Thomas Bentley to Dr Pearce: new light on Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIV, Issue 1, 1 May 1981, Page 23

Thomas Bentley to Dr Pearce: new light on Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost

J. K. HALE

KATHLEEN COLERIDGE

Stuck inside a copy of Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost of 1732 the Turnbull Library possesses a most intriguing letter of 1731, which throws fresh light on that notorious edition and its sequel. The letter itself has been known of for some time, for it came into the Turnbull’s possession in 1921, and its text was published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1925. 1 But its historical and scholarly significance has not received much attention in print. It is briefly mentioned in at least one recent work on Milton; and it gets fuller discussion in an article that appeared after the present essay had been written. 2 Yet the letter, I believe, deserves independent consideration because none of these writings quite identifies its value for Milton scholarship, nor do they reveal the interest it holds for the more general student of literary history.

Before examining the letter reproduced below I should sketch the personalities and issues which it illuminates. Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was the foremost English classical scholar of his time, in fact probably of all time. His forte was textual criticism, and within that province the emending of passages by conjectures based on his wide, systematic reading and powerful sense of logic. Celebrated examples of these powers at work are his editions of Callimachus (1697) and Manilius (1739). His scholarship, but also his talent for verbal combat, reached a wider public in the controversy over the authenticity of the Epistles of Phalaris (1697-99). Perhaps his most exciting single discovery was that the received text of Homer was unmetrical unless a lost letter of the Greek alphabet—the digamma, pronounced like our ‘w’—had still been sounded when the Homeric poems were composed; that it was the writing down of the poems which had led to its omission; and hence that Homer’s text was not at all immune from textual error. This first doubt about the text of Homer opened the way into the whole ‘Homeric question’, and so ultimately to a much better understanding of the nature of all oral poetry.

But the mighty scholar was also a pugnacious autocrat, and made many enemies. This is why his digamma was derided by Pope:

‘While tow’ring o’er your alphabet, like Saul,/ Stands our Digamma, and o’ertops them all.’ 3 In this case, as in the Phalaris controversy, Bentley’s detractors merely exposed their own ignorance. Yet his mind, and his methods with a text, could sometimes be used on subjects where they led him not to hidden truth but into appalling error. Concerning his edition of Horace (1711) R. C. jebb —a temperate, acute scholar —says: ‘Bentley’s tendency was to try Horace by the tests of clear syntax, strict logic, and normal usage .... [He] has made altogether between 700 and 800 changes in the text of Horace . . . [of which Horace] would have rejected the immense majority with a smile or a shudder.’ 4 In other words, the same combination of intuition with remorseless, narrow logic which did wonders for the editor of corrupt texts or simpler authors might lead him to mutilate an uncorrupted text or a complex, individualistic author.

Milton was just such an author, Paradise Lost just such a text. Having given glimpses of its defects in the edition of Horace, Bentley’s method now exposed them in broad daylight. He gave his enemies their perfect opportunity by choosing an author who was recent and accessible, 5 and who did not much need Bentley’s special gifts. The sense of misapplied acuteness is colossal. In his preface (very lively, like all his writing) he at once puts his head on the block. He postulates, first, that Milton in 1667 through blindness and friendlessness could not have supervised the first edition of Paradise Lost; and, second, that some ‘Friend or Acquaintance’, whom Bentley dubs ‘the Editor’, not only introduced ‘Typographical Faults through negligence but ‘thought he had a fit Opportunity to foist into the Book several of his own Verses,

without the blind Poet’s Discovery’. Yet in fact the two hypotheses are to some extent incompatible, since the first denies what the second assumes, that Milton had the help of friends. More important, the biographical evidence was available to Bentley that Milton took great care with the publishing, and had able and trustworthy help. No matter: Bentley’s hypotheses gave him what he really wanted, a clear field for emending in the light of his own preconceptions, both logical and aesthetic.

