hom I now desire to worship as the sovran of
creation. She affects to rebuke the flattery, but naturally asks to be
shown the tree on which the wonderful fruit grows. It of course turns
out to be the Forbidden Tree: and Eve mentions the prohibition as a
thing final and unquestionable. He meets her refusal by giving a
sinister and plausible explanation of the prohibition. Why did God
forbid her the fruit? "Why, but to keep ye low and ignorant, His
worshippers?" God, he suggests, knows too well that as the fruit had
raised the serpent from brute to human, so it would raise the woman
from human to divine. Noon and hunger come to fortify his {188}
arguments; and, after a speech in which she adds one more of her own
drawn from the name, the Tree of Knowledge, given to the tree by God
Himself, she plucks and eats. In the first ecstasy of pleasure she
luxuriates in joy and self-confidence. Then she considers whether she
shall use her new powers to make herself the equal and even the
superior of Adam. The prospect tempts her: but she is not quite free
from fear that the threatened punishment of death may after all descend
upon her. And that suggests the picture of "Adam wedded to another
Eve," which brings her swiftly to the decision that Adam shall share
with her her fate, whichever it be, bliss or woe. In this, as later in
her hasty proposal of suicide, Eve is a living and convincing human
figure. To the stronger and wiser Adam it was harder to give life.
But what could be finer or truer than his instant repudiation of her
plausible tale--

"How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!"

followed by his immediate resolution to die with her--

"And me with thee hath ruined: for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die.
How can I live without thee?"

{189} The rest follows with equal probability. Once resolved to unite
his lot with hers, he soon finds arguments to prove that that lot is
not likely after all to be so dreadful. Having talked himself into the
surrender of his judgment he eats, and having eaten he goes at once all
lengths of extravagance, folly and sin. Then comes the reaction and
the inevitable mutual reproaches; with the fine natural touch of Eve
upbraiding Adam for his weakness in yielding to her request and
granting her the freedom which had proved so fatal. So the ninth book
closes. When the story is resumed in the second half of the t