To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton

1. Lord Monboddo, Close Reading, and “Density of Sense” in Paradise Lost

21 1 Lord Monboddo, Close Reading, and “Density of Sense” in Paradise Lost John Leonard The Milton Society of America is the mildest of academic communities , and its annual meeting at the MLA convention is usually the most convivial of social and scholarly occasions. But a different mood prevailed at the Hotel Statler in New York City on Thursday, December 28, 1950. The Milton Controversy was then at its height, and all access was thronged as the Miltonists swarmed to expatiate and confer their state affairs. They had come to hear two invited speakers, A. S. P. Woodhouse and Cleanth Brooks, discuss the question of how best to answer Milton ’s detractors. The declared aim of both speakers was to find common ground between Historical and New Criticism in the hope of presenting a united front in Milton’s defense. Most New Critics at that time were anti-Miltonists, but Brooks was a leading New Critic and a Miltonist, and he had come to the Milton Society to propose a truce and an alliance. His argument was 22 John Leonard simple but bold: New Critics can be Milton’s friends. To judge from the printed versions of the two presentations (published side by side in PMLA the following year), the deliberations in New York in December 1950 resembled a debate in hell. Woodhouse is first on his feet and his sentence is for open war. He grudgingly allows the possibility “of some alliance” with sympathetic New Critics, but he does not foresee a happy partnership: “No doubt we shall continue to disagree, and our remarks about each other will have a certain tonic bitterness.”1 True to his word, Woodhouse conveys “tonic bitterness” from his opening sentence: “As I understand the assignment given to me, it is to suggest a definition and defence of Historical Criticism as applied to Milton, while Mr. Brooks is to tell us how the New Criticism (as it is called) would deal with the poet” (1033). It is not hard to tell which approach Woodhouse considers to be the real deal. Like most Historical critics of his time, he is suspicious of “the New.” (Three decades would pass before historicists would stake their own claim to that empowering prefix, and two decades would follow after that before “the New Milton Critics” would give themselves leave to use newfangleness , the last of those that furthest cometh behind.) “The New...(as it is called)” is clearly an attempt to cut Brooks down to size, but Woodhouse fails to see that (by his own principles) he is doing New Critics a service when he hints that they might not be so new after all, but have historical roots. Two sentences later, he unwittingly restores one of the richest of those roots: “Nor is it any part of my purpose to attack the New Criticism in its theory or practice. First, because I do not know enough about it, being somewhat in the case of Lord Monboddo. (‘Have you read my last book?’ asked Lord Kames. ‘No, my lord,’ said Monboddo; ‘I can’t read as fast as you can write’)” (1033). The point of Woodhouse’s anecdote is that New Critics are prolific hacks. He makes no mention of the fact that Monboddo and Kames had both written Milton criticism. I suspect that he was unaware of that fact. His comment makes no Lord Monboddo, Close Reading, and “Density of Sense” 23 sense if he was aware of it. As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, James Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714–99) was one of the best close readers that Milton has ever had. It would be silly to present him as a New Critic, but he does stand at the head of a tradition of close reading that flows directly to Brooks. By contrast , Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) had praised Milton’s “music” in the kind of general terms of which Woodhouse approves.2 Kames admired Paradise Lost, but presented Milton as a poet of sonorous grandiloquence—and so prepared the way for twentieth century anti-Miltonists who would deplore Milton for the very reason that Kames admired him. Woodhouse misrepresents the two eighteenth century critics when he aligns himself with Monboddo and Brooks with Kames. The true lineage is the other way around. Replying to Woodhouse, Brooks begins mildly. Woodhouse had concluded with a conciliatory gesture (“we should be patient one...