"Wasted Labor"? Milton's Eve, the Poet's Work, and the Challenge of Sympathy

Kevis Goodman

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse.

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of Yeats"

In her introduction to a 1992 volume of critical essays on John Milton, Annabel Patterson points to Milton's psychology and ideology of work as areas in need of our further attention. ¹ Her comment both reflects and anticipates the new visibility of labor as a subject of literary and cultural study over the last decade. With the 1985 publication of The Georgic Revolution, Anthony Low helped to bring the subject to our attention by reclaiming Virgil's "middle term" from its relative eclipse in the shadows of pastoral and epic, re-initiating critical activity on a neglected genre. ² While Low's project remained largely thematic and catalogic, a more local but theoretically ambitious contribution was made by John Guillory, in two essays on Samson Agonistes which, taken together, synthesize the historical problem of Protestant vocation with a stunning, eclectic mix of psychoanalytic, feminist, and materialist approaches. ³ In the same year as the Longman anthology, there appeared additional articles within Milton studies by scholars such as Marshall Grossman (from a Marxist perspective) and Leonard Tennenhouse with Nancy Armstrong (in a more Foucauldian vein), and these have been complemented by research done on labor in a variety of forms--intellectual and manual, alienated and freely chosen--outside the Renaissance as well, notably in the eighteenth century and Romanticism. ⁴ At the very least, the rise of an academic field which one Americanist has dubbed "work studies" suggests that if poets have suffered from an anxiety of indolence--from a scruple about what the fourth Georgic with some irony calls the artist's "ignoble ease" (ignobilis oti)--then so, too, do the scholars who work on them. ⁵ [End Page 415]

Much remains to be done, however, and the interest continues, evidenced by panels and entire conferences devoted to issues of labor in language and literature. Patterson's own comment came in the context of a recommendation to future psychoanalytic criticism, and while it is not ultimately a psychoanalytic reading that I will attempt, I do want to investigate the relation between work and something that we now relegate to psychology (but would have existed for Milton within theology and ethics): the passions, primarily feelings of sympathy and love. There are at the outset certain reasons for undertaking such an analysis. The vexed relationship between "labor" and "amor" is, I will argue, the central problematic of Virgil's Georgics, which, as Low and others have demonstrated, is the main text available to Milton and other late Renaissance authors for considering and commenting on the activities of culture, with its root sense of cultus (or tending, cultivation). Moreover, there is the historical observation, receiving increased critical scrutiny at present, that the century and a quarter following Milton's death witnessed a particular intimacy between the languages of labor and of feeling, when a text no less famous (or infamous) than The Wealth of Nations could be written by a Glasgow professor then known chiefly for his treatise on sympathy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The discourses of economics and aesthetics would remain for some time at best imperfectly differentiated, existing for most of the eighteenth century as twins emerging from the parent discipline of moral philosophy. ⁶

Yet it is, not surprisingly, Freud whose retrospect gives us one of the most vivid allegories of the relation between labor and love. It has by now become something of a critic's commonplace to say that psychoanalysis is, as Stephen Greenblatt once put it, "the fulfillment and effacement of specifically Renaissance insights"--an observation that has the authority of Freud himself. ⁷ The maxim that the poets came first to his discoveries might seem particularly true when we read Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud offers his account of the vicissitudes of Eros, a figure that includes both fully "genital love" and "steadfast, affectionate feeling" or sympathy. "Civilization" (Kultur), Freud maintained, "is a process in the service of Eros" and constitutes, together with "the advantages of work in common," the "two-fold foundation of communal life." ⁸ Yet in one of the characteristic self-qualifications of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud becomes less sure that Eros is in the service either of civilization or his usual metonymy for it, labor. "In the course of [End Page 416] development the relation of love to civilization loses its unambiguity," and in certain situations, they come into mutual opposition:

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy. In no other case does Eros so clearly betray the core of his being, his purpose of making one out of more than one; but when he has achieved this in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings, he refuses to go further. ⁹

Here Freud's narrative begins to confront something of a dilemma, as it asserts both civilization's reliance on Eros for its continuation and sexuality's capacity for acting as an explosive force undermining civilization. Eros is at once the "builder of cities" and the builder of families, but families are not built out of the same stuff as cities, and Freud leaves underexplored the path between these two identities. This paradox becomes one of the key points in Herbert Marcuse's philosophical critique of psychoanalysis: as Marcuse asks with colloquial skepticism, "How does the notion of the asocial character of sexuality jibe with the 'supposition that love relationships (or to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) constitute the essence of the group mind?'" Marcuse anticipates but refuses to admit the answer that Freud most probably would have given him: "Nor can the contradiction be eliminated by locating the constructive force of Eros only in the sublimated modes of sexuality; according to Freud, the drive toward ever larger unities belongs to the biological-organic nature of Eros itself." ¹⁰

The contradiction in fact becomes more complicated, for Freud assigns genders to "sexuality" and to "civilization," and then projects their impasse onto the drama of domestic life:

Furthermore, women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence--those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable. Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life. . . . Thus the [End Page 417] woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude toward it. ¹¹

This should be a familiar tale, as John Guillory reminds us; if one were to substitute "Dalila" and "Samson" into the appropriate places, one would discover a plot rather like Samson Agonistes, which Guillory rather playfully identifies as an early modern "bourgeois career drama" insofar as it stages the conflict between vocation and marriage, labor and a domesticated sexuality. Milton does not, according to Guillory's argument, escape this masterplot of early modern culture.

Freud, who begins Civilization and Its Discontents with a reconstruction of Rome, his favorite figure for "civilization," might have preferred Aeneas and Dido as his protagonists (or else Aeneas and Creusa), since the Aeneid repeatedly stages its hero's resolution to advance beyond feminine presences whose influences threaten the foundation of the Roman empire. In Virgil's own oeuvre, however, Aeneas's rejection of Dido with her subsequent rebuff of him in the sixth book of the Aeneid is a twice-told tale, a reimagining of the scene at the end of the poem that many have taken to be Virgil's own trial run for his epic: the story of Orpheus's loss of Eurydice in the fourth book of the Georgics. ¹² It is well known that the tableau of Orpheus reaching out toward Eurydice as she slips away from him across the Styx particularly haunts Milton, but when studied for the way it configures labor in relation to erotic and sympathetic love, Virgil's primal scene of poetic labor (as we might call it) appears in an unexpected place with unusual results. By casting Eve as a more successful Orpheus at the pivotal moment in Paradise Lost Book 10, Milton defines a certain kind of sympathetic experience as poetic work. He thereby suggests an instance of passion that is at once passive suffering and radical action. It is as if Milton, in his engagement with Eve, accidentally changes the rules of the game--the opposition between amor and labor--and glimpses a possibility closer to Marcuse's vision of a revolutionary but constructive Eros.

Milton, of course, only allows such a possibility a circumscribed and precarious place. By describing that place in his poetry, however, I believe that we begin two further projects. We attain some understanding of the neglected relationship between work and erotic or sympathetic relations, and, as I will suggest by way of conclusion, we situate Milton's poetry in relation to a history with which he has rarely been associated: that of the "culture of sensibility" after him. [End Page 418] The second project, although it must stand more as prospect here, is not just an exercise in revising literary history. It suggests a way of bringing together the study of an emerging aesthetics with the question of work (and specifically, a poetry concerned with the problem of labor and vocation), a convergence that would seem essential if we are to consider not only the representation of labor in literary texts (its effacement, realistic depiction, or anything in between) but also the status of the literary process as work rather than simply an instance of "ignoble," if privileged, ease. These are my tasks, and I proceed in three stages. The first section of this article provides the Virgilian background important for approaching Milton's Eve and the challenge of sympathy in (and to) the poet's work; from it, the second section develops my main argument about Milton's radical if tentative restructuring of an inherited and still influential opposition. The concluding section then uses the literary history established in the earlier sections to address more overtly the theoretical implications of the position Milton helps us to glimpse.

