The Jonathan Richardsons as Milton Critics

Abstract

The Jonathan Richardsons asMilton Critics PETER M. BRIGGS In his own day Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1665-1745) was known primarily as a portrait painter (second only to Kneller in the opinion of many contemporaries) and as a collector of prints; later interpreters of his period have seen in Richardson an important pre­ cursor to Sir Joshua Reynolds as a theorist and defender of painting as a liberal art? But he was also a Milton enthusiast and an astute, although ‘‘amateur,” interpreter of Paradise Lost.2 Working in col­ laboration with his son Jonathan (1694-1771), who was also a painter, Richardson published in 1734 Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton s Paradise Lost, which includes a biography of the poet, a general appreciation of his art, and close commentary on selected passages in the epic.3 Although the Richardsons were satirized for naive enthusiasm in their own day,4 they were among the first to celebrate the suggestive qualities of Milton’s language and to em­ phasize the visual side of Paradise Lost; they expounded sympathet­ ically the humanely representative natures of Adam and Eve; they explained in detail Milton’s idea of the Happy Fall and thus became the best early defenders of the last two books of Paradise Lost;5 they noticed Milton’s emphatic spellings and expressive metrics, and they 115 116 / PETER M. BRIGGS justified the punctuation of the editions printed in Milton’s life­ time.6 Beyond such specific contributions the Richardsons suggested an approach to Milton’s achievements which significantly fore­ shadowed critical events to come. The Richardsons’ Explanatory Notes were written at least partly in response to Richard Bentley’s notorious “corrected” edition of Para­ dise Lost which appeared in 1732.7 Public condemnation of Bentley’s “tampering” with Milton’s text was nearly universal, and his edition has remained for more than two centuries a monument of scholarly narrow-mindedness and critical presumption. Nonetheless, Bentley’s alterations forced readers to look at Milton’s text more closely and critically than they had, and many (for example, Pope) who derided Bentley in public learned in private how better to read Paradise Lost.8 Most of Bentley’s cancellations and emendations are deservedly infamous. He repeatedly misconstrued Milton’s language and syntax, he often tried to curtail the poet’s allusiveness, and a few alterations suggest that he misunderstood Milton’s ideas or deliberately at­ tempted to change them. Apart from misreadings and distortions, Bentley’s Paradise Lost represents a more fundamental, though cov­ ert, attack on Milton. Bentley had a very strict notion of poetic co­ herence: he believed that important truths, particularly moral ones, are simple and straightforward, and that consequently, techniques for expressing them should be equally straightforward. If truth is neither complex nor ambiguous, poetic language, syntax, and meta­ phor should not be so either. Bentley’s methods of interpretation can be made clearer by ex­ amining one of his less notorious notes. He tended in general to be mistrustful of metaphor, usually because of some logical disjunction between tenor and vehicle.9 He wished that there be close analogical truth in poetic comparisons, and that metaphors in themselves be factually accurate. For example, he emended Milton’s famous levi­ athan simile (PL I, 200-208), so as to rationalize it. The poet speaks of a mariner in a night-foundered boat (Bentley changed it to “nighfoundered ”—note that this also cancels a metaphor) mistakenly fix­ ing his anchor on a whale’s “skaly rind.” Bentley comments: The Jonathan Richardsons as Milton Critics / 117 Skaly rind is unlucky here; for it falls out contrary, that the Whale has no Skales; or if he had them, by Proportion with other Fish, they would be so large, thick, and solid, that no Seaman could fix his Anchor through them. But the Author gave it otherwise, With fixed Anchor in his skinny rind. Tis truly a Skin, so soft and thick, as to make it not incredible, that a small Anchor may be fix’d there without the Whale’s feeling the Wound.10 Bentley’s aim “to make it not incredible” went further; he repeatedly canceled words which implied to him...