Now to the letter. It shows Bentley’s powers at their most perverse, his friends’ vain efforts to stop him making an ass of himself, and also the speed with which the edition was prepared. The writer is Thomas Bentley (1693-1742), a classical scholar in his own right who helped in his uncle’s research from time to time. The recipient, Dr. Pearce, is Zachary Pearce (1690-1774), best known nowadays for his reply to Bentley’s edition, A Review of the Text of Milton’s Paradise Lost in Which the Chief of Dr. Bentley’s Emendations Are Considered (1732-33).

The wrangling about ‘Fables’ versus ‘Apples’ bears on the text of Book IV, lines 250-251. Bentley gives the passage in its original form, with his own proposed changes and excisions added:

Thus was this place, A happy rural feat of various view Groves, * a vhofe rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm * Others, whole fruit bumiih’d with Golden Rind 2,50 Hung amiable', [Hefperian fables true, If true , here only,] and of delicious talle. fame wbofe

Bentley’s apparatus criticus reads (p. 114): The Editor, whoever he was, our Author’s Acquaintance, would often have a Finger in so fine a Work; and here he gives us an Insertion of Hesperian Fables. Fables, says he, if true, here only true. Very quaint: but pray you, Sir, how can Fables be true any where ? a Contradiction in the very Terms. One would think, that the Printer, as he has often injur’d the Poet, had here likewise given foul Play to the Editor; who may be suppos’d to have given it thus; Hesperian APPLES true. Apples and Fables are not very distant in Letters; and Hesperian Apples are celebrated by all the Antient Writers, Turn canit Hesperidum miratam mala puellam. But then the same Writers every one make them solid Gold, far from eatable, or of delicious tast. Let the Editor then take them, whether Fables or Apples', and let us close the Verse thus; Burnish’d with golden Rind Hung amiable’, and of delicious taste.

And the very pat joining of the Verse betrays the Insertion. Perhaps Thomas Bentley had urged upon his uncle that the emending of‘Fables’ to ‘Apples’ was absurd because the Hesperian apples were inedible, or that ‘Apples true’ is merely awkward in sense whereas ‘Fables true’ has at any rate the pointedness of paradox. But Richard Bentley, true to form, would not leave the text alone. (His dig at the Editor for meddlesomeness fits no one so aptly as himself.) Instead of abandoning perversity, he substituted a new one for the old; unwarrantably excising the whole group of words. Equally unwarrantable is the by-play concerning the activities of the Printer and Editor, being pure guesswork on Bentley’s part and a flagrant offence against economy of hypothesis. One hardly knows whether he is serious or facetious at such times, but either way he is irresponsible. 6

Nevertheless, the sequel is intriguing. Pearce, for his Review, thought hard about these emendations, and so, on the basis of Bentley’s errors, made out a better sense than may have been realised before. ‘Fables’ in Latin or English can mean ‘common talk’, hence may be either true or false; which disposes of one main objection. And the other objection, that the Hesperian apples were inedible, disappears(what is left of itjwhen one sees that all the words from ‘Hesperian’ to ‘only’ constitute a parenthesis. Pearce places them within a bracket to ensure that ‘Taste’ shall be taken with the actual ‘Fruit’ of Eden (line 249), and not with the parenthetical matter. So far, then, Bentley’s obstinacy led to Pearce’s clarification. Yet it is equally clear that Bentley’s was the sharper mind. For one thing, Pearce’s account of‘Fables’ still mutes the paradox. Milton is playing on two senses of‘fable’; that which is common talk, true or false, and that which is merely legendary. He claims for these fruit a special status between the two senses, and Bentley saw as much of the paradox as Pearce did, and saw it before

him. Again, Bentley saw quite as clearly as Pearce that the words ‘Hesperian . . . only’ comprise a single parenthetical phrase: it is only his inference drawn from that observation, to excise the words, that is objectionable. Moreover, he saw that Milton’s parenthesis starts and ends at the same metrical place in the line. Indeed, he noticed the same tendency in many other instances, and though one regrets his insisting that such things must be the intrusive ‘Editor’ at his tricks, one still applauds his perception. It reveals a feature, perhaps instinctive, of Milton’s poetic ear, that he preferred a strict coinciding of syntactical with metrical units in such cases. 7 In various ways, then, the Turnbull letter leads one to understand better the tussles which helped to shape the eventual

