CORRESPONDENCE
EMPSON, ADAMS, AND MILTON
SIRS:
I hope it is not too late to offer
some comments on the article by R .
¥.
Adams in your March-April num–
ber, about my essay on Milton and
Bentley.
No doubt he is right in finding so
many copying errors; I wish I had
known about them before the second
edition, when the type was cast. I
copied out my Bentley and Pearce
quotations in the British Museum and
wrote the essay in Tokyo; certainly I
ought to have remembered to check
them later on, when I could. But I
do not see that the mistakes he quotes
make much difference. Indeed, this
idea of checking your quotations as
an absolute duty is fairly recent, and
not always relevant; for instance Haz–
litt habitually quoted from memory,
and commonly a bit wrong, but he was
writing very good criticism. When I
was building an argument on a detail
of the text I would be keen on getting
the detail right while I was looking
at it, but not otherwise. I hope this
does not sound insolently casual; actu–
ally, I have to put an absurd amount
of time into trying to write decent
prose, so that the reader can get the
point without bother, whereas Hazlitt
apparently could do it at his first
shot. What I do submit is that a
critic is spending his time better if
he does that than if he struggles for
the degree of accuracy which is rightly
expected from a textual editor.
What is more serious about Mr.
Adams' article is the claim that I was
giving a harmful account of
Paradise
Lost,
actually spoiling the poem for
my more trustful readers ; by the "cha–
otic uniformity of my responses,"
"treating a giraffe as a rabbit oddly
botched in the making," and so on.
But I wasn't telling anybody how to
read it, except on the one issue about
"pastoral" where Mr. Adams appears
to agree with me. By the way, I can't
see why there is any separate problem
about Imagery in Epics, though of
course I agree in general that an
author shouldn't be saddled with mean–
ings that are irrelevant to his style
and purpose; only you must call it
bad writing if they thrust themselves
in. I agree that the quaint bits of
animus against women, which the
Bentley treatment makes prominent,
are rather deflating to the poem, and
perhaps I made too much fuss about
them; but a reader ought not to have
to protect his innocence from seeing
the lapses of Milton. In the poem as
a whole, these bits of nagging are
swept aside by the tremendous speech
of appeal from Eve to Adam which
saves the situation of mankind. But
it is not only that one feels they were
in the mind of Milton; historically
they are part of the movement away
from medieval ideas such as chivalry;
and one needs I think to appreciate
Paradise Lost
as a monumental sum–
ming-up of the way the mind of Europe
was going, Counter-Reformation as
well as Reformation. Something has
obviously gone very wrong with Mil–
ton's God, too, but he didn't invent
that either ; the human mind is splen–
did but appalling, and what you are
getting here is a massive specimen of
one of the ways it ca n go. The poem
needs I think to be regarded rather
like Aztec or Benin sculpture, invigor–
ating as well as marvelous but clearly
produced by a sickening ideology and
social practice. I did not say this in
my essay, partly because I was con–
cerned with something else, but also
because it has been obvious ever since
it was said by Blake and Shelley. Now–
adays we get these Neo critics, who
apparently demand that you must sink
your self totally in the art-work when
viewing it. I would say that my ap–
proach is more "total" than Mr.
Adams', not less as he implies; you
need to see both sides of the thing ;
it is out of place to feel a tender
regret for the imperial but appalling
court of Benin.
Also I don't think I need have been
blamed, at the end of his article, for
suggesting that Milton (in his turn)
