Milton's "sage and serious Poet Spencer": error and imitation in The Faerie Queene and Areopagitica.(John Milton, Edmund Spencer)(Critical essay)

One of the topics that Milton discusses in Areopagitica (1644) is the inadequacy of cloistered virtue. The focus of his discussion is The Faerie Queene (1590,1596,1609), in which Spenser relates Mammon's temptation of Guyon in the underworld (FQ, 2.7). Milton writes as follows:

 
  He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming 
  pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that 
  which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot 
  praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, 
  that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the 
  race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust 
  and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring 
  impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is 
  by what is contrary. That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in 
  the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice 
  promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not 
  a pure; her whitenesse is but an excrementall whitenesse; Which was 
  the reason why our sage and serious Poet Spencer, whom I dare be known 
  to think a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas, describing true 
  temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer 
  through the cave of Mammon, and the bowr of earthly blisse that he 
  might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and 
  survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of 
  human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, 
  how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions 
  of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing 
  all manner of reason? (CPW, 2:514-17). 

Thus Milton describes Guyon and the Palmer in The Faerie Queene. The passage is significant as one of Milton's strongest comments in praise of Spenser and has become the focal point of discussions concerning Spenser's influence on Milton (Guillory, Poetic Authority, 131). But as readers of Spenser recognize, the Palmer does not accompany Guyon into Mammon's cave. Milton's retelling of The Faerie Queene departs from Spenser's text, and scholars have generally held that Milton made a mistake. Milton's summary of Guyon's adventure clashes with most readings of Spenser's poem, and John Guillory has noted the unusual complexity of critical debate surrounding Milton's words (Guillory, "Milton, John," 474). Probably more than anyone else, Harold Bloom has drawn attention to Milton's mistake. Bloom argues that Milton unconsciously rewrites Spenser's text to distance himself from his poetic precursor, and he has used Milton's reworking of The Faerie Queene to support his larger theory of the anxiety of influence. (1) But Milton's restatement of Guyon's journey is not as egregious an error as critics have generally suggested. On close examination, Milton's revision of The Faerie Queene turns out to be more deliberate than accidental and is part of his rhetorical strategy rather than a mistake.

The critical tradition surrounding Milton's lapse apparently begins with Ernest Sirluck. In a gloss on the passage, Sirluck says that while the error shows that Milton thought he knew The Faerie Queene well enough not to check the text, he also misunderstood Spenser's psychology. According to Sirluck, Guyon needs the active intervention of reason, as represented by the Palmer, to resist the temptations of the Bower of Bliss, but Spenser separates Guyon from the Palmer partly to show that Guyon's habitual temperance is sufficient to resist Mammon. When Milton remembers and reworks the incident, he does not separate the Palmer from Guyon. Sirluck argues that Milton is being less Aristotelian than Spenser, and that Milton "is less disposed to rely on the security of habit; in all significant situations, choosing [...] is, for him, active reasoning" (CPW, 2:516n108). (2)

Sirluck's observation and analysis attracted the attention of later critics. Some, such as Edward W. Tayler, have chiefly repeated Sirluck's interpretation without significant elaboration (194), while others, such as Paul M. Dowling and Maureen Quilligan, have gone further. Dowling notes Sirluck's explanation of the separation of Guyon and the Palmer in The Faerie Queene and adds that Milton rewrites the episode to agree with his rejection of virtue founded on habit ("Scholastick Grosnesse," 70-71). For Quilligan, Milton's revision introduces the presence of a reader, in the form of the Palmer, into the text of Guyon's actions, and his mistake shows his recognition that there is an extra presence within the text, one that sees and knows and sometimes abstains (51, 65). But of all the reactions to Milton's allusion, Bloom's has been particularly influential and widely quoted. Bloom calls Milton's revision an "astonishing mistake" (Map, 127) one that is "no ordinary error, no mere lapse in memory, but is itself a powerful misinterpretation of Spenser, and a strong defense against him. For Guyon is not so much Adam's precursor as he is Milton's own, the giant model imitated by the Abdiel of Paradise Lost" (Map, 128). According to Bloom, "St. Augustine identified memory with the father, and we may surmise that a lapse in a memory as preternatural as Milton's is a movement against the father" (Map, 128). Milton's error is, for Bloom, an unconscious act through which "Milton re-writes Spenser so as to increase the distance between his poetic father and himself" (Map, 128).

Guillory has considered Bloom's position at length, but he argues that "Milton is writing to decrease the distance between himself and Spenser," to add Spenser's name to his argument (Poetic Authority, 132). He finds it unlikely that Guyon is a "giant model" for either Milton or Abdiel, and he argues that if Bloom's interpretation were correct, then "Milton would have written the Mammon episode as Spenser did, with Guyon unaccompanied, and he misremembers the fact of the Palmer's absence to reserve for himself the heroic model of virtue standing alone against temptation" (Poetic Authority, 133). For Guillory, such a reading is flawed, though, because it depends heavily on Milton's later characterization of Abdiel in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Guillory notes that the Lady of A Mask (1634) is more contemporary with Areopagitica, that "she needs the accompaniment of someone like the Palmer," and that Milton is more likely looking back at A Mask than ahead toward his epic (Poetic Authority, 133). For Guillory, Milton "has the guilty conscience of the student who has diverged from his teacher" (Poetic Authority, 134). Guillory's Milton recognizes the danger of self-reliance and "must 'bring in' the Palmer even as he brings Spenser into his argument, because it is the absence of both that signifies danger" (Poetic Authority, 135).

Milton's revision of Spenser in Areopagitica is but one of various mistakes that appear throughout his works. While these errors have been noted in passing, they have seldom received extensive critical scrutiny (Leonard, 118nl). In his study of Milton's inaccurate allusions, John Leonard acknowledges that while Milton sometimes makes mistakes, on other occasions his alleged errors are volitional. According to Leonard, Milton's inaccuracies often follow a pattern of exaggerating the heroism or virtue of historical persons or literary figures. The critic must then decide whether Milton errs because he imagines an ideal world that never was, or if he intentionally misrepresents the facts for an iconoclastic or ironic purpose (96-97). Leonard proposes three questions for assessing Milton's mistakes: "1) Is Milton really inaccurate? 2) If so, is he being deliberately ironic? 3) If there is a deliberate irony, does it enhance or spoil the poem?" (102).