edition, but also to see how a perverse reading, and the edition as a whole, may prove to be a critical felix culpa. The second part of the letter delightfully brings out some leading characteristics of the parties involved. All were members of Trinity College, Cambridge, whose affairs had been a battle ground for decades because of Bentley’s autocratic comportment as Master of Trinity. Thomas Bentley had been embroiled in the feuding between Master and Fellows for a time while holding office as Librarian, but had willingly resigned as soon as his uncle let him. Even his ‘modest and unassuming’ 8 disposition could not, in the present instance, stand any more hectoring: ‘he called me Ignoramus & several other hard words’, so that ‘we parted & I have never been with him since . . .’. But the continuation of that

sentence witnesses to more than simply overbearing self-will in Richard Bentley: ‘. . . for I know he can’t forbear talking of Milton, & I can’t bear the nonsense he puts upon him’. This shows how, in his own way, Bentley had become enthused and engrossed by Milton’s work. Admittedly, he was devoted as much to his theories about the poem as to the poem itself (not such an uncommon failing). Yet the absorption, in a work not classical but English and not ancient but recent, of the foremost classical scholar of that time, one with a European reputation for editorial acuity, bears a witness to the rising fame of Milton’s epic every bit as striking as the critiques of Addison (1712) or Voltaire (1727), or the gathering stream of translations. In this respect also Bentley’s tinkerings were less a backhanded compliment than a felix culpa for the serious study of Milton.

As for Zachary Pearce, his presence on the sidelines of the family disagreement reflects his slightly equivocal position in the affairs of Bentley. Pearce had become a Fellow of Trinity in 1716, against Bentley’s wish but thanks to the powerful patronage of Lord Parker. In 1719 Pearce was privately encouraging Dr Colbatch, the leader of the Fellows in their second great attempt to oust Bentley

from the Mastership. 9 In 1721 he published an assessment of Bentley’s Proposals for Printing the Greek Testament. It is judicious and scholarly and (for those days) courteous, like his later reply to the Paradise Lost. He brought out this assessment pseudonymously; but if we may believe Monk’s Life of Bentley ‘the real object . . . was to bring forward his own merits, and to found a reputation by mixing himself in a controversy which the name of Bentley rendered generally interesting’; in which case pseudonymously does not mean anonymously nor disinterestedly. 10 Similarly in 1732 with the review of the Milton. Pearce brought out his Review anonymously, but the authorship appears to have been well enough known. He may also have written, with even more expedition than the Review, an anonymous pamphlet called A Friendly Letter to Dr. Bentley: though the tone is more personal and unpleasant, in fact crude, its arguments correspond closely to those of the Review. 11

Be all that as it may, Pearce undoubtedly emerged from the controversy about the Milton edition with an enhanced reputation. Moreover, the Turnbull letter helps us to see how. We learn from it that Pearce was aware well before the edition came out of what it would contain, both in its general line and in some particulars; for Thomas Bentley’s words presuppose that Pearce knew about the skirmishing over ‘Fables’, and probably about the ‘whole design’ of the edition. So it is less surprising that Pearce could begin bringing out his rejoinder in the same year, 12 and the whole work in 1733.

The speed of the preparation of the edition is a vexed question, and so is the related matter of Bentley’s motives for taking on the work. He had a motive for speed. The edition was undertaken to please Queen Caroline, probably, but also and connectedly to influence the new Parliament of 1732; for that Parliament would be determining whether to eject him from the Mastership. Yet his writing, as distinct from his preparations for writing, was always swift: he had often boasted of the fact, and did so again in the Preface: ‘I made the Notes extempore, and put them to the Press as soon as made. . .’. Even so, there is proof that he went over the text more than once, for his annotations survive in his own copy, written in different inks at different times. 13 The Turnbull letter, too, shows that he debated his work vigorously with his nephew, and, perhaps, that he consulted ‘his friends for their judgement’. And of course the letter shows him having second thoughts, and acting upon them, in one instance. Indeed, so far as the letter goes, the haste to publish comes from the publisher, Tonson: ‘I fancy Jac. Tonson wants to be off, for they have been 3 weeks about one sheet, & tis not yet ready to be printed off’. Why such delay? Was Bentley making alterations in the sheet that was at the printer’s, and does that imply hesitation about further sheets? The different evidence of

