A religious poem if it is to be deeply felt must embody a
living faith. The great poems of antiquity are precious to us in
proportion to our acceptance, now, as fact, of what they tell us about
heaven and earth. There are only a few persons at present who perceive
that in substance the account which was given in the seventeenth century
of the relation between man and God is immortal and worthy of epic
treatment. A thousand years hence a much better estimate of Milton will
be possible than that which can be formed to-day. We attribute to him
mechanic construction in dead material because it is dead to ourselves.
Even Mr. Ruskin who was far too great not to recognise in part at least
Milton's claims, says that "Milton's account of the most important event
in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is
evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly
founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's
account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. The
rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of
invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single fact being
for an instant conceived as tenable by any living faith" (Sesame and
Lilies, section iii.
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