I. "Effusus Labor" ("Wasted Labor"): The Georgics

At the end of the first Georgic Virgil envisioned a future for his own war-torn Roman land when the farmer, peacefully ploughing the soil, would turn up rusty javelins and dislodge empty helmets and giant bones with his heavy hoe. ¹³ At the end of the fourth book of Paradise Lost, just the inverse occurs: toiling with the "tilting furniture" and trappings of epic, Milton suddenly uncovers a vivid substratum of georgic, in the form of this well-known simile:

While thus [Satan] spake, th' Angelic Squadron bright
Turn'd fiery red, sharp'ning in mooned horns
Thir Phalanx, and began to hem him round
With ported Spears, as thick as when a field
Of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends
Her bearded Grove of ears, which way the wind
Sways them; the careful Plowman doubting stands
Lest on the threshing floor his hopeful sheaves
Prove chaff. On th'other side Satan alarm'd
Collecting all his might dilated stood. (PL, 4.977-86) ¹⁴

The mood disclosed here does not achieve the usual calm and serenity of "Milton's counterplot," nor does it seem unequivocally to celebrate "the dignity of man's labor," as in T. S. Eliot's characterization of the Georgics themselves. ¹⁵ Dr. Bentley's patrician misreading is, as [End Page 419] usual, quite helpful. Comparing the plowman's with Satan's plight, Milton's greatest literalist reader complained: "What are sheaves bound up in a Barn to the Phalanx that hem'd Satan?" Had Bentley taken notice that the sheaves are not yet bound up in the barn, he might have understood what they are doing in the poem. The outcome of the harvest, like the fate of the pendant earth and its two inhabitants at this moment, hangs in the balance; so much depends on whether or not the sheaves "prove chaff." The fact that the actual scales which do appear in the sky at this moment (PL, 4.995-1005) are not primarily concerned with human affairs but balance the supernatural fray between Satan and Gabriel only adds to the uncertainty and vulnerability, anticipating the "Heav'n / Now alienated" of Book 9.

I approach the Georgics by means of this enclosed moment because the simile captures the pervasive sense of care (curae) and doubtful hope in Virgil's poem, and because it also shows how Milton reads Virgil. The precarious status and the potential for waste in human effort courses ominously through the Georgics. Much criticism on the poem, indeed most commentary on Virgil, tends toward a debate over which "Virgil" is truer: the optimist or the pessimist; the poet who champions the foundation of empire or the one who plangently records the misfortunes underlying it. Both sides are mutually implicated; just as we see two Marcelli, the glorious and doomed namesakes, we see in the Georgics both the possibility and the perishability of human achievement. Hence detailed instructions for raising cattle, or trees, or bees, are accompanied by accounts of their diseases and blights: eighteenth-century imitations of the Georgics will contain within them a mini-genre of plague literature. The most famous and enigmatic lines of the poem, "Labor omnia vicit / improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas" ("Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard" [G, 1.145-46]), exhibit just this doubleness. If one stops reading at the end of the line (with vicit), one might take the verses to be a declaration of the triumph of human skill over nature ("labor conquers all things"); as soon as one passes the enjambment and finds labor qualified by improbus, however, one reads altogether differently ("unremitting labor and pressing need conquer all experience").

Virgil likes to pun on labor (the noun, meaning toil or effort) and lapsus (from the verb meaning to slide or fall), almost always with the intention of disclosing the susceptibility of labor to lapse. Toward the end of the account of Ceres's arts in Book I, the speaker observes: [End Page 420]

I have seen seeds, though picked long and tested with much pains [multo . . . labore], yet degenerate, if human toil, year after year, culled not the largest by hand. Thus by law of fate all things speed toward the worst, and slipping away fall back [sic omnia fatis / in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri]; even as if one, whose oars can scarce force his skiff against the stream, should by chance slacken his arms, and lo! headlong down the current the channel sweeps it away. (G, 1.197-203)

Perhaps more than any other set of lines or critical commentary, the simile here catches Virgil's understanding of "labor," for in the Georgics labor is just this--rowing against an adverse current, the attempt to counteract the entropic forces of physical or human nature. The Latin word is complex, able to convey both active and passive meanings--"work, exertion, striving, accomplishment" as well as "suffering, trouble, pain." ¹⁶ It is a synonym of opus on the one hand and the verb patior or the nouns dolor and cura on the other; in terms of the simile, it describes both the weight of the current felt in the arms of the rower and his expenditure of effort while rowing against the stream. Labor is thus not defined in terms of any particular kind of pursuit (for example, agriculture rather than poetry); it is a more general word for the force spent and burden sustained in any pursuit or ars (skill). The distinction between ars and labor is consequently not (as we might expect from our modern English distinction between art and labor) between kinds of activities with their different social or cultural inflections, but between any skill and the human energy or endurance put into carrying it out. "Tum variae venere artes. Labor omnia vicit / improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas" ("Then came the divers arts. Toil conquered the world"): the concluding lines of the Jupiter theodicy, the center for so many of the concerns of the poem, also convey this distinction; the various arts arrive and labor improbus spreads throughout them.

The variae artes in the Georgics are various indeed, and the list begun in the Jupiter theodicy continues to expand until the closing lines of the poem, encompassing, in addition to the four central subjects (the culture of the fields, trees, herds, and bees), gardening, weaving, iron-work, singing, and poetry. Toward the end of the fourth book, Virgil introduces the mythical bugonia, the spontaneous rebirth of the bees from the carcass of a cow, in order to tell the paired stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus: "What God, ye Muses, forged for us this device [extudit artem]?" (G, 4.315). The epyllion that follows would [End Page 421] become for the Renaissance the central classical text on the relation between agricultural and literary labor. The first of our two classical accounts of the Orpheus story--Ovid provides the other, with a more comic turn--Virgil's inset founds what would become an elaborate and enduring mythology in Christian as in Classical times. ¹⁷

In the Georgics' version, Aristaeus, the arch-husbandman, son of Apollo and Cyrene, appeals to his mother for help with his blighted and unproductive bees. Guided by Cyrene, whom he visits in her underwater abode, Aristaeus wrestles with Proteus and extracts the reason for his misfortunes from him: Orpheus, angry with Aristaeus for having caused the loss of Eurydice, must be propitiated. Proteus accordingly narrates the inset tale of Orpheus's descent to the depths of Tartarus and the reascent with its famous climax:

And now as [Orpheus] retraced his steps he had escaped every mischance, and the regained Eurydice was nearing the upper world, following behind . . . when a sudden frenzy seized Orpheus, unwary in his love [cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem]. . . . He stopped [restitit], and on the very verge of light, unmindful, alas!, and vanquished in purpose, on Eurydice, now his own, looked back [respexit]. In that moment all his toil was spent [ibi omnia / effusus labor], the ruthless tyrant's pact was broken, and thrice a crash was heard amid the pools of Avernus. (G, 4.485-93)

Like Aristaeus's earlier attempt to possess her, Orpheus's transgressive attempt to make Eurydice "his own" in fact causes him to lose her, and his exertions and sufferings in the underworld are dissolved: they are "effusus labor" (labor wasted, spent, or literally "poured out"):

She cried: "What madness, Orpheus, what dreadful madness (quis tantus furor) hath ruined my unhappy self and thee? Lo, again the cruel Fates call me back and sleep veils my swimming eyes. And now farewell! I am swept off, wrapped in uttermost night, and stretching out to thee strengthless hands, thine, alas! no more." She spake, and straightway from his sight, like smoke mingling with thin air, vanished afar, and, vainly as he clutched at the shadows and yearned to say much, never saw him more. (G, 4.494-502)

