pretative vein the Fall; Salvation; and the declaration of a purpose. The first of these is enlarged by the author, in the Truth presentation, thus:—

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden.

The reference to redemption, which is the second point, is couched interpretatively thus:

till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.

Then, finally, instead of saying 'I now intend to treat this theme,' he borrows the old classic idea of inspiration through a specific genius or deity, identifying the influence. he means by its work in the seership of Moses; and this influence he invokes to indite his strains:

Sing, heavenly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of Chaos.

To a Brahmanic or Buddhist reader, no matter how well versed in English speech, unless he chanced to be expert in Christian theology, this opening passage would be unintelligible. Even our native college youths and maidens, themselves well-languaged, and well-instructed in the lore of the catechism, often find the diction of this poem intolerable, and sometimes conclude, after a trial or two, that they have not the brains to read it. The reason is not merely that they lack a certain spiritual or philosophic maturity, -for the literal meanings of Para

dise Lost, as of all else of Milton's poetry, are throughout simple, but that they have not yet learned to kindle at the first note of lofty feeling. Unawakened minds must always perhaps regard that master-work as a mass of trite and exploded notions told in tedious circumlocution. On the other hand, there are always book-worms and other lovers of literature for its own sake who prefer neat and finical paraphrasing to straightforward diction. There is possibly, also, another group of readers, with tastes so etherialized as to insist that literal and commonplace things come to view not as upon the solid plane of fact where they belong, but by mirage, solely in the upper air of the spiritual. Neither of these is the class of true readers for whom Milton, and Shakespeare, and Sophocles, and Dante, and Tennyson, and the other masters wrote.

We cannot account for the style and language of the Paradise Lost as merely periphrastic, for the sake of elegance, or as ingeniously varied to avoid triteness, but only as inspired by a generic sentiment of the sublime. This feeling induced in advance by the transcendental proportions of the theme, by the vast conceptions that from the first had gathered about the plan, forced the author to lay aside his literal or matter-of-fact vocabulary and manner, and admit only such expressions as would befit the loftiness of his purpose.' Thus, at the opening of the second. paragraph, wishing to ask rhetorically the reason for Adam's and Eve's disloyalty, he goes to considerable interpretative length in expressing it :—

It may be noted that Paradise Regained lacks the lofty indirectness of the earlier poem. We shall remember also that the author's inspiration in attempting it was very different.

Say first, what cause
Moved our grand parents, in that happy state,
Favor'd of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the world besides?
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?

Any such circumlocution would be intolerable in prose; yet a more curt or condensed mode of utterance, under these circumstances, would fail of the controlling sentiment in the author's mind. Poetry, whether metrical or not, is sometimes palpably a sort of expanded prose, and amounts to retelling in spiritual terms something already known or assumed to have been already told in the fact way. In primitive and rudimentary literature, as for instance Homer, there is often a double statement, one literal, and one interpretative. We see examples of this perhaps most frequently in the Hebrew psalms:

When Israel went forth out of Egypt,

(Literal)

The house of Jacob from a people of strange language, (InJudah became his sanctuary,

Israel his dominion.

[terp.)

(In

O come, let us sing unto the Lord, (Literal) Let us make a joyful noise to the Rock of our salvation. [terp.) It will thus be found that the supposed parallelisms of the Hebrew Scriptures are often not strictly parallel, or intended to be merely repetitions of single notions, but are rather attempts to express undeveloped residues of inner spiritual meaning.

The literature of mature civilizations is generally too intense to permit a literal statement and an interpretative repetition of the same idea; a single presentation is made to do duty for both clauses. In such a case it is naturally

the fitter that survives; the principle, which is greater than the fact, is put for the principle and the fact together. This presentation will, of course, be either of the second. or the third kind. We need but to turn, for illustration, to the opening paragraph already quoted (p. xi) of The Holy Grail. It is interesting to note how completely literal or prose" meanings are evaded, or expressed by implication only. The first part of the passage is essentially equivalent, with the literal and interpretative meanings unmerged, to this:

66

From wars, or noiseful arms, and from tournaments or tilts, and acts of real prowess done therein, Sir Percival, whom Arthur and his knights believed to have achieved the ideal of purity to which they were sworn, and whom hence they called The Pure, had entered an abbey, and thus passed into the silent life of prayer, praise, fasting, and alms-soliciting.

The last line of the paragraph, as will have been noted, is not interpretative, but ends the whole, though strongly, in the prosaic way. Camelot, it must be remembered, is not to be taken as merely geographical, but associational of great towers, and marvelous riches and beauty. The sentence, if completed as begun, would have closed doubtless somewhat as thus:

and leaving for the cowl

The helmet in an abbey far away

From Camelot,-that flower of Arthur's towns,
Built high and strong and wonderful with magic,
There yielded, and not much afterwards, his life.

But there is such a thing as proportion; and interpretative diction consumes more time than the prosaic. Such an ending would have made this opening paragraph too long.

In literary values, below the interpretative presentations, are to be recognized Conceits, Marinism, and Phrasing.

When a figure is not spiritually true, but used sensationally, the result is generally a Conceit, or Marinism. In either case the matter is in extreme subjection to the manner. Figures are properly used, as has been shown, for interpretative ends; that is, as aids to bring to consciousness inherent type-qualities of Beauty and of the True. Conceits are easily distinguished from interpretation in that they occasion a larger experience from the ingenuity and far-fetched nature of the idea than from the interpretative proceeds of the expression as a whole. Tennyson, because of his imaginative saneness and intensity, seldom admits them to his lines. Perhaps his worst offences, at least in The Princess, were committed when he wrote (VI. 349-351).

now and then an echo started up

And shuddering fled from room to room, and died
Of fright in far apartments;

and when, wishing to hit off the fondness of women—as he apparently believed-for ambitious phrases, he allowed himself (II. 355-357) to say

jewels five words long,

That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever.

Of course these deliverances really interpret nothing, either in kind or in degree. The strained and perversely intellectual quality of the idea draws away the mind very