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"And in our own Milton, Samson Agonistes makes as good, indeed a better bull; for he not only makes the mute speak, but speak loud: 'The deeds themselves, though mute, spoke loud the doer. And in Paradise Lost we have, to speak in fashionable language, two famous bulls. Talking of Satan, Milton says, 'God and his Son except, Created thing nought valued he nor shunn'd.
He felt himself in the situation of his Samson Agonistes, whom he so pathetically describes His foes' derision, captive, poor, and blind. Even LOCKE complains of his "discontinued way of writing," and "writing by incoherent parcels," from the avocations of a busy and unsettled life, which undoubtedly produced a deficiency of method in the disposition of the materials of his great work.
The professor of slang could degrade the conduct of the soldiers on board the Birkenhead; he could make the choruses from Samson Agonistes seem like the Cockney puerilities of a comic news-sheet.
The love of the beautiful, wielding a keen intellect, needs furthermore rich material to mold, and only out of the poet's individual resources can this be drawn. To make a high artist, you must have very much of a man. Behind "Paradise Lost" and "Samson Agonistes" is a big Miltonic man.
Of late, if I have felt moved by anything it has been by the grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself. A young lady sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and M.'s, I now and then read W-'s poems to them.
His three great poems, in the order of their value, are, of course, "Paradise Lost," "Samson Agonistes," and "Paradise Regained." Whoever knows anything of Milton knows these three and knows they are Scriptural from first to last in phrase, in allusion, and, in part at least, in idea. There is not time for extended illustration.
The Samson Agonistes, were his life passed like that of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce of it only some bits of written paper, the Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the Philistine mill; this is always a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature.
Setting aside such faithful transcripts from the antique as the Samson Agonistes, we might consent to view Goethe as that one amongst the moderns who had made the closest approximation to the Greek stage. Proximus, we might say, with Quintilian, but with him we must add," sed lango intervallo; "and if in the second rank, yet nearer to the third than to the first.
"This was one of the occasions," to quote from a distinguished critic of Toombs, "when the almost extinct volcano glowed again with its wonted fires when the ivy-mantled keep of the crumbling castle resumed its pristine defiance with deep-toned culverin and ponderous mace; when, amid the colossal fragments of the tottering temple, men recognized the unsubdued spirit of Samson Agonistes."
All the great tragedies are assertions of the joy of living, in the deepest sense of the phrase in the sense in which Samson Agonistes or Handel's Samson are such assertions. Tannhäuser suffers defeat and is glorious, like Samson in his overthrow.
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