The New Compass: A Critical Review
Justifying
A Reply to Ian
Robinson
John Baxter
In
his piece in the first issue of The New Compass,[1]
Blake,
says Robinson, shows us innocence from the perspective of experience. His point
is not simply that the two states are “contrasts” (Robinson’s term) or
“opposites” (Coleridge) or “contraries” (Blake himself), but that each can be
seen only with the help of the other. His further point is that Milton,
in spite of his commitment to a storyline leading from one state to the other,
knows this as well as Blake does. Paradise Lost, Robinson says, is
immediately lifted when Satan sees Adam and Eve (in Book 4): “This is
unmistakable in the poetry, which soars from the rather uninspired level of the
tranquil garden to something which it took the full power of a great poet to
create. Milton here solves the problem of the presentation of innocence in the
only possible way, by showing how it is viewed by experience, in this case by
the worst possible experience.” It’s an acute observation and also, surely, the
corollary of the fact that Satan is never more securely in Hell than when he is
in the presence of Adam and Eve—when experience sees itself from the
perspective of innocence.
Whether
or not this use of contrasts altogether rescues the poem from what Robinson
calls “the gross and deep flaw of the attempt at sequential narrative” is
another matter, but it does persuasively rescue Paradise Lost from the
famous criticisms leveled first by Blake and later by Shelley. Milton, Robinson
shows, is “certainly not of the Devil’s party with or without knowing it.” At
least not in this part of the poem. Robinson doesn’t take up the issue of
whether the characterization of Satan is consistent throughout the whole.
As
for Drummond, his position, by analogy with Blake’s, may fairly be said to
claim that Milton of is Adam’s party without altogether knowing it, or knowing
it only intermittently. Robinson doesn’t quite go the whole way in endorsing
Drummond’s claim that in showing what is supposedly Adam’s fall, Milton gives
us “the greatest love poetry in the language,” but his treatment of Drummond at
this point is extraordinarily generous. He agrees that Milton is “at his best
when he most needs to be, at the moment of the fall itself,” and then he quotes
the crucial lines (from which passage I excerpt only the conclusion):
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no, I
feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of
Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from
thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or
woe.[3] (IX.911-16)
Robinson
gives what might be called (following his own coinage) a Drummondist reading of
these lines, though it attempts, in the middle, to disarm the Drummondian
consequences: “Here Milton is at his most Shakespearean, with a wholeness of
language that is one mark of great poetry. And the power of the poetry is not
deceptive and not against Milton’s myth or his stated intention. This is what
marriage is in the world: they are indeed one flesh.”
Since
this marriage poetry is an expression of love, and since this expression is
embedded in the very instant of the Fall, there are some very pressing
questions as to how it could possibly not run against the grain of
Milton’s myth or his stated intention. Is it Milton’s intention to characterize
the act of disobedience as, simultaneously, an expression of the deepest kind
of love? Robinson’s intentions in suggesting as much themselves cry out for
explanation, the more particularly since he again joins Drummond in resisting
the standard sort of explanation:
“Milton’s own characterization of this ‘compliance bad’ is. .
.notoriously that Adam acted”
Against his better knowledge, not deceav’d
But fondly overcome with Femal charm.
(IX.988-99)
“How
can he have better knowledge,” Robinson shrewdly asks, “without
knowledge of good and evil? Adam’s fall, pace C.S. Lewis and pace
Milton himself, does not come to the reader as a Blakean clinging to the garden
of love, as all for love or the world well lost, or any such sentimentality....
Adam tells the exact truth when he bases his determination to stay with Eve on
‘the link of Nature’.” All this is well said, and I add only in further
confirmation that Milton himself also resists the Narrator’s foolishness about
“fondly overcome with Femal charm” when, in a more dispassionate mood and at
the behest of his printer to head up each book with a prose “Argument,” he
supplies the much more accurate observation that Adam’s frame of mind at the
crucial moment evinces “vehemence of love.”
Even
more generous is Robinson’s way of entering into the spirit of Drummond’s
commentary and strengthening the point by trying to imagine what Adam would
have sounded like, if he had tried to obey God (something many other
commentators postulate but never really imagine). The attempt, in Robinsonian
blank verse, has an impressively Miltonic ring to it, as it picks up and
amplifies the Narrator’s points and addresses Eve to divorce her. And having
written the poetry of reproof, Robinson also provides the appropriate
commentary: “No, it wouldn’t do. What sort of a man would he have been?”
The answer, for Robinson as for Drummond, is clearly that he would have been a
worse man, much worse. But if Adam, at this key moment, is shown to be the best
he could be, if he is shown as better than anything else he could imaginably
be, then he is decidedly not being shown as falling. Nor is this soaring
poetry, the most elevated in the poem, at all accurately described, as Robinson
attempts to do in his sub-title, as a fall into language. This is
language of a sort that a man might hope to rise to.
Having
waded in this far with Drummond—“Milton’s poetry triumphs over his masterfully
applied doctrine”—Robinson is in deeper than he thinks. He wants to rescue
Milton’s great theme: “The story of Adam and Eve, especially from Book IX
onwards, does vindicate eternal providence. From the fall, the marriage of Adam
and Eve is a true marriage as it could not be before,” he says at one point.
