouse no interest because its issue is
obviously foregone, and much of the action of the rebel angels
necessarily conflicts with the frequent statements that they can do
nothing except as permitted by their Conqueror. At one moment they
know their powerlessness, at another they hope for revenge and victory.
These are grave difficulties which deprive large parts of the poem of
that illusion of probability or truth without which poetry cannot do
its proper work. A further difficulty, from which ancient poets were
free, arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the
Christian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity
of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling,
fighting gods and goddesses. A being who is Incomprehensible as well
as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for
human readers. The gods in the _Iliad_ shock us because they are too
like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more
often in danger of fatiguing us by His utter remoteness from our
experience, by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so often as we could
wish, in clouds and darkness, but in a world of theological mysteries
which necessarily lose more in sublimity than they gain in clearness by
being perpetually discussed and explained. Dante's poem is at least as
full as Milton's of obscure theological doctrines and attempts at their
explanation; but, either by virtue of the plan of the _Divina Commedia_
or by some finer instinct of reserve and reverence in the poet, we
never find ourselves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising our
critical faculties, whether we will or no, on the very words of God
Himself. If we reject an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it is
on Virgil or Statius, Beatrice or Thomas Aquinas, that we sit in
judgment. The Divine Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its
presence is from the first canto of the poem to the last, is yet felt
always as from behind a {158} curtain which can never be raised for the
s