Among the most popular questions for readers of the Georgics since Servius has been the relationship of Orpheus's story to the plight of Aristaeus, the rest of the fourth Georgic, and the poem as a whole. ¹⁸ This apparently limited textual point becomes more ideologically vexed and pressing because it implies questions about the relationship of agrarian to poetic labor and, ultimately, whether poetry [End Page 422] escapes the category of "ignoble ease"--whether or not the artist's toil can be "justified" as such. Most readers now recognize that, regardless of whether or not the epyllion is an addition (as Servius thought), it is carefully integrated into the well-wrought architecture of Virgil's poem. Most also assume a concordia discors model whereby Orpheus, whose amorous furor destroys the success of his labor, is regarded as the counterpoint to Virgil's productive bees, who "indulge not in conjugal embraces, nor idly unnerve their bodies in love" (G, 4.198-99)--a counterpoint that nonetheless remains contained within the poem's georgic economy and celebration of industry. Thus one of the more recent classicists to write on the poem, Christine Perkell, depends on a binary opposition between husbandman and poet, so that the husbandman "stands for 'productivity' and for control of nature . . . while Orpheus [and the poet narrator] stand for 'creativity' and 'sympathy' with nature." ¹⁹ Even Jane Tylus, whose exemplary discussion of Spenser's use of Virgil is sensitive to the disruption Orpheus poses to the narrative, nonetheless thinks Orpheus remains "outside of the georgic cycle in which Virgil's own narrator willingly participates." ²⁰

These interpretations may avoid idealizing poetic labor only to end up glorifying agricultural labor in Virgil, and something is consequently lost from the Georgics. The image of Eurydice swept backward into the Styx recalls pointedly and poignantly the first Georgic's admonition against lapsed labor in the production of corn, cited above: "Sic omnia fatis / in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri . . ." ("Thus by law of fate all things speed toward the worst and slipping away fall back; even as if one, whose oars can scarce force his skiff against the stream, should by chance slacken his arms, and lo! headlong down the current the channel sweeps it away" [G, 1.199-203]). The waste of effort that can leave the laborer clutching at shadows--that too easily tilted balance between hoping and doubting that makes Eurydice suum iam ("now his") and then non tua ("not yours")--is a strong link between Orpheus's and the other labors in the Georgics. The musician's labor effusus is an intensification of a lurking potential in all of the "divers arts," and the waste is imperfectly contained, or subdued, by the thrifty Aristaeus's sudden recovery of his hives, which, after all, does not mark the triumph of human labor but the intervention of a miracle.

The various instances of labor are associated not only in their precariousness but in their common desire to restore what has been lost. For Virgil, georgic always borders on elegy, and the work of [End Page 423] farming on the work of mourning; the effect is to define most effort in the poem as restitutive or reparative. In an earlier era, the poet explains, "before Jove's day, no tillers subdued the land. . . . Earth yielded all, of herself, more freely, when none begged for her gifts" (G, 1.121 and following). There has been an alteration since that golden age which the georgic spirit strives to redress. And like Orpheus's difficult and flawed attempt to use his art in such a way that the ruthless underworld might yield up Eurydice, the fruits of the earth are now extracted by human technology only with trouble. Such a task was Virgil's as well, as William Sessions has discussed: "The message of the Maecenas-commissioned Georgics was to reclaim the imperial homeland by a series of difficult labors," to redeem "a land and a history from the effects of time's disorders." ²¹ The stream that the Georgics' poet rows against, so to speak, is the flux of time itself, as in this passage from the third Georgic, where he catches himself slackening his pace in a markedly erotic account of the amorous passions among the herds (amor omnibus idem--"the same Love conquers all" [G, 3.244]):

Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus,
singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.
Hoc satis armentis: superat pars altera curae,
lanigeros agitare greges hirtasque capellas.
Hic labor, hinc laudem fortes sperate coloni.

[But time meanwhile is flying, flying beyond recall, while we, charmed with love of our theme, linger around each detail! Enough this for the herds; there remains the second part of my task, to tend the fleecy flocks and shaggy goats.] (G, 3.284-88)

The scene and its characteristic rhythms are by now all familiar: slackening, pause, and the disappearance or waste of the object sought. As in the case of Orpheus, the threat to labor is amor, as is emphasized in Virgil's enigmatic phrase "charmed with love of our theme" ("capti . . . amore"), where his theme has been love itself. Here, if not elsewhere, the luxury of love is a temptation resisted, and the poet plies his trade in due time.

Exactly what is Orpheus' error? Is it simply to pause and to succumb to the recklessness of passion; does the Georgics engage in a rigid polarization of amor and labor and, as in the simplest version of Freud's formulations, rest civilization on the firm renunciation of instinct? This appears to be Ovid's question as he rewrites the Virgilian scene. The Metamorphoses omits Eurydice's reproach to [End Page 424] Orpheus altogether, letting the poet speak for her: "And now, dying a second time, she made no complaint against her husband; for of what could she complain save that she was beloved?" ²² Yet Orpheus's fault, the Georgics seem to suggest, is not simply to love but to love in a nostalgic or conservative way. As Harry Berger, Jr. remarked some time ago, the word "respexit" occupies a key place in Virgil's account. Orpheus "respexit"--Orpheus looks back:

Here respicere means to look back unguardedly, in longing, toward the object of love. The poet must learn to look back at the beloved past without destroying its life, or his own happiness and control. Respicere can also mean to look back, in the sense of reflecting upon; or to look again, in the sense of re-vising. ²³

Yet Orpheus "respexit" only in Berger's first sense. The singer is compelled to repeat the same experience of loss not just twice but again and again, as he roams the regions of nature retelling the tale of Eurydice. In death, his punishment is endless repetition of the same: "Even then, while Oeagrian Hebrus swept and rolled in midcurrent that head, plucked from its marble neck, the bare voice and death-cold tongue, with fleeting breath, called Eurydice--ah, hapless Eurydice! 'Eurydice' the banks re-echoed, all adown the stream" (G, 4.523-26). In this light Pluto's initial requirement appears emblematic rather than arbitrary: the past may be profitably regained only if one retrieves it facing forward into the future.

The sixth book of the Aeneid contains Virgil's own attempt to reflect upon and revise (in Berger's second sense) Orpheus's "wasted labor." The Thracian singer is invoked by Aeneas in the underworld, petitioning the Cumaean Sibyl for permission to seek another lost presence, Anchises: "If Orpheus availed to summon his wife's shade, strong in his Thracian lyre and tuneful strings . . ." (A, 6.119 and following). The Sibyl, as if responding to the missing outcome in Aeneas's awkwardly selective account, tells him that the great task is not to descend but to redirect one's footsteps in order to leave the underworld and the past. The lines are famous: "But to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil" (hoc opus, hic labor est [A, 6.128-29]). In public terms, Aeneas will be more successful, mastering the dementia and the furor (Eurydice's name for Orpheus's emotion, and the passionate counterpart to nature's storms throughout the Georgics) in order to reascend and replace Troy in Latium. But then the only footsteps that he "recalls" are his own. The moments when he, too, stretches out strengthless [End Page 425] hands to departing shadows--calling "Whom fleest thou?" to Dido (A, 6.466), or striving fruitlessly to embrace the shade of Creusa (A, 2.790-94)--are the most precarious for the completion of the work, as his labor dips toward effusus labor.

Milton is distrustful of purely restitutive labor, of the impulse that says, "There has been a fall--let us work to repair it." The effort of making things stand a second time appears in some suspicious contexts in Paradise Lost, as when the devils erect their "high Capitol" in Pandaemonium. Milton, Protestant and iconoclast, prefers "before all Temples th'upright heart and pure." But even the pure heart needs to be helped to stand upright, and it too can be the product of labor, prone to Virgilian precariousness. As the poet's own version of Bacon's call for a "Georgicks of the Mind" in The Advancement of Learning (1605), Milton's Of Education (1644) provides a motto suited to a career-long project: "The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright." ²⁴ If one had to choose a single tableau to summarize the Virgilian legacy in Milton, it would be the scene of Eurydice (or Dido, Creusa) slipping away from the extended arms of Orpheus (Aeneas). Some of its occurrences, such as the fading dream of sonnet 23, have been discussed by others. I will be interested in a more ghostly apparition in Paradise Lost, where the repairing of lost paradise after the fall takes as its occasion a recasting--but not an unguarded return or perfect repetition--of the Georgics episode and its Virgilian relatives.

