and humbled Milton’s strains’ (IV, 212), the formidable classical
scholar and Master of Trinity.^31 Here is Bentley’s comment on a
striking phrase of Milton (admired by Pope since he used it at
Dunciad, IV, 3) taken from his edition of Paradise Lost:
No light but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe.
(ll. 64–5)
Darkness visible and darkness palpable are in due place very
good expressions; but the next line makes visible here a flat
contradiction. Darkness visible will not serve to discover
sights of woe through it, but to cover and hide them. Nothing
is visible to the eye, but so far as it is opaque, and not seen
through; not by transmitting the rays, but by reflecting them
back. To come up to the author’s idea we may thus say
No light but rather a transpicuous gloom.Who can doubt that the author of this deserves to be
remembered in the roll-call of the dull? If we ask, by what
authority did Pope judge, then the answer must be, by the
authority of his prodigious creative talent, a talent in which
he had a just confidence since his poetry continues to be read.
NOTES
1 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, in two
volumes, Everyman’s Library, London and New York:
Dent, 1925, vol. 2, p. 149. All references to Johnson are to
the Everyman edition which exists in many reprints.
Comments on individual poems are to be found in two
places in the Life of Pope, in the chronological review of
the works given as Johnson recounts the life, and in a
second assessment of the works without reference to the
life from p. 215 onwards.
2 Pope: The Critical Heritage, edited by John Barnard,
London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973,
paperback, 1985, pp. 381–2. The whole of the dedication
is included here and a generous selection from the Essay
itself, pp. 379–407. The citation from Voltaire is in
French.