And later in the same paragraph, this: “In the adversity of our fallen state,
with our knowledge of good and evil, the poet shows us the possibility of a
reality of love, both of one another and of God, that was not called for in Eden.
With the fall comes the possibility of redemption: Milton does show that, and
what more has he undertaken to show?” But there is something like a sleight of
hand in this argument. Yes, Milton does show the possibility of redemption, and
yes, he does show Adam and Eve in a fallen state, but he also undertook to show
the Fall, to show—in a sequential narrative—the passage, the transition from
innocence to experience, and that he hasn’t done. Not if you concede the point,
as Robinson does, that there’s a flaw in the climax of the poem.
The
beginning of the same paragraph from which I’ve been quoting tries to justify
Milton through a sort of strategy of containment, but it doesn’t work. “The
failures of Paradise Lost, though big and drastic, are local.” How could
this be? A flaw in the climax and yet
merely local? It can’t be true, for just as a climax can’t be a climax without
being something more than local, so with any flaw therein. Robinson permits
himself this finesse, this sleight of hand, because he contrives to think that
at the crucial moment Adam has not really made a decision:
We are certainly shown Adam exercising free will. All the same, decision
is not quite the right word: he willingly follows his nature, and in that sense
does what he is fated to do. Had he remained obedient he would not have been
man at all but superhuman or more likely subhuman, however pleasing to the
speechifying epic God of Book III. Milton’s poem shows us what mankind is.
The
problem with this argument is that in diminishing the moment of decision, it
can’t help but diminish the exercise of free will and, along with that, the
momentousness and depth of Adam’s choice.
Adam’s
choice here might appear to be purely spontaneous, or it may be a product of that
intuitive reason that Raphael says (V.488-89) is most often the property of
angels but is not exclusively theirs. Adam does demonstrate such intuitive
understanding when he is able to name the animals without any prior experience
of them. But more than this is involved. Generous and perceptive though
Robinson’s treatment of Drummond is, it has to reach still further if it is to
rise to the full challenge of Drummond’s argument, for what that shows
persuasively is that behind Adam’s “decision” in Book IX is the full force of
the long dialogue between God and Adam in Book VIII, in which the latter comes
to a full and rational understanding about his nature and about the link of his
nature with Eve’s. The decision in Book IX is, emphatically, a complete decision,
a decision of the whole man—instinct (that is, nature) supported by reason. If
it were anything less than that, Milton would not be showing us what mankind
is.
It
is a curious, and significant, omission that Robinson’s reprise makes no
mention of Drummond’s discussion of Book VIII. Among other things, it would
help give the lie to a remark quoted from J.C.F. Littlewood: “What a Paradise
Lost we should have had if Milton had been a writer of Lawrence’s
powers.” Robinson says, rightly, that
this claim is “frankly absurd.” But one of the reasons it is absurd is that the
Milton of Book VIII clearly does have the powers (and more) of a D.H. Lawrence.
In the discussion that begins at line 316 and then runs for nearly two hundred
lines, Adam intuitively discovers the needs of the body, including its sexual
needs, the needs of human life on earth and of the earth, and then explores
with wonderful vigour and boldness the ways of bringing these needs to
consciousness. His needs rise into language, expressing as Drummond says
(echoing Lawrence) the holy ghost within; or as Milton’s God puts it (more
powerfully): “Expressing well the spirit within thee free, / My image”
(VIII.440-41). As Milton anticipates and supersedes Blake on the relation of
innocence and experience, so he anticipates and supersedes Lawrence on the
integrity and wholeness of body and mind.
Perhaps
the most profound change Milton makes to his narrative is to transfer the
perception “it is not good for the man to be alone” from God (as in Gen 2.18)
to Adam (as in VIII.355). The result is that Adam and Eve have a responsibility
to discover for themselves what is good for them, and it will turn out that the
pursuit of the good is a higher goal than mere obedience. One of the wonderful
things in Drummond’s discussion of the dialogue in Book VIII is the way it
shows how God, himself, approves of Adam’s initiative in the pursuit of that
goal, encourages his “presumption,” rewards his disobedience: “with these [the
animals] / Find pastime and bear rule” (VIII.374-75) says God, in the
imperative mood, “and seemed / So ordering” (376-77), and yet Adam is
congratulated for disobeying this order, for pushing ahead to discover his own
proper good. He disobeys one command in order to obey what seems to him a
higher imperative. There are risks, of course; he could get it wrong, though on
this occasion he happens not to. A plausible extension of Drummond’s argument
and of Robinson’s critique would seem to be that obedience and disobedience are
a set of “contrasts” or “contraries” every bit as necessary to the narrative as
are innocence and experience, and that they are built into pre-lapsarian Eden
as much as into the post-lapsarian world: they cannot be known, or understood,
separately.