II. Counter-Love, Original Response: Paradise Lost

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.

--Robert Frost, "The Most of It"

As Milton approaches his version of the Fall of man, Paradise Lost displays something of a Marxian prescience. Where most traditional and mythological accounts, including Virgil's, depict the advent of labor as the consequence of a fall (a Promethean theft, the end of a golden age), Milton's Fall is precipitated by a change and alienation [End Page 426] within the conditions of labor itself. In Book 9, the immediate cause of man's disobedience is a dispute over working conditions:

And Eve first to her Husband thus began.
Adam, well may we labor still to dress
This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flow'r,
Our pleasant task enjoin'd, but till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labor grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild. Thou therefore now advise
Or hear what to my mind first thoughts present,
Let us divide our labors (PL, 9.204-14)

There has been work in Eden all along, but what is new here is the ethic of productivity, the intrusion of a "performance principle" (Marcuse's name for the specifically sociohistorical dimension of Freud's "reality principle" ²⁵ ). With the phrase "the work under our labor grows," Eve is distinguishing for the first time between what she calls "the work"--an abstracted sense of what ought to get done, not for the means of survival (which exists in abundance), but for some external reason--and their own activity of doing it: "our labor." Marx would describe estranged labor (entfremdete Arbeit) in terms of the moment when "the object which labour produces--labour's product--confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer," and this is indeed what happens to Eve at the moment that "work" and "labor" come to mean different things. ²⁶ Her activity, externalized and objectified in a newly alien nature, confronts her, and "with wanton growth derides / Tending to wild."

Furthermore, as Marx would also recognize, the estrangement of the laborer from the product of her labor has as its first consequence an estrangement between laborers--here the first couple--which arrives in the form of a familiar proposal: "Let us divide our labors." Marriage is the basic social unit, the place where all larger divisions begin for Milton as later for Marx; ²⁷ and Adam understands Eve's strategy as a danger to the marital union as well as to the divine injunction against the fruit:

Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd
Labor, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow [End Page 427]
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life. (PL, 9.235-41)

Such language recalls the modest eroticism of the divorce pamphlets, such as Tetrachordon's praise of "delightfull intermissions" (CPW, 4:85-86), and the elevation of "sympathy" as the primary ground of marriage in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The Doctrine had justified divorce in cases of "antipathy" of mind or body, arguing that to "command love and sympathy . . . is not within the province of any law to reach" (CPW, 2:346). It is with this logic that Adam grants Eve a temporary divorce of sorts, refraining from commanding her sympathy with--ironically--another command: "Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more; / Go in thy native innocence, rely / On what thou hast of virtue, summon all, / For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine" (PL, 9.372-75).

After the Fall, the initial disagreement over the conditions of labor radiates outward to all aspects of the cosmos, and the sympathetic universe, which Adam had praised as "this goodly Frame, this World of Heav'n and Earth consisting" (PL, 8.15-16), is dismantled. The cosmological dissonance anticipated in the Invocation to Book 9 (the "distrust, and breach / Disloyal," the "disobedience," and the "distance and distaste" of a world of woe) multiplies until "Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowl with Fowl / And Fish with Fish" (PL, 10.710-11). Book 10, the only Book to bring together the three worlds of Hell, Earth, and Heav'n, poses in a dramatic manner the question of what can redress the "fierce antipathy" (PL, 10.709). In this Milton is not Marx, and "repairing the ruins of lost paradise" will begin not in an alteration in the conditions of labor, but within the marital union. What Marx would have put first and foremost in terms of redressing alienated labor relations, Milton frames explicitly in terms of alienated sympathetic relations--but without, as we will see, leaving the issue of labor behind.

Near the beginning of Book 10, Sin, registering the discord on Earth from her seat at the gates of Hell, gloats at Death and proposes her own ambitious program of work. Like a nightmare version of some prosperous Renaissance nation or city, she seeks to celebrate her newly expanded internal capacities with a policy of territorial expansion, mortal colonization:

Methinks
I feel new strength within me rise,
Wings growing, and Dominion giv'n me large 


[End Page 428]


Beyond this Deep; whatever draws me on,
Or sympathy, or some connatural force
Powerful at greatest distance to unite
With secret amity things of like kind
By secretest conveyance . . .
      Let us try
Advent'rous work, yet to thy power and mine
Not unagreeable, to found a path
Over this Main from Hell to that new World<
Where Satan now prevails, a Monument
Of merit high to all th'infernal Host,
Easing thir passage hence, for intercourse,
Or transmigration, as thir lot shall lead.
Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn
By this new felt attraction and instinct. (PL, 10.243-49,
254-63)

This "sympathy or some connatural force," the "secret amity" attracting like things across great distances, takes us back to a more archaic--and from the theological perspective more dangerous--sense of the word "sympathy": to the practice of magic and astrology, to a world of mystical incantations, charms, alchemy and strange humors. ²⁸ For the post-Enlightenment reader versed in Hume or Smith, the occult philosophy of a Ficino, Paracelsus, or Thomas Vaughn, with their quasi-scientific uses of the word, may seem unfamiliar; yet even in so worldly a thinker as Adam Smith, as Christopher Herbert has argued, the occult is never far removed from a postulate about the sympathetic bonds underlying culture. ²⁹ For Milton, the use of "sympathy" as a term in spiritual and demonic magic would still have lingered, existing rather uncomfortably alongside newer applications, including marital relations.

Death responds to Sin's compulsive, magnetic attraction to the now sinning beings on earth, and mother and son engage in a scene of giant making:

      The aggregated Soil
Death with his Mace petrific, cold and dry,
As with a Trident smote, and fix't as firm
As Delos floating once; the rest his look
Bound with Gorgonian rigor not to move,
And with Asphaltic slime; broad as the Gate,
Deep to the Roots of Hell the gather'd beach
They fasten'd, and the Mole immense wrought on
Over the foaming deep high Archt, a Bridge
Of length prodigious joining to the Wall
Immoveable of this now fenceless World
Forfeit to Death; from hence a passage broad, 


[End Page 429]


Smooth, easy, inoffensive down to Hell.
. . .
Now had they brought the work by wondrous Art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendent Rock
Over the vext Abyss . . .
      With Pins of Adamant
And Chains they made all fast, too fast they made
And durable. (PL, 10.293-305, 312-14,
318-20)

Bad making and bad art, in this ambivalent send-up of the sublime, are imagined in terms of fixing, fastening, binding, and petrifying, as in Angus Fletcher's association of the mode with psychological fixation. ³⁰ The structure "wrought" is "immoveable" and, the narrator sighs, "all fast, too fast." Most modern critics, if not Milton's eighteenth-century readers, detect the element of parody, but they are not agreed on its object. Some have identified it as the blasphemous and bathetic counterpart of the divine creation in Book 7, where God's creative work may be summarized best by the image of a "kindly rupture" (PL, 7.419) in Milton's own opening up of the Genesis text. I believe that Sin's and Death's unkind fastening must instead be read in its Book 10 context, against the reparative actions of Adam and Eve which immediately follow.

