expression of the Matrona: "small in her exile, but powerful "; " "the house is hers, and man is to consult her for all matters relating to the household " ; "the union of man and woman must be voluntary on both sides." Woman must never be considered as the passive instrument of pleasure; her consent must be obtained "by words of friendship and tenderness." " This attitude of superiority mixed with respect and tenderness is quite precisely Milton's attitude to woman.

If we pass on to Milton's more particularly religious ideas, the conception of the "Greater Man," of Christ, who is the whole body of the elect, of the intelligent, the problem becomes wider. It is a larger tradition than that of the Zohar which comes down to Milton. But the tradition is in the Kabbalah also. The Heavenly Man, Adam Kadmon, who is One, the prototype and also the whole of mankind, may have helped Milton towards his idea of the Greater Man, Christ. In any case there is harmony.

This parallelism could be carried on ad infinitum. I shall only add here the simple statement that, among others, the following Miltonic conceptions are also found in the Zohar:

Original Sin takes place in each of us, and not once for all in Adam. In God's intention our bodies were to become spirits without having to undergo death.

There is in the fall much that is good.

There exist mysteries which it is fatal to unveil.

God reveals himself to men according to their powers,

and not such as he is.

Holy Scripture has many meanings.

External events, although real in themselves, are yet in a way only symbols of spiritual events, etc.

45 VI, 117.

46 I, 286.

There is thus practically not one philosophical trait in Milton which is not to be found in the Zohar. Does this mean that Milton derived all his ideas from the Kabbalah? That cannot be reasonably asserted. It seems to

me:

1. That he obviously derived from the Zohar such peculiar conceptions as are found nowhere else, e. g., the idea of "retraction," his most fundamental idea;

2. That some ideas coming to him from other sources were strengthened by the Zohar into a maturity and importance they would not otherwise have reached;

3. That again he found in the Zohar confirmation of other ideas which belonged to a much wider tradition.

But it is perhaps practically impossible—and it is of no real utility— to try to work out this division in the detail of the ideas. What conclusions then are we to draw from the main facts?

The first is that Milton has used the Zohar; I see no other hypothesis covering the range of correspondences I have hardly done more than point out here.

The second is that Milton's originality as a thinker is practically reduced to the working of his intellect or feelings upon outside material which he appropriates and only arranges. Yet he remains a great thinker, because he is still the representative of the modern mind in presence of the tremendous chaos of impossible ideas, puzzling myths, and grotesque conceptions of the Zohar. Milton has chosen warily; he has drawn from this confusion practically all the original or deep ideas that were acceptable to the cultured European. He has never been swept away by the element of intellectual and sentimental perversity which plays so great a part in the Zohar. In the

presence of this (for it) new world rising on the European horizon, an undeniable greatness of character and of intellect was needed to maintain such an attitude; few of those who dealt intimately with the Kabbalah were able to do so.

In the light of these data-Milton now appearing, not as the creator, but as the stage-manager only, of his philosophical ideas - the problem of the poet's thought is transformed and becomes: Why and how did Milton come to adopt such ideas? Why did he give up the orthodox tradition of his time and adopt this kabbalistic tradition?

The answer is to be found in the historical and psychological study of his life, of the evolution of his feelings and character, a study of which I have tried to lay the foundations in Part I.

Milton's original value may thus be diminished, but his historical significance becomes much greater. He is not an isolated thinker lost in seventeenth-century England, with predecessors or disciples. He becomes, at a given moment, the brilliant representative of an antique and complex tradition which continues and widens after him; for the problem becomes larger. "Milton among the kabbalists"-this is, as it were, a gap blown into the very fortress of English literature, and much may here come in: for example, the inexplicable relationship of Blake to Milton becomes clearer for this common light;" Blake himself in many points is less of a puzzle; and this current broadens into the nineteenth century from Shelley to Whitman. But here it is no longer simply Milton and only the Zohar that are in question;

47 See on this my Blake and Milton (Paris, Alcan, 1920, and New York, Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press, 1924).

other influences are at work, and on others besides Milton. It becomes necessary to trace a whole stream of semioccult ideas, flowing through the whole of modern literature and taking in much of Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche, much of Lamartine and Hugo.18

48

48 See on this point my article in the Revue de littérature comparée, III (1923), 337-68.

A

CHAPTER II

ROBERT FLUDD (1574-1637)

STUDY of Fludd is indispensable to a proper

understanding of the evolution of ideas in the

seventeenth century in England. His contemporaries held him in high esteem. Selden is known to have thought highly of him. Gassendi devoted two treatises to a courteous refutation of his ideas. His works are an encyclopedia of Kabbalism, Neo-Platonism, Hermetism, and of all sciences and arts of his time, from astrology and even astronomy, to the construction of musical instru

ments.

His system is extremely complicated, and it can be said at once that Milton has not adopted it, nor even probably been influenced by it except on some particular points which I shall examine in detail. That Milton knew Fludd I take for granted; every educated man of the time knew Fludd; to his great reputation as a philosopher he added celebrity as a medical practitioner and a somewhat scandalous notoriety for his independence towards the medical authorities, who, on several occasions, had to admonish him severely.

Of his general system of ideas, it is enough to say that practically all the kabbalistic conceptions which we went over in our last chapter are found in his works. It is therefore needless to prove the general similarly between Milton's philosophy and Fludd's.

There is, however, one particular doctrine which must be investigated more closely, because it can be said not