Robert Martin Adams
EMPSON AND BENTLEY
Something About Milton Too
Empson on Pearce on Bentley on Milton--one would hesi–
tate to involve the Chinese puzzle any further, if it weren't for the
hope of clarifying it. Milton wrote the poem, Bentley emended the
text, Pearce criticized the emendations, Empson to gain his private
ends revived the debate.
1
But Empson's comments have been treated
very much like Bentley's original emendations--as a
faux pas
with
just enough oblique cleverness attached so that one had better be
careful. Professor Hanford has employed a classically Empsonian am–
biguity in dealing with Empson.
A M ilton Handbook
said in 1946,
"it has remained for William Empson to declare Bentley superior both
in sincerity and in discernment to those critics who have found no
aesthetic difficulties in Milton'g poetry and who praise him for the
wrong reasons." The tone of this phrasing is pretty clearly hostile; the
phrase "it has remained for" implies that now we've heard everything,
and the assumption that Empson is a defender of Bentley right down
to his "sincerity" makes opposition easy. But in 1949,
John Milton,
Englishman
planted a thick hedge by saying that some of Bentley's
emendations had been "interestingly" defended by the "super-subtle
modernist," Empson.
2
"Interestingly" here means "clever but un-
1 Milton,
Paradise Lost;
Richard Bentley, ed.,
Milton's
Paradise Lost, Lon–
don 1732; Zachary Pearce,
A Review of the Text of the
12
Books of Milton's
Paradise Lost, London 1773; William Empson,
Some Versions of Pastoral,
Norfolk,
Conn., n.d.
2 A Milton Handbook,
339;
John Milton, Englishman,
258. The earlier
book is not without its own charming bifurcations, for example, in scorning
Bentley because only " two of his many emendations have been adopted in the
received text, while some five or ten additional ones are held by
J.
W. Mackail
to be all but certain" (3 39-340 ).
