XVI. Adam and Eve
Dr. Bull . . . wore a coat covered with heraldic animals in red and gold, and on his crest a man rampant.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Man Who Was Thursday.
‘Adam,’ wrote Professor Raleigh, ‘from the depth of his inexperience is lavishly sententious.’ When I first read these words they voiced a discontent with Milton’s picture of our first parents which I had felt for many years. But I have lately come to see that I disliked it because I expected something which Milton never intended to give and which, if he had given it, would have gratified a somewhat commonplace taste in me and would have been hardly consistent with the story he had to tell. I had come to the poem associating innocence with childishness. I had also an evolutionary background which led me to think of early men, and therefore a fortiori of the first men, as savages. The beauty I expected in Adam and Eve was that of the primitive, the unsophisticated, the naif. I had hoped to be shown their inarticulate delight in a new world which they were spelling out letter by letter, to hear them prattle. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted an Adam and Eve whom I could patronize; and when Milton made it clear that I was not to be allowed to do anything of the sort, I was repelled.
These expectations of mine were due to my refusal to ‘suspend my disbelief’, to take seriously, at least till I had finished the poem, the assumptions on which it is based. Raleigh’s reference to Adam’s ‘inexperience’ is misleading. The whole point about Adam and Eve is that, as they would never, but for sin, have been old, so they were never young, never immature or undeveloped. They were created full-grown and perfect. Mr. Binyon understands the right approach much better than Raleigh, when he makes his dying Adam say to his sons
These hands in Paradise have gathered flowers,
These limbs which ye have seen so wasted down
In feebleness, so utterly brought low,
They grew not into stature like your limbs;
I wailed not into this great world, a child,
Helpless and speechless, understanding naught,
But from God’s rapture, perfect and full-grown
I suddenly awoke out of the dark.
(Death of Adam.)
Adam was, from the first, a man in knowledge as well as in stature. He alone of all men ‘has been in Eden, in the garden of God: he has walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire’. He was endowed, says Athanasius, with ‘a vision of God so far-reaching that he could contemplate the eternity of the Divine Essence and the cosmic operations of His Word’. He was ‘a heavenly being’, according to St. Ambrose, who breathed the aether, and was accustomed to converse with God ‘face to face’. ‘His mental powers’, says St. Augustine, ‘surpassed those of the most brilliant philosopher as much as the speed of a bird surpasses that of a tortoise.’ If such a being had existed—and we must assume that he did before we can read the poem—then Professor Raleigh and, still more, myself, on being presented to him would have had a rude shock; it is we who would have been the stammering boys, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, red in the face, and hoping that our clownishness would be excused by our ignorance. Dante strikes the right note:
And Beatrice said, ‘Within yon light
The first of souls whom ever the First Cause
Did make, with love beholds the God who made him.’
Even as a leaf that in the passing wind
Bows its frail head and, when the wind is passed,
Of its own springy nature rises up,
So did I bow my head (stupendous awe
Was on me) while she spoke. But, strong desire
To speak to him making me bold again,
I soon began, ‘O thou, the only fruit
That came forth ripe and perfect.’
(Paradiso, XXVI, 83.)
Milton himself gives us a glimpse of our relations to Adam as they would have been if Adam had never fallen. He would still have been alive in Paradise, and to that ‘capital seat’ all generations ‘from all the ends of the Earth’ would have come periodically to do their homage (XI, 342). To you or to me, once in a lifetime perhaps, would have fallen the almost terrifying honour of coming at last, after long journeys and ritual preparations and slow ceremonial approaches, into the very presence of the great Father, Priest, and Emperor of the planet Tellus; a thing to be remembered all our lives. No useful criticism of the Miltonic Adam is possible until the last trace of the naif, simple, childlike Adam has been removed from our imaginations. The task of a Christian poet presenting the unfallen first of men is not that of recovering the freshness and simplicity of mere nature, but of drawing someone who, in his solitude and nakedness, shall really be what Solomon and Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid and Louis XIV lamely and unsuccessfully strove to imitate on thrones of ivory between lanes of drawn swords and under jewelled baldachins. And from the very first sight we have of the human pair Milton begins doing so (IV, 288). Among the beasts we see two ‘of far nobler shape’, naked but ‘in naked Majestie’, ‘Lords of all’, reflecting ‘their glorious Maker’ by their Wisdome and Sanctitude. And the wisdom and sanctitude, not in Adam only but in both, were ‘severe’—in the sense in which Cicero speaks of a man as severus et gravis; that is, they were like a severe style in music or architecture, they were austere, magnanimous, and lofty, not remiss, nor free and easy, nor florid—a dry flavour, appealing to corrected palates. They are people with whom modern critics would be well advised not to take liberties. As Professor Raleigh (redeeming his momentary lapse) points out, Adam goes to meet the archangel not so much like a host as like an ambassador (V, 350 et seq.). That tone is preserved throughout their interview. If we think simply of a happy, naked savage sitting on the grass, then it is absurd that Adam should urge the angel to continue because the sun ‘will delay to hear thee tell His generation’ (VII, 101). This hyperbole is to be judged by the standards of exalted compliment from a great personage to an even greater personage on an occasion of high courtly festivity. Similarly when Adam modestly depreciates his own powers as a narrator and explains that all his talk is only a device to detain his godlike guest (VIII, 206), we are expected to admire the gracefulness of his courtesy—as the servants in Bercilak’s castle expected to learn from Gawain the ‘tacheles terms of noble talking’.