cancels suggests that the edition may not have gone forward with the arrowlike certainty that Bentley’s preface implies. 14 If he was visited by compunction, should we see that as a sign of grace in him, or (since he still went ahead in the end) of an increased obstinacy? It is perhaps like judging between the walrus and the carpenter; but I do not see, yet, that the Turnbull letter helps one way or the other. Its value lies elsewhere. It illustrates with some exactness the issues raised within the developing critical debate about Milton by Bentley’s edition. It illustrates, too, the stormy personal relations surrounding that event. But perhaps for us, at a safe distance from the Moby Dick of this story, the abiding impression should be of Bentley’s remarkably powerful and personal response to Paradise Lost itself; for as Helen Darbishire put it:

. . . we all owe Bentley a debt for his astute examination of the text and verbal texture of Paradise Lost. I know no commentary on the poem in this regard so animating, enjoyable and instructive. He gave Milton what he deserved, for Milton stands among our English poets not only as the finest artist of them all, but as the most exacting craftsman. 15 Or as his nephew put it, . .he can’t forbear talking of Milton’.

THOMAS BENTLEY TO DR. PEARCE: SOME COMMENTS ON THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EVIDENCE

Thomas Bentley’s letter to Pearce shows that Richard Bentley was having second (and perhaps subsequent) thoughts about the Notes he made ‘ extempore , and put ... to the Press as soon as made’. The final published work contains some physical evidence to support both Richard Bentley’s claim and the contrasting assertion of revision. 1 Notes made extempore and printed immediately will have to be changed in proof, or at an even later stage, if revisions are made. If Richard Bentley was holding one sheet up for three weeks by requiring change after change, as his nephew’s letter suggests, then Jacob Tonson might well have become impatient. Any printer might pressure his author to finalise the text and let trivial misprints stand if the alternative was to have similar delays with every one of the fifty-four and a half sheets that the finished book contains. The least businesslike publisher would be concerned about the capital tied up in paper stocks, apart from type held standing for long periods.

The distribution of Richard Bentley’s emendations and comments, and to a lesser extent of the errata, suggests that his interest flagged or the pressure from Tonson increased, or both, as the work progressed. Books I, 11, V and VII are heavily annotated (especially Book I), while Books IX, XI and XII are lightly treated. The errata note lists four misprints in the text, all literals in Books VIII, IX and XII, whereas there are ten amendments required in the notes of the first five books, and none thereafter. One change requires the note to Book Ilfline 413 to be altered from ‘He has again the Chorus’ to ‘He forgets ’tis the Chorus’, suggesting that Bentley’s haste led him to forget that the text does not specify the speaker at this stage. We may record that four of these ten line references are themselves misprinted. The catchwords to the Notes include twelve examples of line numbers cited wrongly in the catchword and correctly in the actual note. 2 This type of error, which suggests haste in the compilation of the notes, does not occur in the other two annotated editions of the eighteenth century, namely Newton’s 1749 edition

