Book Review

Milton and the Natural World:
Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost

It is worth the price of the book just to find out how subtly words like experience or occult were used by people like Francis Bacon or Robert Boyle-and also by Milton. Edwards is also not content to let a word like charlatan go by without examination of a real Italian ciarlatàno, observed in the street by Samuel Purchas, a mountebank fooling people by his deceitful patter (ciàrla) and tricks that deceived the eye, in order to sell the equivalent of snake oil. Aha, you say, snake oil: isn't that what Eve buys? Yes, that's the point. Satan is indeed a charlatan who sells Eve the equivalent of snake oil-the forbidden fruit-in the process of practicing a combination of black magic, snake-oil salesmanship, and pseudo-religious patter.

Karen Edwards begins by gently but firmly proving that Kester Svendsen in Milton and Science sent a generation of Milton scholars down the wrong trail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956). Svendsen pictured Milton as a fossilized old Elizabethan with a backward view of the New Philosophy: "it is the old science, rather than the new, which bulks large in Milton" (3). Svendsen in turn caused William Riley Parker and others to believe that Paradise Lost is "the monument to scientific backwardness" that Svendsen saw it as (Edwards 4). Instead, the poem is "cognizant of the century's new experience of the natural world" (4) as embodied in the research methods and publications of Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne (especially in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica), Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and John Evelyn. Bacon gave Milton an empirical attitude towards scientific observation, Browne gave him a skeptical eye, Hooke gave him a microscopic perspective, Boyle gave him some keys to understanding the inner workings of the human body, and Evelyn defined pestilential smog and unnatural air pollution for him.

Edwards concentrates on the book of nature in the first major division of her book, on animals in the second part, and on plants in the third, firmly placing the experimentalism of the Baconian empiricists in the study of nature according to Milton. Experience, not abstraction; the world of observation, not speculation; inductive classification, not classical precedent, instructs Milton when he describes plants and animals, in Eden and out of it. Edwards finds Milton agreeing with the Baconians. "Deductive arguments can be deceptive . . . ; it is better to rely solidly upon matters of fact" (19). Milton is un-superstitious about science, and un-sentimental, and un-nostalgic. His serpent makes vocal sounds by using his tongue "as if it were a musical instrument (specifically an organ)" (25). Satan is the embodiment of a snake-oil salesman, as well, anti-scientific, a mountebank, a quack: he combines salesmanship with false oratory and false theology. Satan is not an empiricist (33).

Expanding on what she means by linking science and poetry in her subtitle, Edward summarizes: "Milton's poetic style-his 'infinite suggestiveness'-is exactly what we should expect of one who advocates an experimental reading of the natural world" (47). As with Browne's suggestive and punning prose style, Milton's poetry "generated rather than closed off enquiry" (56). By p. 70, Edwards can boldly announce

It is the thesis of this book that the natural world represented in Paradise Lost yields its interpretive riches upon an experimental reading and that comprising those riches are the reveries, discoveries, and uncertainties of experimental philosophy in its first, exhilarating decades. (70)

Sphinx, chimaera, griffin, amphisboena, leviathan; Tree of Forbidden Fruit, figs, roses, balsam: trust Karen Edwards to tell you exactly what was thought about each mythical (or were they?) plant or beast. Even though, as literary critics, we have been trained to think in terms of imagery, of rhetorical tropes, or allegory, a bird may just be a bird, and a rose is a rose is a rose, in Milton as in Gertrude Stein. Edwards has discovered, for instance, that thornless roses were not just a feature of Eden: they existed in England and were pictured as such in Gerard's famous Herbal (Ed wards 173: Figure 14). Monsters such as the leviathan [End Page 132]and the griffin represent the "monstrous effects of a non-experimental reading" (80), and bees and ants deserved study not just for their models of commonwealths but for their patterns of behavior as observed even under the microscope of Robert Hooke.

To read Milton's myrtle as by nature representative of Venus, as Alastair Fowler does, is over-reading--what Edwards calls "allegorical rigidity" (18), and to read the ellops (PL 10.525) as "perhaps originally a swordfish," as Hughes does (10.525n), is also over-subtle: ". . . creatures in Milton's catalog [of serpents] resist this symbolizing approach, especially the indeterminate ellops" (92). There is evidence that specious monsters manufactured in the perverse imaginations of fallen angels are "inscribed in specious actuality, entangled in a discourse of superstition and half-truths" (94). Outside of the Satanic imagination, nature remains clear and comprehensible; the mythical leviathan "has some features of the natural (cetacean, crocodilian, or serpentine), but the overall entity is fictional" (114).