Milton's Eve has, of course, posed a problem to Miltonoclasts and Miltonolaters alike. Yet both camps have chosen to dwell more on Book 4--stumbling on that familiar block, "Hee for God only, shee for God in him"--than on Book 10. At this later, pivotal moment, the turning point of the deteriorating relations in Eden, Adam is not at his best, rejecting Eve as a "fair defect" and "rib / Crooked by nature" (PL, 10.884-85, 891):

He added not, and from her turn'd, but Eve
Not so repulst, with Tears that ceas'd not flowing,
And tresses all disorder'd, at his feet
Fell humble, and imbracing them, besought
His peace, and thus proceeded in her plaint.
Forsake me not thus, Adam, witness Heav'n
What love sincere, and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended,
Unhappily deceiv'd; thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not,
Whereon I live, thy gentle looks, thy aid,
Thy counsel in this uttermost distress,
My only strength and stay: forlorn of thee,
Whither shall I betake me, where subsist?
While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps, [End Page 430]
Between us two let there be peace, both joining,
As join'd in injuries, one enmity
Against a Foe by doom express assign'd us,
That cruel Serpent: On me exercise not
Thy hatred for this misery befall'n,
On me already lost, mee than thyself
More miserable; both have sinn'd, but thou
Against God only, I against God and thee,
And to the place of judgment will return,
There with my cries importune Heaven, that all
The sentence from thy head remov'd may light
On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe,
Mee mee only just object of his ire.
She ended weeping, and her lowly plight,
Immovable till peace obtain'd from fault
Acknowledg'd and deplor'd, in Adam wrought
Commiseration (PL, 10.909-40)

Eve "in Adam wrought / Commiseration": this, too, is a scene of making. Placed shortly after the work of "wondrous sympathy," that "Mole immense wrought" between Hell and Earth, her speech initiates a new if fragile structure of human relationships after the destruction of all relations brought on by the Fall. Where the infernal toil renders all things "Immoveable" (PL, 9.303), Eve's task is, precisely, to stir an "Immovable" Adam. "Both joining, / As joined in injuries," Adam and Eve erect their own bridge of sympathy against the giant work of Sin and Death. It is as if one of the "Pins of Adamant" quietly drops out of the pontiface (that solidification of fallen intercourse) at this moment.

One might argue, of course, that what is fashioned by Eve's speech is not a new structure of relations but the old one writ large--that it is her prostration at Adam's feet (her "lowly plight"), more than anything else, which "works commiseration" in him. Yet the new pattern of intercourse she attempts is not an exact remaking of the old. While her words "Both have sinn'd, but thou / Against God only, I against God and thee" seem to reinstate the earlier hierarchy (as seen by Satan)--"Hee for God only, shee for God in him"--they also subtly subvert it. For although Eve claims the greater sinfulness, the greater guilt and humiliation, she also allots to herself the greater agency, the more power both to repair and to impair. Responsibility for the damage is, after all, a kind of responsibility. A new ordering principle of doing is placed over the static hierarchy of being (there is no action in "Hee for God only, she for God in him"). The shift from "God in him" to "God and thee" marks a small revolution in [End Page 431] relations, although an ironic one; if only in sin, Eve imagines an unmediated access to God, and the ontological ladder becomes, at least temporarily, a triangle.

"To be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, Hoc opus, hic labor est": Sir Philip Sidney's charge to the Renaissance poeta, or maker, is significantly allusive. ³¹ As she moves Adam from his fixed despair, Eve is associated specifically with the power of poetry--the twin tasks, as the Defense of Poesie has it, of movere and flectere. Of the two, the second (literally, to alter the shape or direction of something, to curve) is perhaps the most interesting. Much of Milton's poetry, as Angus Fletcher has said, displays as its salient characteristic a "principle of echo," which gives "to Paradise Lost the structure of a language that continuously affirms its own order through each mirrored recollection of itself"; John Hollander calls such reverberations "the poem's memory of itself." ³² But with Eve's speech Paradise Lost achieves a particularly heightened self-reflexiveness, so that we find ourselves in a resonant echo chamber of the whole poem, and the very fact of this density--why the principle of internal echo should exert such pressure at this moment--needs some explanation.

To begin with, we have seen this scene before: it is an altered version of the exchange between Adam and Eve at the pool in Book 4. Eve's question to the averted Adam in Book 10--"My only strength and stay: forlorn of thee, / Whither shall I betake me, where subsist?"--now comes as a delayed answer to Adam's first call to her, where (as she described it) "Back I turn'd / Thou following cri'd'st aloud, Return fair Eve / Whom fli'st thou?" (PL, 4.480-82). In the later tableau, of course, their situations are reversed: where Eve once turned from Adam to seek her own image in the pool, then yielded to him, now Adam "from her turn'd" to submerge himself once again in the ostentatious, Hamlet-like soliloquizing from which he has just emerged--and she must call him back. Reversing the postlapsarian discord means returning with a difference to that first separation by the pool. And to evoke the Book 4 scene is to call up also its Virgilian background. As generations of readers have noted, Adam's "Whom fli'st thou?" is Aeneas's wistful and more futile appeal to the retreating Dido: "Stay thy step and withdraw not from our view. Whom fleest thou [quem fugis]?" (A, 6.465-66). However, for Virgil, behind Aeneas and Dido stand another pair, Orpheus and Eurydice. The lineaments of that primal scene of poetic labor in the Georgics come into view, but Eve is now Orpheus. And like Orpheus, [End Page 432] her efforts are almost labor effusus, self-destroyed by the intensity of her soon suicidal passion, until Adam intervenes:

Soon his heart relented
Towards her, his life so late and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress,
Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking,
His counsel whom she had displeas'd, his aid;
As one disarm'd, his anger all he lost,
And thus with peaceful words uprais'd her soon.
Unwary, and too desirous, as before,
So now of what thou know'st not, who desir'st
The punishment all on thyself. (PL, 10.940-49)

"Unwary and too desirous": turning back to her, Adam speaks to Eve the words Virgil applies to Orpheus: "incautum . . . amantem," or unwary and loving.

Very much a labor in the complex Virgilian sense of suffering and exertion--of moving against a resistance, an adverse current--Eve's accomplishment remains precarious, potentially flawed and self-destructive. Yet here, unlike the tableau from the Georgics, the lapse (lapsus) is just avoided: together "striv[ing] in offices of love" (10.959-60), Adam and Eve do begin to repair "the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright," that Miltonic labor of restitution. Their separate miseries having now become "commiseration," the first couple themselves re-pair, and only then are they able to follow Adam's suggestion (which is really Eve's proposal rephrased, for listening, too, is being mended at this moment): "What better can we do, than to the place / Repairing where he judg'd us, prostrate fall / Before him reverent?" (PL, 10.1086-88, emphasis added; see also Eve at 10.932). The first line of Book 11 finds Adam and Eve both "in lowliest plight" before God, so that the web of relation that Eve extends to Adam has become a bridge of reparation that both extend to God. ³³

What, then, makes Eve a more successful Orpheus, able to recall her object of desire and so avoid the full self-consuming furor which in Orpheus's case results in sterility and dismemberment? Again, we need to consider how this moment is able to reshape, dislodge, even subvert, as it repeats--translates in the root sense--the scene at the pool. Now Eve is the pool, as it were, holding up to Adam a reflection of his own despair:

First and last
On mee, mee only, as the source and spring [End Page 433]
Of all corruption, all the blame lights due;
So might the wrath. Fond wish! couldst thou support
That burden heavier than the Earth to bear,
Than all the World much heavier, though divided
With that bad Woman. (Adam, PL, 10.831-37)

It might be more apt to say that Eve becomes Echo to Adam's Narcissus, since the principle of reflection is not visual but verbal. Yet she does not present Adam with what Robert Frost will call mere "copy speech." Adam offers to bear a share of "that burden heavier than the Earth"; Eve amplifies his labor, his suffering, by proposing to bear the whole thing, and she purges his speech of some of its petulant, misogynistic recriminations. ³⁴ Milton here heightens the older Latin sense of labor as the actual weight--the "burden"--sustained as well as the act of endurance itself ("For who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life?"). ³⁵ Only with Eve's revisionary echo can we say that the ideal of respicere achieves the complete meaning of "to look back upon" and to "reflect upon," or revise. Orpheus respexit, but he only looks back, and so is doomed to endless repetition of the same.