and Marchant’s badly printed edition of 1751. There is one major catchword error, on 384 (p. 375), where the catchword to the text reads ‘Beyond’ although page 376 begins with line 830 (of Book XI), starting ‘Of . . .’. Line 828 begins with ‘ Beyond’, and the note at the foot of page 375 could be at least two lines longer than it actually is. We may suspect that Bentley removed a sentence or two of comment at a late stage of proof and that two lines of text were brought back to fill the gap. The preceding points are slight hints only. The most substantial evidence that Bentley continued to revise his text both during and after the printing rests in the two cancel leaves, 2C4 (pages 199-200) and 2D4 (pages 207-208). As in the beautiful but inaccurate 1758 edition printed by Baskerville not all copies cancel both leaves. 3 In Baskerville’s edition the cancels correct some textual errors apparently considered intolerable; in Bentley we presume that the cancels ensure that all copies, not just those printed last in the run, would have the final version of Bentley’s thoughts on the text. Seven copies in all have been checked (three at the Turnbull Library, and four at the British Library) and while the three Turnbull copies cancel 2D4 but only copy two cancels 2C4, none of the British Library copies cancels 2D4 but three of them cancel 2C4. 4 It therefore seems likely that some changes were first introduced into 2C4 and 2D4 while the sheets were being printed. In that case some copies would have the first reading and some the later. The cancels, however, suggest an attempt to ensure that the final corrected version was substituted for the earlier uncorrected one in those sheets printed before the correction was made. Since the readings of the cancelled and uncancelled leaves are identical we have no certain way of knowing what changes were made in the stop-press alteration.

Both leaves occur in Book VI, the account of the battle between the fallen and the loyal angels. Signature 2C4 carries the account of the manufacture of gunpowder (lines 469-520), and it includes on page 200 the major emendation of line 513 from ‘They found, they mingled, and with subtle Art’ to ‘They pound, they mingle, and with sooty Chark’ (with attendant changes in the tense of three subsequent verbs). Bentley has a lengthy note which extends onto page 201 (the first page of sheet 2D, and not yet printed when 2C was being machined), and this passage with its companion note is a prime candidate for being the cause of the cancel. Signature 2D4, printing lines 672-732, has no such notable emendation. The verso (page 208) is almost untouched and only lines 681-683, in the Father’s speech to the Son, are changed significantly, from:

to:

Son in whose face invisible is beheld Visibly, what by Deitie I am, And in whose hand what be decree I doe Son in whose face is visible beheld What I invisible by Deitie am, And by whose hand what I Decree I doe.

These changes are minor and for that very reason may have been afterthoughts, consented to by Tonson because otherwise a blank leaf would have been machined with the other cancel, 2C4. Those two leaves were probably printed together with the flytitle and title-page, making a complete sheet. The numerous catchword errors and the errata lead one to suspect haste in the printing or proofing. The cancels suggest the incorporation of changes at a late stage in the printing of the amended sheets. Thomas Bentley’s letter confirms that changes were being made after the type had been set. The physical evidence of the cancels is at least consistent with his observations and suggests further that the changes were both important (at any rate in 2C4) and made very late.

REFERENCES 1 A note beside the letter reads ‘This letter was given to me by the Ven. Archdeacon Williams when I was in Palmerston North at the Science Congress in Jany. 192 T, and there follow the initials of Turnbull’s first Librarian, Johannes Andersen. He it was who supplied the TLS 0f1925 with its text of the letter, p. 557. 2 Respectively, J.T. Shawcross, ed. Milton 1732-1801: The Critical Heritage (London, 1972) p. 20 and n. 38, and Robert E. Bourdette, Jr., ‘“To Milton lending sense”: Richard Bentley and Paradise Lost’, in Milton Quarterly, XIV (1980) 40-41. 3 Dunciad, IV. 217-218. (Has Pope contrived a hiatus between the final ‘a’ of ‘digamma’ and the opening letter of ‘and’, so as mockingly to invite the insertion of a digamma?) 4 Bentley (in the series English Men of Letters) (London, 1902; first published 1882), p. 129 and 131. 5 This, however, was partly why he chose Milton —to apply his powers, at the suggestion of Queen Caroline, to a familiar and recent text in English, for all to admire them. (‘Non injussa cecini’, in his note to Paradise Lost, XII. 648.) 6 Bentley’s good faith was questioned by Samuel Johnson, and others since. In particular, Helen Darbishire convicted him of being ‘a rogue’ in one important respect, that he claimed there was no MS extant yet his annotations in his own copy of Paradise Lost show he was using the MS, still extant, of Book I. See ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (thejames Bryce Memorial Lecture, 1951), in Somerville College Chapel Addresses and Other Papers (London, 1962).