It
is not part of Drummond’s argument to claim that having failed to depict the
Fall as a fall, Milton has therefore left Adam and Eve in a state of perpetual
innocence or of Rousseauistic nature. They are fallen humanity, limited, liable
to error, but they were that from the very beginning; insofar as they are
recognizably human at all they have to be. That’s why Eve struggles with
narcissism in Book IV, or they both struggle with her dream in Book V, or they
quarrel over a separation and a division of labour in Book IX. What they have
to determine, every time, is which impulses should be obeyed (and why) and what
instructions or commands need to be obeyed or disobeyed (and why). It may be
argued that the Prohibition is a command of a different order entirely (and of
course this is pretty much the standard view of the poem), but I doubt that can
be truly the case, not in the imaginative universe of Milton’s reconstructed
narrative. God may say he wants simple obedience, but since he has endowed his
creatures with reason and free will, it’s clear that he wants informed
obedience, and it’s further clear from what his indulgence to Adam in Book VIII
shows that he is not merely satisfied but even pleased with informed
disobedience.
So
in one sense the issue comes down to what counts as “informed,” or to use the
word that God himself prefers, what counts as “sufficient”? He has made
humanity, he says in Book III, “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall”
(III.99). Are they? Can his word be trusted here? The constituents of “sufficient”
are reason and free will, though it perhaps remains an open question whether
Adam and Eve are independently sufficient or only sufficient when together.
Satan clearly thinks it a great advantage to assail Eve in isolation, and there
are many who would fault her determination to be independent (another fall
before the fall). But a fundamental principle for Adam (and Milton and God) is
the fully engaged reason and will of the individual: “Go, for thy stay, not
free, absents thee more” (IX.372). And Eve, for her part, could, perhaps, have
obeyed the Prohibition simply because it was the Prohibition, but that too
would deny her freedom, and obedience without understanding would absent her
more, would have her offering to God (and Adam) an obedience less than fully
human.
Instead,
in her final meditation before eating the fruit (IX.745-79), she tries her best
to reason the matter through, to exercise her full humanity. The Serpent eats
and has not died; the Serpent eats and has been elevated into language. She is
wrong, of course, but that’s because Satan is a liar and a hypocrite; he has
not eaten, he did not learn to speak as a result of having eaten, and he does
not dodge death for the reasons he gives but because he is an immortal spirit.
But Eve has no way of knowing these things. Nor would Adam had he been there.
No one but God could have known—could know. When Satan gets past
the sentinel Uriel in Book III (Uriel, one of God’s top seven angels, his
“eyes”), he does so by hypocritically pretending to be a wide-eyed tourist
eager to pay an admiring visit to the new creation. Uriel, however, is not
faulted for not doing his job “For neither man nor angel can discern /
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone”
(III.682-84). If the Archangel Uriel cannot be faulted, then neither can Eve.
How could she be, without better knowledge, and what could that better
knowledge be but knowledge of good and evil? And even then, it’s clear that
some evil (like some good?) is discernible only by God. In these circumstances,
a more than superhuman power is needed to be “sufficient.”
Adam
and Eve, as presented to us at the climax of Paradise Lost, exercise the
best of the powers and gifts with which they are endowed—powers of reason, of
love, and of reason and love combined—and if these aren’t sufficient, that’s
not because they were free to fall but because they were already fallen: they
already inhabit a world in which innocence can know itself only through
experience (including, ultimately, experience of the divine and the satanic).
As for the unimaginable superhuman beings living in an unimaginable paradise,
who can say whether such gifts and powers would be sufficient (though there is
reason to doubt even that), but for the wonderfully imagined world Milton does
create—inside Eden and heading away from it—they do show the range and reach of
humanity. I will conclude by saying that I do agree with Ian Robinson on a
fundamental principle of criticism.
We may as English speakers allow
Milton to show us the constitutive myth of the culture without ourselves
believing it in anything like the way he expects. But I don’t quite know what
it would be to disbelieve Milton. Would we then be able to make any sense at
all? I will also say that I do not believe there is any alternative to Milton.
Utilitarianism and even less noble creeds, expressed or implicit, have largely
replaced Christianity, but where are their myths? None has got such a hold on
the language and the culture. I will go as far as to say that actually to
accept Milton is a great advantage to the English critic.
Yes,
well said, we need Milton, but probably not in anything quite like the way
Robinson expects either. And justifying Milton requires that we first figure
out whose Milton we mean to justify. For the time being, I’ll stick with
Drummond’s.
[1] “Milton’s
Justification of the Ways of God: or, the Fall into Language, An
Anti-Drummondist Reprise,” The New Compass 1, (June 2003).
[2] An
Anti-Miltonist Reprise, The Compass,
2-5 (1977-79). Drummond’s Milton articles are included in the collection, In
Defence of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton, and Others (Edgeways Books/
Brynmill Press, forthcoming, 2004).
[3] This quotation, like the next one, is taken directly
from Robinson’s article. All other quotations from Paradise Lost are
from Merritt Y. Hughes, ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose
(Odyssey Press, 1957).
Baxter, John. “Justifying
Milton? A Reply to Ian Robinson.” The
New Compass: A Critical Review 2 (December 2003) <http://
http://www.thenewcompass.ca/dec2003/baxter.html>