ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the rubric of ‘Style’, some of the ways in which John Milton dramatises the beauty of art in the presentation of the Garden of Choice; but it is worth while looking again at the key passage, Book IV, lines 216–68, where style, drama, doctrine and narrative combine to build up a density of apprehension. The description of the Garden can be seen as a bridge passage between the two polarities that give it meaning, Satan and the human pair. For Satan, Christ’s rule can only be known in terms of a scale of power: the more power he has, the less Satan can have. Eve is liable to the same kind of argument, even before Satan has put it in her mind. The emotion of tragic mystery that Milton attaches to Adam’s fate leaves doctrine where one might suppose it ought to be -as the highest expression of human capacity to understand.
