"Awful Doubt": Milton and Darwin in the Land of Fire

Abstract

With regard to ‘Paradise Lost,’” Henry James mused in 1876, “some of the cargo must be thrown overboard to save the ship.”1 The problem for James is not the size, length, or volume of a poem that, as Samuel Johnson groused, “none ever wished . . . longer than it is.”2 It is instead, I will venture, a problem of reading John Milton after Charles Darwin, for whom, in precedent, Milton presented both a problem and a provisional solution. James’s remark was an elaboration upon the French intellectual Edmond Schérer’s estimation that Paradise Lost could be appreciated “only in fragments,” and it was a fragment of Milton’s epic that returned to Darwin as the HMS Beagle “drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorous” off the eastern coast of South America: “It is impossible to behold this plain of matter, as it were melted & consuming by heat, without being reminded of Milton’s description “