Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/134

ton's method is at the opposite pole to Shakespeare's. He gives the general type, where Shakespeare gives the concrete individual. He describes the emotion excited, where Shakespeare gives the specific details which excite the emotion. The danger of the Shakespearean method is that it may suggest grotesque and trivial associations and injure the unity and symmetry of the whole. Milton's method involves the danger of becoming vague and insipid. The general is apt to be commonplace. Milton, as Professor Raleigh points out with great clearness, is saved from this weakness by his 'concrete epic realities.' Keats's Hyperion, he says, fails by want of Milton's 'exact physical system.' The world in which the history takes place is so shadowy and indefinite that there is 'nothing for the poem to hang on by.' Milton is anthropomorphic and materialistic, and in his posthumous treatise explicitly defends the corresponding principles. Even in heaven events happen in the time and place of human chronology and geography—though at vast distances. The angels and devils, therefore, though vast and shadowy, have still tangible clothing of flesh and blood. They do not become properly abstractions, however nearly they approach that consummation.