theoryofliteratu00inwell

256 Theory of Literature
harmonies," which are all that is left to Milton. 17 The "content"
has to be disregarded 3 the form is disengageable.
Such judgments should not, we think, be accepted as satisfac-
tory versions of "formalism." They take an atomistic view of the
work of art, estimating the relative poeticality of its materials
instead of the poeticality of the total work, which may magnetize
to its purpose much which, out of this context, would be abstract
discourse. Both Dante and Milton wrote treatises as well as
poems, and did not confound the two. Milton, a theological in-
dependent, wrote a dissertation De Doctrina Christiana at about
the time during which he was composing Paradise Lost. How-
ever one defines the nature of his poem (epic, Christian epic, or
philosophical-and-epic poem) and in spite of its announced de-
sign to "justify the ways of God," it had a different purpose
from the treatise: its nature is established by the literary tradi-
tions it invokes and by its relation to Milton's own earlier poetry.
Milton's theology in Paradise Lost is orthodox Protestant
or susceptible of such a reading. But the reader's failure to share
that theology doesn't denude the poem. As long ago as Blake,
indeed, it was suggested that Satan is the hero of the poem, by
Milton's unconscious "intention"; and there was, with Byron
and Shelley, a romantic Paradise Lost which coupled Satan
with Prometheus and which dwelt sympathetically, as Collins
had earlier begun to do, upon the "primitivism" of Milton's
Eden. 18 There is certainly also a "humanist" reading, as Saurat
has shown. The sweep, the vistas of the poem, its scenery
somber or vaguely grand—are not disposed of by dissent to its
theology or fact.
That the style of Paradise Lost leaves it a great poem even
though its doctrine should be scrapped is highly dubious. Such a
view reduces to the absurd the separation of a work into its
"form" and its "meaning": "form" here becomes "style," and
"meaning" becomes "ideology." The separation, indeed, does
not take care of the total work: it leaves out all structures "above"
metrics and diction; and "meaning," according to its account, is
what L. A. Reid calls "secondary subject-matter" (subject mat-
ter still outside the work of art). It leaves out the plot or nar-
rative, the characters (or, more properly, the "characteriza-
tion"), and the "world," the interlocking of plot, atmosphere,
—