most scrupulous in this respect;
and towards the inevitable change, which Milton completed and perfected
from Camoens and Tasso, Virgil took a great step in making Jupiter
professedly almighty. But compare Virgil's "Tantaene animis celestibus
irae?" with Milton's "Evil, be thou my good!" It is the difference
between an accidental device and essential substance. That, in order to
symbolize in epic form--that is to say, in _narrative_ form--the
dualistic sense of destiny and the destined, and both immediately
--Milton had to dissolve his human action completely in a
supernatural action, is the sign not merely of a development, but of a
re-creation, of epic art.

It has been said that Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_. The offence
which the remark has caused is due, no doubt, to injudicious use of the
word "hero." It is surely the simple fact that if _Paradise Lost_ exists
for any one figure, that is Satan; just as the _Iliad_ exists for
Achilles, and the _Odyssey_ for Odysseus. It is in the figure of Satan
that the imperishable significance of _Paradise Lost_ is centred; his
vast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound antinomy of modern
consciousness. And if this is what he is in significance it is worth
noting what he is in technique. He is the blending of the poem's human
plane with its supernatural plane. The epic hero has always represented
humanity by being superhuman; in Satan he has grown into the
supernatural. He does not thereby cease to symbolize human existence;
but he is thereby able to symbolize simultaneously the sense of its
irreconcilable condition, of the universal destiny that contains it. Out
of Satan's colossal figure, the single urgency of inspiration, which
this dualistic consciousness of existence makes, radiates through all
the regions of Milton's vast and rigorous imagination. "Milton," says
Landor, "even Milton rankt with living men!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: 'And all round the ships echoed terribly to the shouting
Achaians.']

[Footnote 7:
'When in a dusty whirlwind thou didst lie,
Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry.'--OGILBY.
(The version leaves out megas megalosti.)
]

[Footnote 8: 'Mother, since thou didst bear me to be so short-lived,
Olympian Zeus that thunders from on high should especially have bestowed
honour on me.']

[Footnote 9: 'Honour my son for me, for the swiftest doom of all is
his.']

[Footnote 10: "For everyone his own day is appointed; for all men the