Is Art "nice"? Art and Artifice at the Outset of Temptation in Paradise Lost

There are several reasons for stopping to look at the details of the scene in Book 9 where Eve is happily gardening alone, just before her temptation begins. She has worked hard to get there, and she appears to be surrounded by some interesting flowers, specifically chosen. Moreover, the sight of her has the astonishing effect of stopping the devil in his tracks, making him “stupidly good, of enmity disarmed” (9.465). At this crucial moment of discovery Satan is unable to summon up any evil at all. His purpose is momentarily confounded. I believe that Satan is arrested by more than sensual rapture, and that the iconography of this scene has more than decorative significance. Here is an interesting hiatus in the dramatic action which deserves close investigation. Eve is creatively and artistically engaged, and the scene shows a cunning interplay between art and artifice.

Although “nice art” is not specifically mentioned in the passage to be considered in this essay, it becomes, as a notion, increasingly prevalent as thematic backdrop to the compelling Satanic design which gradually impinges on Eve’s innocent gardening schema. Moreover, “nice art” persists as an essentially tricky idea wherever it is represented, either through word or deed. The word nice is variously glossed in the OED: it indicates refined tastes, discrimination, precision, accuracy, danger, uncertainty, and attentiveness to detail, which counterbalance the glosses such as foolishness, wantonness, and indolence. There is no unequivocal meaning even in this brief word in the epic: no nice judgement is possible.

In the postlapsarian state, art is not nature. Nature is the true product of God’s Creation. Humanity may only try to imitate nature through art. Daston and Park trace, as the first text to air this problem, Aristotle’s Physics, where the distinction between art and nature is observed to rest on the fact that artificially constructed objects have no “innate impulse to change”: they can neither develop nor reproduce themselves. “Only natural objects can constitute true species or kinds characterized by internal principles of change and faithful reproduction” (Daston and Park 263–64). Following this line in his book Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature, Edward Tayler writes of the tradition that “Art corrupts the pristine integrity of nature” (37). Milton’s text problematizes this dogmatic view: in Eden art and nature are interdependent. Art is not an simple issue in Paradise Lost. Isabel MacCaffrey observes that “Milton’s references to art are frequently pejorative; the flowers of Paradise are the products, not of ‘nice Art,’ but of ‘Nature boon’ (iv.241–42)” (MacCaffrey 161). And Roy Flannagan notes, “the word art is almost always associated with the Black Arts or the kinds of dissimulation practised by the fallen angels in Paradise Lost” (105). On the other hand, Milton’s text appears to endorse the idea of “Nature as the Art of God [as] a commonplace even before Dante,” as Tayler notes with reference to Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (185). Robert Fludd’s “The Mirror of Nature and the Image of Art” of 1617 shows, as an example of this commonplace, that God is “the final cause of nature. The chain of command, as we say, is perfectly clear. Art imitates Nature, and Nature is the Art of God” (Tayler 2). Furthermore, Thomas Browne’s view that “Nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, they being both servants of his Providence . . . In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God” (Tayler 32) certainly complicates the view that art is necessarily a manifestation of human misguidedness or idolatry. As Roland Mushat Frye points out,

Though Milton’s descriptions drawn directly from nature are often extraordinarily effective, the principal analogues to the subject matter he treats in the epics are to be found in the visual arts rather than in nature. It is the arts which have enabled the mind of man to “see” the supernatural, and the arts which have stocked the mind with images for envisioning the principal incidents of Paradise Lost.

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Several critics recognize the influence...