Part of the effectiveness of the principle of respicere is that, where Eve's turn to the pool would have resulted in a fulfilled narcissism, Eve gives Adam a reflection of himself that he can turn to--safe narcissism as it were, a "counter-love" that gratifies self-love. Kenneth Burke has said that rhetoric, or all motivated speech, depends on the principle of identification. Identification achieves "consubstantiality," but consubstantiality is crucially not equivalence--two consubstantial beings are not "substantial" but "acting together" in this world:

Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by those conditions; rather it would be natural, spontaneous, and total as with those ideal prototypes of communication, the theologian's angels, or "messengers." ³⁶

Identification in this sense preserves an element of division or difference as its ironic counterpart. Burke's language nicely renders [End Page 434] the effort that goes into achieving a degree of communication; he depicts these processes precisely as work--that which is not "natural, spontaneous, and total," but involves rowing against the stream of our separateness.

Burke strove for what he called a "sociological criticism"--not a new purpose then, he admitted, and less so today, although not so embattled. He treats works of art as strategies and situations, rather than as specialized pursuits set off from the rest of human practices; literature is, for him, "equipment for living." ³⁷ In Eve's speech, I would argue, we too can see Milton uncovering a larger strategy that is implicitly "sociological" in this sense, and one that indicates a significant shift. As is most evident in pastoral poetry, echo and sympathy are at root related principles (poetic echo is a sympathy between texts, and sympathy an echoing between people or objects); each can act as a trope for the other. Sympathy is not, in Paradise Lost, or elsewhere in Milton's poetry, an instinct generally to be trusted; more often it is the "horrid sympathy" which in Book 10's Ovidian parody involuntarily attracts the devils to each other and contracts their bodies to their serpentine fates--sympathy quite literally as lapse only, and not at all as labor (PL, 10.540). Yet, through Eve, Milton is fashioning what for him is a new principle of human relations, one that is not contagious magic, that does not, in Foucault's words, "reduce the world to a point, to a homologous mass, to the featureless form of the Same." ³⁸

If magic is, as Burke would have it, a primitive misrecognition of rhetoric, then Eve's rhetoric of responsiveness disables and disenchants the demonic sympathy in the poem, edging the concept of sympathy forward in historical time. ³⁹ But it does something else at least as important. Unlike the "answering looks / Of Sympathy and love" that pull Eve in the opposite direction from the "voice" at the pool (PL, 4.464), sympathy is at this moment not antithetical to vocation (understood both as God's call to faith and man's divinely sanctioned temporal station in life), for Milton the chief constituent and institution of culture. We see an example of sexual and sympathetic love that is not, as Freud has it, "at loggerheads with civilization," so that going home to the wife's house at the end of Paradise Lost does not mean arresting Eros in his unifying and binding purpose. Adam and Eve go hand in hand into the world, onto a plain that is subject to domestic existence. However contained and precarious it is, this moment stands against the main impulse and [End Page 435] assumptions of Milton's culture and indeed of his poetry, which Freud renders as timeless verities in Civilization and its Discontents.

"Responsibility begins with the ability to respond," Geoffrey Hartman has said with Wordsworth (and I. A. Richards) in mind. ⁴⁰ Yet that has not always been so. As is most evident in the debates within the Restoration clergy between the Latitudinarian praise of passion as conducive to "works" and a neo-Stoicism fighting to maintain its ground, by the end of the seventeenth century this belief exists in heightened tension with a different conviction, which Milton for the most part adheres to, and which holds that responsibility depends on the ability not to respond. ⁴¹ In Paradise Regained, the one thing the Son must do if he does nothing else is resist the sympathetic lure of Satan; in the later poem, temptation is figured explicitly as the appeal of relationship. "The Son of God I also am, or was, / And if I was, I am; relation stands," pleads Satan, but if the Son is to stand, relation must fall (PR, 4.518-19). In Comus and Samson Agonistes, of course, the erotic intensification of sympathy reveals itself more clearly in the figures of Comus and Dalila, and must be renounced in the name of a higher call.

The Lady, the Son, and Samson have customarily been read for biographical reasons as versions of John Milton, and it may be precisely because of Eve's relative difference from him that the poet can imagine a more radical possibility, radical not only for its novelty in his own poetry but also for its capacity to reorder even as it restores. As Raymond Williams has remarked of emergent or pre-emergent "structures of feeling," this other principle does not have to be fully developed or defined before making itself felt as a palpable pressure. ⁴² Certainly, Eve is accorded not only a precarious success but also bounded agency, since her gesture not only depends on Adam's intervention to secure it from lapse but is also bounded textually by the intercessions of the Son at the beginning of Book 10 and again in the first lines of Book 11. Yet because Milton carefully distances the Son's presence to the margins of Book 10's central tableau, we cannot, or should not, disregard what he allows to stand in Eve. To the Yeatsian complaint that "Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden responds by making a vineyard of that "curse": "It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth." ⁴³ So, too, the possibility represented in Eve survives, and just as Auden amplifies Yeats's voice in his own differing or "original response," other mouths will return it. By way of conclusion, I want to indicate the future, and also the limits, of this other way of happening. [End Page 436]

III: "Whether to Work or to Feel"?

For hither I had come with holy powers
And faculties, whether to work or feel.

--William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)

At the same time that there has been renewed critical interest in the georgic and questions it raises about artistic vocation, career, and labor, there has also been, in recent years, a recuperation of what we now recognize to be an entire "culture of sensibility," with political, economic, medical, and religious as well as literary dimensions. ⁴⁴ Although it may be, as Jerome McGann has recently said, that the literature of sensibility has been "securely marginalized," it is undergoing a rapid transport back from the sidelines. ⁴⁵ As it returns, it does so with all sorts of complexities and paradoxes not noted before. While it is widely recognized that the study of sensibility is inseparable from the question of gender, for example, just how the two problems are aligned is less than clear. Many have assumed that sentiment and sympathy were somehow a "feminized" experience, but others increasingly feel, with Claudia Johnson, that particularly toward the end of the eighteenth century "sentimentality entailed instead the 'masculinization' of formerly feminine gender traits, and that the affective practices associated with it are valued not because they are understood as feminine, but precisely and only insofar as they have been recoded as masculine." ⁴⁶ Similarly there has been--among the writers of the past and the present--a pervasive association of feeling with indolence and passivity. Thus Henry Mackenzie writes that "men unfeeling and unsusceptible commonly beat the beaten track with activity and resolution," whereas "persons endowed with that nice perception of pleasure and pain feel so much indescribable uneasiness in their pursuits . . . that they are often induced to sit still." Mary Wollstonecraft takes the point further by including the question of gender, as she laments the tendency to tie indolence, feeling, and women in one insidious knot: "How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have . . . stood erect supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility." ⁴⁷ Yet among an increasing number of scholars today, just as among certain writers of the period, there exists the alternative possibility that the passions can have a more radical potential--even, perhaps, that the terms of Wordsworth's phrase "whether to work or to feel" can stand in apposition rather than in opposition. Is the evocation of feeling in [End Page 437] another being to "work" commiseration and effect further activity or to encourage a passive reactivity? Can passion only be "productive" if somehow "masculinized?" And, finally, is what is produced in any act of sympathy simply a nostalgic return to a previous state or can the sympathetic imagination and, more generally, aesthetic experience, "re-presen[t] reality while accusing it" (Marcuse's formulation of the Virgilian respicere)? ⁴⁸ These are all questions, as I hope to have suggested, that already inhere in Milton's picture of Eve, and his recasting of the Georgics in Paradise Lost Book 10.