Milton's beasts are not brought piecemeal out of a "curiosity cabinet," the seventeenth-century equivalent of a miniaturized side-show in a box. He doesn't exhibit the claw of a griffin as an oddity, and he doesn't value the word "strange," as in a Barnumesque phrase such as "strange wonders of the Orient." No beast or flower in Paradise Lost is senti mentalized or treated as a curiosity: crocodiles may be there, for instance, but unicorns are not. In Raphael's "fleeced the flocks and bleating rose, / As plants," Milton seems to allude to the "vegetable lamb of Tartary, or the barometz" (122), a very strange beast indeed, one that seems to be draped over a stick (think of Brooks Brothers' golden fleece emblem) like a kind of wolf-popsicle. John Parkinson's frontispiece to Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629) actually illustrates this limp-vegetable lamb, but Thomas Browne makes fun of the sheep-plant, and Milton seems to restrain his own opinion in a similar way. Raphael, Edwards believes, is involved in the "process of freeing animals from their symbolic places" (127).

Now, as for "the royalist bee and republican ant" (128), Milton seems to turn conventional interpretation of the politics of insects upside down. If Edwards is correct, Milton's bees just talk a good game and don't get much done: they "embody immoderate and wasteful activity" (131). Even what was thought to be the "monarch bee" (a king and not a queen) was, well, lazy. With the image of the bees, Milton may be picturing a dissolute monarchy, with its idleness and plotting and corruption. The bees live ironically in a straw-built citadel, like the least able of the three little pigs. By contrast, the parsimonious emmets, not swarming as the bees do, are calm and collected, and the ants practice commonality and magnanimity (135). Good ants; bad bees.

In all of this, Edwards continues to turn upside down the conventional beliefs of Miltonists, from Svendsen to Fowler (and what about allegorists like Mindele Treip?)--the numbers don't add up, the symbols don't work, the images are too literal and too naturalistic. Milton had common sense as compared with a sixth sense. What about the balm of Gilead, and its derivation from a balsam tree? What about those apples of Sodom, that turn into dust in serpents' mouths: aren't they symbolic of something? If it is true, as Edwards maintains, that "Milton consistently uses botanical [and animal] terms with precision and care" (145), even to the degree of using "ant" and "emmet," but not "pismire," or of using "platan" to mean both the occidental and the oriental species (144), then do those apples of Sodom really exist, growing either in the vicinity of the Dead Sea? In a flurry of mis-naming, Satan, who has simplified the name of the fruit to "apple" is himself victim of another fruit misnamed "apple," the "Sodom apples" not admitted to Gerard or Parkinson's herbals (148). "In Paradise Lost, the penalty for misnaming and undervaluing the natural world is to be subject to the monstrous fictions told about it" (148).

The trick is that "only plants which belong geographically and historically to the whole world are represented in Milton's earthly paradise" (151). This may be Edwards' major discovery, that Milton's practice of identifying Edenic flora and fauna has an internal consistency that has nothing to do with symbols or with allegory, or even with colonial exploitation of the Americas or of India. The Indian herdsman who takes shade under the fig tree and the American native who also protects his body against the sun with "feathered cincture" are not "innocent natives victimized by their European conquerors," as David Quint reports, but common descendants of [End Page 133] Adam and Eve (153).

Milton probably never saw a cedar tree, though he may have seen one illustrated in Gerard's Herbal. And he probably never looked through a microscope at a bee, partly because Hooke's great illustrations of microscopic ant and bee were not published until after Milton went blind (in 1665, to be precise). But Milton certainly knew the difference between the pleasing and healthful odor of balm or rose or cedar as compared with the noxious odors of London sea-coal pollution and sewage, both of which odors he might well associate with Satan, as did Evelyn. Even Adam's "balmy sweat" is innocent and sweet by comparison.

Milton encourages his readers to "engage in a continuing process of interpretation" (202) of the natural world; in writing Paradise Lost, "Milton was fashioning a poetic representation of the natural world that was responsive to the latest intellectual and stylistic currents of the day. Milton's Adam and Eve are not nostalgic. Nor was their author" (203).

Milton and the Natural World would make a good book to teach alongside the great prose and poetry of the seventeenth century: it would be pedagogical fun and a challenge to upper-level undergraduates or graduate students to read Edwards's book together with selected works by Harvey, Hooke, Bacon, Browne, and Evelyn, and DuBartas's Divine Weekes and Paradise Lost, all in the same semester.

Edwards' writing is fresh, witty, clean, neat, unencumbered by jargon. She is a pleasant conversationalist--someone to sit down with after dinner and talk deeply wit--engaging rather than pretentious and annoying (no one from Svendsen and Parker to Alastair Fowler could possibly be upset with her sweet disagreements), yet there is solid learning behind her every sentence. She is a born skeptic, but not a controversialist; she has strong opinions, but they are always substantiated. Her interpretations are rarely arguable, they are so well-built. Her book will certainly change the mind and the attitude of any intelligent reader. It is one of those quiet books that change the way we think forever after.

Roy Flannagan