7 See Ants Oras, Milton’s Editors and Commentatorsfrom Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd (1695-1801): A Study in Critical Views and Methods (Tartu, 1931) p. 73-74. My quick comparison with Shakespeare and Wordsworth revealed no such regularity as this of Milton’s with the metrics of parentheses. 8 J.H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D. (2v., London, 1833), 11, p. 277. 9 Ibid., I, p. 411, and 11, p. 79-80. 10 Ibid., 11, p. 145. 11 Oras, op.cit., p. 77-81. There are other hints that Pearce may have been active against Bentley, though circumspectly. 12 Ibid., p.Bl-2. Extracts were printed in the Grub-street Journal from July 1732 onwards. 13 See J.W. Mackail, ‘Bentley’s Milton’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, XI (1924-25) 59. 14 See Miss Coleridge’s bibiliographical comment, appended to this essay. 15 Darbishire, p. 126. Other modern writers on Milton who have gone back, with profit, to Bentley’s Milton are William Empson, Christopher Ricks andJ.B. Broadbent.

REFERENCES 1 These comments deal with several technical details which will need definition for some readers: ‘Catchword’: the first word of the following page inserted at the right-hand lower corner of each page of a book, below the last line. In Bentley’s Milton, like many other annotated editions, there are separate catchwords for the text and the notes. ‘Literals’: printer’s errors involving only misplaced letters, in contrast with those errors which involve a change in wording.

‘Cancel’: a cancel is any part of a book substituted for what was originally printed. The most common form is a single leaf inserted in place of the original leaf (indicated in bibliographical formulae by ±). ‘Signature’: the letters (or numbers, in many modern books) printed at the foot of the first page of each sheet of a book to guide the binder. The leaves of the sheet, for example B, are identified, and often signed, as B (i.e.81), 82, 83, B 4 (and so on for the total number of leaves). The printer’s doubled and trebled letters ‘Bb’ or ‘Bbb’ are customarily abridged in formulae to ‘2B’ or ‘3B’. By extension ‘signature’ may be used to refer to the sheet or the leaf itself. Bentley’s edition of Milton has a collational formula, indicating the physical make-up of the volume, thus: 4°: A 2 a-b 4 B-2B 4 2C 4 (±2C4) 2D 4 (±2D4) 2E-3E 4 3F-3I 2 ; 218 leaves, pp. [2o] 1-399 [l7]. This formula can be explained in words as follows. The volume is made up of sheets in-quarto, that is sheets folded so that each leaf is one quarter of a full sheet. These sheets are arranged in sequence with first a half-sheet signed ‘A’ (two leaves joined), then two sheets signed ‘a’ and ‘b’, then a series of twenty-four sheets signed ‘B’ to ‘Bb’ (the alphabet omits ‘W’ and uses only one each of‘l’ or ‘J’ and ‘U’ or ‘V’); the sheet signed ‘Cc’ has the fourth leaf replaced by a cancel, as does the sheet ‘Dd’; there are then another twenty-four sheets signed ‘Ee’ to ‘Eee’ followed by four half-sheets signed ‘Fff’ to ‘lii’. The volume begins with twenty unnumbered pages, then the pages are numbered in sequence from T to ‘399’ without interruption, and the volume ends with seventeen unnumbered pages, a total of 436 pages, 218 leaves. 2 See also J. D. Fleeman, ‘Concealed proofs and the editor’, Studies in the Eighteenth century IV (Canberra: 1979) 207-221, which discusses much more fully the signs left by textual disturbance. 3 See P. Gaskell, A Bibliography of John Baskerville (Cambridge: 1959), p. 24. 4 The British Library copies are 11626.h.6, 83.k.23, C.134.h.1, and 641.k.22. The copy at 83.k.23 (King George Ill’s copy) does not cancel 2C4.