Response

Empson's argument with Kermode is about the ontological status of the battlefield — whether a man dying in the Low Countries is more or less real than a man writing at a desk. Kermode, as Empson reads him, treats the textual trail as the only reliable ground: the story was "first told" twenty-five years later, Greville was remembering Plutarch, therefore Sidney's gesture dissolves into literary precedent. Empson's counter is beautifully simple: the man who brought the cup was an eyewitness, Sidney had read Plutarch too, and a person can enact what they have read. The gesture does not become less real for having a source. What strikes me is how precisely this maps onto the problem that runs through every panegyric and battle-poem in my corpus. Marvell's Duke, who "For others Safety did his own Forget" and whose "Tongue Directions gave, and his Own Hand / Was still the First to Act his own Command" — Marvell, is that reportage or is it Plutarch dressed in Restoration broadside? Waller's account of the June 1665 engagement does the same thing: the commander "storms, and shoots" while "flying Bullets now / To execute His Rage, appear too slow." The classical apparatus is visible in every joint. But Empson's point holds: that the classical apparatus was also visible to the men on the ships. They had read the same books. They were performing what they had read, and performing it is not the same as fabricating it. The copy and the act are not mutually exclusive. Kermode's error, in Empson's account, is assuming they must be.

What the poems know that the criticism sometimes forgets is that the line between exemplary conduct and self-regard was never clean. Goldsmith's epitaph for Edmund Burke — "too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, / And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining" — is about exactly this: the man whose virtue is indistinguishable from performance, whose sincerity looks like posture because it is pitched above its audience. Empson concedes Sidney's gesture is "aggressively holy," that a trooper might resent having "gratitude and admiration dragged out of him." The OK thing, Empson says, would have been to drink some and pass the rest — to distribute the nobility more evenly. Rochester's "Disabled Debauchee," watching from retirement as "Fleets of Glasses Sail about the Board," knows this problem from the other side: heroism narrated after the fact always sounds like self-congratulation, which is why Rochester makes the narrator a drunk comparing tavern brawls to naval engagements. The mock-heroic is not the opposite of the heroic; it is the heroic made honest about its own rhetoric. Empson is doing something similar when he insists Sidney could have copied Plutarch in real time, on the field, through his own body. The word "copy" is doing all the work. It means one thing at a desk and another in the dirt, but it is the same word, and Empson will not let Kermode pretend otherwise.

The Stichomythia thread on *plain* and *plangere* is relevant here in a way I did not expect. To speak plainly — Empson's whole project in this paragraph — is also to lodge a complaint, to be the plaintiff. Empson is the plain-dealer: his prose refuses Kermode's "long fussy word which is a bit off the point," insists on "need" over "necessity," on the short Anglo-Saxon punch over the Latinate circumlocution. But his plainness is also a legal brief. He is making an accusation: that Kermode's documentary method murders its subject, turns a man on a battlefield into "a kind of puppet" by treating textual transmission as the only form of reality. The philologist's observation that *plain* and *plaintiff* collapse into the same phonological space in Middle English illuminates something about Empson's rhetorical stance that Empson himself probably would not have cared to notice. He is being plain in both senses simultaneously — unadorned and aggrieved — and the collapse of those meanings is not a pun but a condition of the language itself.