Adam’s kingly manner is the outward expression of his supernatural kingship of earth and his wisdom. Of astronomy he is, indeed, ignorant, because Milton does not know whether the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system is going to be acceptable. But he understands the problems involved; his speculation has already roved over the whole created universe. When he received the homage of the beasts he instantaneously ‘understood their Nature’ and assigned their names (VIII, 352). He has complete insight into the mysteries of the soul and can give Eve a full explanation of the phenomena of dreams (V, 100 et seq.). His ‘lectures’ to his wife sometimes excite the smiles of the modern reader, but the joke is a shallow one. He is not merely her husband, he is the sum of all human knowledge and wisdom who answers her as Solomon answered the Queen of Sheba—‘Adam, earth’s hallowed mould, of God inspired.’
In considering his relations with Eve we must constantly remind ourselves of the greatness of both personages. Their life together is ceremonial—a minuet, where the modern reader looked for a romp. Until they are fallen and robbed of their original majesty, they hardly ever address each other simply by their names, but by stately periphrases; Fair Consort, My Author and Disposer, Daughter of God and Man, accomplisht Eve, O Sole in whom my thoughts find all repose. Is this ridiculous? At least it is much less ridiculous than similar formalities between fallen creatures in Milton’s own time when husbands and wives could still address each other as My Lord and My Lady or Sir and Madam and the morning toilet of a French king was a ritual. Perhaps it is not ridiculous at all if we can once make the initial assumption that the reality whereof all such courtesies since the Fall have been simulacra, was present in Eden. This royal couple could live throughout in the grand manner. They uttered great verse extempore (V, 150).
This royalty is less apparent in Eve, partly because she is in fact Adam’s inferior, in her double capacity of wife and subject, but partly, I believe, because her humility is often misunderstood. She thinks herself more fortunate than he, because she has him for her companion while he ‘like consort to himself can nowhere find’ (IV, 448) and obeys his commands ‘unargued’ (IV, 635). This is humility, and, in Milton’s view, becoming humility. But do not forget that it is to Adam she speaks; a lover to a lover, a wife to a husband, the Queen of earth to the King. Many women in love, many wives, perhaps many queens, have at some time said or thought as much. Portia wished that for Bassanio’s sake, she might be trebled ‘twenty times herself. A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times More rich’, and protests that, as things are, ‘the full sum of her Is sum of nothing’, ‘an unlesson’d girl’. It is prettily said and sincerely said. But I should feel sorry for the common man, such as myself, who was led by this speech into the egregious mistake of walking into Belmont and behaving as though Portia really were an unlessoned girl. A man’s forehead reddens to think of it. She may speak thus to Bassanio: but we had better remember that we are dealing with a great lady. I am inclined to think that critics sometimes make the same mistake about Eve. We see her prostrate herself in spirit before Adam—as an Emperor might kneel to a Pope or as a Queen curtsies to a King. You must not think but that if you and I could enter Milton’s Eden and meet her we should very quickly be taught what it is to speak to the ‘universal Dame’. Even Satan, when he has said that she is ‘not terrible’, is constrained to add ‘though terrour be in Love And beautie, not approacht by stronger hate’ (IX, 490). Even for Adam, though she is ‘made so adorn for his delight’, she is also made ‘so awful that with honour he may love’ (VIII, 576; italics mine). There is no question, you see, of a boy and a girl tumbling on a bank; even for him there is that in Eve which compels deference, the possibility of Daungier. The angel hails her more ceremoniously than Adam. She stands before him unabashed—a great lady doing the honours of her own house, the matriarch of the world. Her grandeur, and a certain aloofness in her, live in some of Milton’s most memorable phrases: ‘with sweet, austere composure thus reply’d’, or ‘to whom the virgin majestie of Eve’. Virgin, that is, in majesty: not, at the time to which the words refer, in body, and never virginal in the sense of being immature. Maidenly ignorance had never existed in Eve; in the first half hour of her existence she understood the purport of Adam’s suit. She even understood it in all its bearings; you could not assume her consent, nor, on the other hand, would you need to ply her with Donne’s metaphysics about soul and body in so natural an affair, though not one to be taken for granted: ‘she what was Honour knew’ (VIII, 508). She is able to share Adam’s speculative interests. Such impress as art had made on the beauties of Paradise is largely hers, ‘the hand of Eve’ (IX, 438).