Tragic Effect in Samson Agonistes

TRAGIC EFFECT IN SAMSON AGONISTES IA.S.P.~oodhouse The point of view from which I propose to look afresh at Samson Agonistes' seems perfectly simple and even obvious, and yet, so far as I know, it has never been tried. Misled by Milton's prefatory emphasis on his Greek models, an emphasis entirely justified if properly understood, critics have assumed that the poet intended not only to follow them in structure and convention but to reproduce their spirit and effect, and that hence the only possible criterion for judging Samson Agonistes is Greek tragedy. Opinions on his success have differed. Jebb (to take a famous example) vigorously defends Milton against Joimson's charge that Samson Agonistes has a beginning and end but no middle, that nothing occurs to precipitate the catastrophe. But he goes on to condemn the drama as not truly tragic, as not Hellenic at all in spirit and effect, but thoroughly Hebraic. It does not, like Greek tragedy, pit the hero against superior powers before which he goes down to inevitable defeat, yet demonstrates his heroism even in his defeat. On the contrary, Samson is an instrument of the Supreme Power, and the only possible conclusion is that "All is best." Nor, in the most vigorous and effective defence against Jebb, does W. R. Parker question the assumption that Greek tragedy furnishes the sole and sufficient criterion. But it is precisely this assumption that I would question. In Paradise Lost Milton follows his classical models every whit as closely as in Samson Agonistes; yet no one supposes that he is trying to reproduce the spirit and effect of Homer, or even of Virgil. His purpose is to adapt the classical epic form to a Christian content and outlook, and to achieve thereby a new but still genuinely epic effect. And I would ask whether mutatis mutandis the same thing may not be true of Samson Agonistes. The only way to find out is to re-examine the drama from this point of view, that is, with two questions in mind: What 206 A. S. P. WOODHOUSE is the effect actually achieved? Aud is it one that can be legitimately described as tragic? n To attempt an answer, however tentative, to these questions we must establish a proper understanding of the theme and action, and on the way thereto may comment on the insufficiency of Jebb's. He recognizes that "Samson's will is the agent of the catastrophe" and that everything which "helps to determine his will and define his purpose" leads on to it. But he proceeds: "The force which is to produce the catastrophe is the inward force of Samson's own despair, not an external necessity pressing upon him." On the contrary (as I have heretofore argued, and D. C. Allen has further demonstrated) it is not Samson's despair that produces the catastrophe, but his gradual rising out of his initial state of feeling, in which indeed the last heroic act would have been quite impossible. Again, it is true that Samson voluntarily precipitates the catastrophe (for Milton never surrenders his robust belief in man's free will within God's providential scheme, and could not possibly achieve the effect at which he aims if he did so here). But if there is "no external necessity," there is still an overruling power: there is God who controls the outcome: and this fact, paradoxically, Jebb later insists upon in order to explain Milton's failure to achieve the Greek tragic effect. In his reading of the poem Jebb altogether misses the interplay of these two forces, Samson's will and God's, because while he oversimplifies the conception of God as Providence, he iguores the intense religious experience undergone by Samson as he comes to a realization that God's "ear is ever open; and his eye / Gracious to readmit the suppliant" (1172-3). When Jebb insists on the Hebraism of Samson Agonistes, he does not ask himself how much of this adheres inevitably to the legend with which Milton is working, or whether the religion which permeates the poem is not in fact Christian, and whether it is not the Christianity, far...