Blake imagined Milton "descending . . . clothed in black, severe and silent," and all too often that is the image that has descended on us as well. Virginia Woolf's complaint is a famous example of that Romantic legacy from a feminist perspective: "He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. . . . There is [in Paradise Lost] no pity or sympathy or intuition." ⁴⁹ I would contend, however, that Woolf, Keats, Blake, and so many others misrecognize, because they foreclose, the issue. The representation of human passion, particularly of a sympathetic suffering, is indeed a critical problem for much of Milton's poetry, and, particularly when considered at large, his treatment of it bears witness to the kind of pressures, observable especially on the level of "style," that Williams recommends we look for. ⁵⁰ Like those ears of corn swaying between alternate outcomes in Paradise Lost Book 4, Milton himself may register the movement between different "structures of feeling"; the name is less important than that we understand them as different constructions of feeling itself: one, indebted to the Stoic ethic of apatheia and to Calvinism, distrusts the passions and where they may lead; the other, which one increasingly detects toward the end of the century in religion and moral philosophy, attempts to locate a place for them within the active life. To talk of any decisive shift either in Milton's poetry or afterward would be to impose a false teleology; what one can investigate is the increasing dialectical activity between the two attitudes by the end of the seventeenth century.

We take a step in that direction if we can describe the resistance to understanding certain kinds and uses of passion as work. That Eve's peculiarly restitutive and transformative commiseration is not an isolated textual moment for Milton (conveniently "frozen" here for purposes of critical argument) but rather part of a larger meditation becomes clearer when we recognize the other model behind her speech, one that merges with the traces of the Orpheus and Eurydice [End Page 438] episode from The Georgics. Eve is, after all, echoing not only Adam in her ostentatious self-abnegation ("On me . . . Mee mee only just object of his ire") but also the Son's self-sacrifice in Heav'n: "Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life / I offer, on mee let thine anger fall" (PL, 3.236-37). Penetrated by error as it is, Book 10 is her version of the Passion.

"The Passion," of course, is notoriously the poem that Milton is at once never able to write and always writing. From the 1630 fragment by that name to the Christus Patiens projected in the prologue to Samson Agonistes in 1671, its lineaments provide, as Guillory says, "the engine of his life and work." ⁵¹ Guillory and others have suggested that the great attraction and repulsion of this scene resides in Milton's sensitivity to the possibility of a father's sacrifice of his son, and certainly the complexities of the poet's relations with his own father--dramatically detailed for us by William Kerrigan--do heighten a well-established problem of representation in theology and religious art. ⁵² Yet there is a further crux, more ethical than explicitly Oedipal, vexing Milton's conception of the Passion. By 1815, Wordsworth could assert rather defensively that "passion . . . is derived from a word which signifies suffering; but the connexion which suffering has with effort, with exertion, and action, is immediate and inseparable"; Milton would like to embody the immediacy of that "connexion" in poetic terms, but he has more trouble doing so. ⁵³

In part, it is an inherited problem, one that resides in the concept of the passio as it developed from Aristotelian through Stoic ethics, and later to the religious ideal of the gloria passionis, and did not dissipate once the term was naturalized and began to describe strong human emotion. Erich Auerbach, who has chronicled the conflicting phases of this semantic history, has shown that the English sense of "passion" attempts a finely layered rapprochement between the active and passive senses of the word: "Those who stress the distinction between the two meanings 'suffering' and [active] 'passion' have not understood the dialectical relation between them in the Christian sense of sense of the word--for God's love, which moved him to take upon himself the suffering of men, is itself a motus animi without measure or limit." ⁵⁴ In his own poetic practice, however, Milton has particular difficulty maintaining the dialectic of action-in-suffering, which for him takes the form of holding together the two identities of the Son: as militant Messiah and as sympathetic human sufferer. In "The Passion," when Milton depicts Christ's head "that dropt with odorous oil down his fair eyes" (CP, 16), or in "Upon [End Page 439] the Circumcision," it is as if all the overt activity denied the poet by his immediate subject blows the rhetoric up into hyperbole. This may be a "grand style," of sorts, but not Milton's, nor should we too quickly attribute the uneasiness to "juvenilia" without understanding it in its own terms. Milton is, in general, more successful when he renders the warfaring Son only, as at the end of the "Nativity Ode," or in Paradise Regained, where the battle is quieter but not less forceful. The "passion spent" at the end of Samson Agonistes is not erotic but aggressive, as Guillory has remarked. All Thanatos and very little Eros, Samson does not repair the ruins but dies in them. Moreover, as in sonnet 19's opening line, the drama leaves open the possibility of understanding "spent" in either of two ways: wisely used or merely wasted and exhausted (in Virgil's terms, "effusus"). Eve, and not Samson, may be Milton's best if not his last answer, but the multiplication of answers and attempts within his poetry can testify to the challenge of imagining sympathetic and erotic passion as productive action.

The challenge remains. As they defend against charges of the "ignoble ease" afforded them by the academy, and become more alert than ever to the institutional conditions of their own work, literary scholars today confront their own version of it. The questioning of the sympathetic passions that Milton conducts largely in theological terms becomes more explicitly and exclusively the province of aesthetics by the end of the next century, and it is as such that we inherit it. In particular, it has taken the form of the vexed relationship between aesthetics and ideology. To equate aesthetics with ideology can be to regard it as a species of indolence--a passive acceptance of interests imposed from without--and to deny its capacity to work against and unsettle such interests. ⁵⁵ It is not that we have to distinguish between the aesthetic and instrumental uses of language; we need rather to learn more about the distinctive, peculiar "instrumentality" possessed by the aesthetic aside from its capacity to be put in the service of ideologies. Steps have been taken in that direction; one thinks, for example, of the 1994 anthology self-consciously entitled Aesthetics and Ideology, as if to insist that the two are neither perfectly congruent nor perfectly independent categories. Its contributors, with some variation, conceive of the aesthetic as a space where political and ethical assumptions can be tested and resisted, where public consequences are not avoided but deferred, or simply slowed down for questioning. ⁵⁶ What seems to be emerging from such efforts is an understanding of the aesthetic as an action [End Page 440] analogous to "working through"--a Freudian term, once more, but one that crucially emphasizes the gradual adjustment to and the admission of the conditions of the external world and others in it. ⁵⁷ Clearly, we cannot be too quick to affirm affective and aesthetic experience as "work" (one thinks of the effusive Harleys and Yoricks who weep and do little else, or, as a different example from a different time, Benjamin's criticism of empathy with the victors of history as an "indolence of the heart"). ⁵⁸ We would need in each case to scrutinize the way such experiences occur through the material medium of style. At the same time, however, I hope to have suggested that the suspicion of all uses of feeling as a kind of indolence or ideological lapse has a long, entrenched past. It may be time to brush that history against the grain. ⁵⁹

Yale University

Notes

1. John Milton, ed. Annabel Patterson (New York: Longman, 1992), 3.

2. Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985).

3. John Guillory, "Dalila's House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor," Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1986), 106-22; and "The Father's House: Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment," Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and the Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 148-76.

4. Grossman, "The Fruits of One's Labor in Miltonic Practice and Marxian Theory," ELH 59 (1992): 77-105; Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), ch. 4. Relevant studies outside of the Renaissance include the work of John Barrell, especially in The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1992) and The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980); Dustin Griffin, "Redefining Georgic: Cowper's Task," ELH 59 (1992): 865-79; Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980); and "Roman Georgic on the Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 182-214; Donna Landry, "The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History," The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 99-120; Alan Liu, "The Economy of Lyric," Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989), ch. 7; David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: the Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987); Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988); and "Wordsworth's Prescriptions: Romanticism and Professional Power," The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), 303-21. Willard Spiegelman approaches the topic of work from the opposite direction in his work on indolence: Majestic Indolence: English Poetry and the Work of Art (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

5. The phrase is Nicholas Bromell's, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1993), 2.

6. Or, as Mary Poovey has shown, as Siamese twins, since "each discourse continued to haunt the other in the form of vestigial traces." Also relevant to my treatment of Milton's Eve is Poovey's claim that the later discursive split not only forgets the common origins of aesthetics and economics in moral philosophy but also performs "ideological work apparently unrelated to aesthetics and economics," namely, "the enforcement of a set of truisms about gender" that subordinate women even as they valorize aesthetic beauty. (See Poovey's "Aesthetics and Political Economy," in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine [New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994], 79-105, especially 79-82.) Poovey's own discussion of the breakup of moral philosophy draws on earlier work by John Guillory, Cultural Capital: the Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), ch. 5.

7. Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 210.

8. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and tr. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 21:101-2.

9. Freud, 21:103, 108.

10. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 42-43. Part of the problem--as Marcuse knows--is that Freud's theory of sublimation was never fully developed or integrated into his metapsychology. The editors of The Standard Edition surmise that sublimation formed the subject of one of the lost metapsychological papers (see Freud, 14:106, 126).

11. Freud, 21:103-4.

12. On the fourth Georgic's relation to Aeneid 6 (Aeneas in the underworld) as well as Aeneid 2 (Aeneas's loss of Creusa), see Michael Putnam, Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in The Georgics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), 297-98, 306-7. For a very fine, more general discussion of the way Virgil discovers his basic strategy for the Aeneid in writing the Georgics, see William Sessions, "Spenser's Georgics," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 202-38.

13. Virgil's poetry is quoted from Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6, Loeb Classical Library Series 63, ed. and tr. by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by number and line, and abbreviated E, G, or A.

14. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 4.977-86. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by book and line and abbreviated PL (for Paradise Lost) or CP.

15. Geoffrey Hartman, "Milton's Counterplot," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-70 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 113-23; T. S. Eliot, "Virgil and the Christian World," On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar Straus, 1957), 141.

16. For further discussion of labor and its synonyms, see Susan Scheinberg Kristol, Labor and Fortuna in Virgil's Aeneid (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), esp. 226, and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, 10 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1977).

The English words "labor" and "work" are similarly complex and deserve some discussion here. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between them and adds a third category to the vita activa: "action." For Arendt, labor is limited to that which is motivated by biological necessity; its products are consumed as soon as they are made. Where the fruits of labor are ephemeral, the results of work are characteristically durable and exist, despite wear and tear, for permanent use. Because her distinctions seem to me not to apply either to Virgil's or to Milton's usages, I do not differentiate sharply between labor and work in this essay--except insofar as "labor" can only denote process (the activity of working) and not the end-product, whereas "work" must include some element of materialization or reification.

Action, in The Human Condition, is intangible, consisting of words and deeds; it creates "the web of human relationships" and our political bodies (accomplishments Arendt would deny to "labor" and "work"). This rather rigid renewal of the Aristotelian categories of praxis and poesis founders, as Arendt acknowledges, when it comes to categorizing poetry, which merges the characteristics of both "action" (the exchange of words, etc.) and "work" (reification). (The Human Condition [Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958], 167-74).

17. Ovid reunites Orpheus and Eurydice in the blessed fields: see Metamorphoses 2, Loeb Classical Library Series 43, ed. G. P. Gould, tr. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 11.61-66. W. S. Anderson provides a useful sketch of the differences between the two versions in "The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid," Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), 25-50.

18. Most studies of the Georgics include a discussion of the epyllion. On Servius's position, see L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 108-11. For a fine modern reading that takes up the sometimes neglected role of Proteus, see David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), ch. 2. Notable treatments of the Georgics as a whole include Joseph Farrell, Virgil's Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), Gary Miles, Virgil's Georgics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), Christine Perkell, The Poet's Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil's Georgics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), and Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton: Princeton Univ, Press, 1979).

19. Perkell, 69-70.

20. Tylus, "Spenser, Virgil, and the Politics of Poetic Labor," ELH 55 (1988), 55.

21. Sessions, 204.

22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11.60-61.

23. Berger, "Archaism, Vision, and Revision: Studies in Virgil, Plato, and Milton," The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences 11 (1967), 32.

24. Francis Bacon, Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1857-74), 3:419. Milton, Of Education, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959-82), 2:366-67. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page and abbreviated CPW.

25. Marcuse, Eros, 35.

26. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), 71.

27. See Marx's comments on the division of labor and the family in The German Ideology (Marx, 158-60).

28. The word "sympathy" does not enter English until the second half of the sixteenth century. Although the sense that we are more familiar with, a "community of feeling" or "harmony of disposition," is present in Spenser's "A Hymne in Honour of Beautie," the word is used during the next hundred years to describe any principle of mutual attraction, affinity, or magnetism between things. As such it was readily adapted for the description of planetary music, medicine, white, and black magic--all of which presented the Church with the serious problem of a rival religion. For an account of Renaissance astrological and magic practices, see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1975). Also helpful in this connection is the background given in Anya Taylor, Magic and English Romanticism (Athens: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979). The more dangerous associations that sympathy acquired from its relation to the occult were intensified by a longstanding bias against the theater and its effects on public audiences; this latter issue has been explored at length by Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981).

29. Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 84, 104-5.

30. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), esp. 60-69.

31. Sidney, "The Defense of Poesie," Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1962), 427.

32. Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), 198; Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 51, and 45-52 more generally.

33. While I share Georgia Christopher's impatience with sentimental and idealizing readings of the scene, I cannot dismiss Eve's speech as having "only incidental bearing upon Adam's return to faith" (Milton and the Science of the Saints [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982], 164).

34. See Heather James, "Milton's Eve, the Romance Genre, and Ovid," Comparative Literature 45 (1993), 134, 141-42.

35. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Hopewell, NJ: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 3.1.75-76.

36. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 23.

37. See Burke's "Literature as Equipment for Living," The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1967), 293-304.

38. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, tr. Alan Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), 23-24.

39. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 42.

40. Hartman, "I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication," The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), 21.

41. See R. S. Crane, "Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the 'Man of Feeling,'" ELH 1 (1934), 205-30.

42. Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 128-35, esp. 132.

43. Yeats, "Adam's Curse," in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillian, 1989); Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 248.

44. Important contributions of the last decade include G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992); Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), ch. 5; Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986). For a more extensive bibliography, including studies of earlier decades, see Johnson, 205-10.

45. McGann's recent work on Mary Robinson and other poets, particularly women writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, marks a significant qualification of his earlier distrust of the affective as the evasive. He now argues against the tendency to read the literatures of sensibility "through categories that exclude the (aesthetic) value of sensibility as a mode of expression"--against, in his words, the reduction to "neutralized 'historical' terms." See McGann, "Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho," Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995), 56.

46. Johnson, 14.

47. MacKenzie, Mirror, 14 (13 March, 1779); quoted in Brown, 89. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (1792; New York: Penguin, 1992), 267-68.

48. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). A similar position is defended by Derek Attridge, with an emphasis on the effects of differential repetition: "But literature can act powerfully to hold the political and the ethical up for scrutiny by means of its power of suspension . . . performing the ethical decision and political gesture." Its staging of the manifold capacities of language, he continues, "happens only through repeated acts of reading (or reading/writing) whereby the uniqueness is reenacted differently with each repetition." See Attridge, "Literary Form and the Demands of Politics," in Aesthetics and Ideology.

49. For Blake's Milton, see The Complete Poetry and Prose, rev. ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 138 (plate 38:5). The well-known quotation from Woolf's A Writer's Diary is quoted in and used by Sandra Gilbert, "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," PMLA 93 (1978), 369.

50. Williams, 131.

51. Guillory, "The Father's House," 176 n. 22.

52. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983).

53. From Wordsworth's "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 3:81.

54. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 70.

55. Even a critic such as Terry Eagleton--not generally noted for a reluctance to demystify--will uphold the revolutionary potential of the aesthetic dimension; it is its capture by the political right that he deplores (see The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990], esp. 60).

56. See especially George Levine's introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology (1-28).

57. Freud, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through," 12:147-56.

58. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.

59. I dedicate this essay with thanks to the remarkable teaching of Leslie Brisman, and to my own students in seminars at Yale.