There is nothing extraordinary, or that could merit a special notice, in a
simple case of oversight, or in a blunder, though emanating from the
greatest of poets. But such a case challenges and forces our attention,
when we know that the particular passage in which it occurs was wrought
and burnished with excessive pains; or (which in this case is also known)
when that particular passage is pushed into singular prominence as having
obtained a singular success. In no part of his poetic mission did Pope so
fascinate the gaze of his contemporaries as in his functions of satirist;
which functions, in his latter years, absorbed all other functions. And
one reason, I believe, why it was that the interest about Pope decayed so
rapidly after his death (an accident somewhere noticed by Wordsworth),
must be sought in the fact, that the most stinging of his personal
allusions, by which he had given salt to his later writings, were
continually losing their edge, and sometimes their intelligibility, as
Pope's own contemporary generation was dying off. Pope alleges it as a
palliation of his satiric malice, that it had been forced from him in the
way of retaliation; forgetting that such a plea wilfully abjures the
grandest justification of a satirist, viz., the deliberate assumption of
the character as something corresponding to the prophet's mission amongst
the Hebrews. It is no longer the _facit indignatio versum_. Pope's
satire, where even it was most effective, was personal and vindictive, and
upon that argument alone could not he philosophic. Foremost in the order
of his fulminations stood, and yet stands, the bloody castigation by
which, according to his own pretence, he warned and menaced (but by which,
in simple truth, he executed judgment upon) his false friend, Addison.
To say that this drew vast rounds of applause upon its author, and
frightened its object into deep silence for the rest of his life, like the
_Quos ego_ of angry Neptune, sufficiently argues that the verses must
have ploughed as deeply as the Russian knout. Vitriol could not scorch
more fiercely. And yet the whole passage rests upon a blunder; and the
blunder is so broad and palpable, that it implies instant forgetfulness
both in the writer and the reader. The idea which furnishes the basis of
the passage is this: that the conduct ascribed to Addison is in its own
nature so despicable, as to extort laughter by its primary impulse; but
that this laughter changes into weeping, when we come to understand that
the person concerned in this delinquency is Addison. The change, the
transfiguration, in our mood of contemplating the offence, is charged upon
the discovery which we are supposed to make as to the person of the
offender; that which by its baseness had been simply comic when imputed to
some corresponding author, passes into a tragic _coup-de-theatre_,
when it is suddenly traced back to a man of original genius. The whole,
therefore, of this effect is made to depend upon the sudden scenical
transition from a supposed petty criminal to one of high distinction. And,
meantime, no such stage effect had been possible, since the knowledge that
a man of genius was the offender had been what we started with from the
beginning. 'Our laughter is changed to tears,' says Pope, 'as soon as we
discover that the base act had a noble author.' And, behold! the initial
feature in the whole description of the case is, that the libeller was one
whom 'true genius fired:'
'Peace to all such! But were there one whose mind
True genius fires,' &c.
Before the offence is described, the perpetrator is already characterized
as a man of genius: and, _in spite of that knowledge_, we laugh. But
suddenly our mood changes, and we weep, but why? I beseech you. Simply
because we have ascertained the author to be a man of genius.
'Who would not laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?'
The sole reason for weeping is something that we knew already before we
began to laugh.
It would not be right in logic, in fact, it would be a mis-classification,
if I should cite as at all belonging to the same group several passages in
Milton that come very near to Irish bulls, by virtue of distorted
language. One reason against such a classification would lie precisely in
that fact--viz., that the assimilation to the category of bulls lurks in
the verbal expression, and not (as in Pope's case) amongst the conditions
of the thought. And a second reason would lie in the strange circumstance,
that Milton had not fallen into this snare of diction through any
carelessness or oversight, but with his eyes wide open, deliberately
avowing his error as a special elegance; repeating it; and well aware of
splendid Grecian authority for his error, if anybody should be bold enough
to call it an error. Every reader must be aware of the case--
'Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve'--
which makes Adam one of his own sons, Eve one of her own daughters. This,
however, is authorized by Grecian usage in the severest writers. Neither
can it be alleged that these might be bold poetic expressions, harmonizing
with the Grecian idiom; for Poppo has illustrated this singular form of
expression in a prose-writer, as philosophic and austere as Thucydides; a
form which (as it offends against logic) must offend equally in all
languages. Some beauty must have been described in the idiom, such as
atoned for its solecism: for Milton recurs to the same idiom, and under
the same entire freedom of choice, elsewhere; particularly in this
instance, which has not been pointed out: 'And never,' says Satan to the
abhorred phantoms of Sin and Death, when crossing his path,
'And never saw till now
Sight more detestable than him and thee.'
Now, therefore, it seems, he _had_ seen a sight more detestable than
this very sight. He now looked upon something more hateful than X Y Z.
What was it? It was X Y Z.
But the authority of Milton, backed by that of insolent Greece, would
prove an overmatch for the logic of centuries. And I withdraw, therefore,
from the rash attempt to quarrel with this sort of bull, involving itself
in the verbal expression. But the following, which lies rooted in the mere
facts and incidents, is certainly the most extraordinary _practical_
bull [1] that all literature can furnish. And a stranger thing, perhaps,
than the oversight itself lies in this--that not any critic throughout
Europe, two only excepted, but has failed to detect a blunder so
memorable. All the rampant audacity of Bentley--'slashing Bentley'--all
the jealous malignity of Dr. Johnson--who hated Milton without disguise as
a republican, but secretly and under a mask _would_ at any rate have
hated him from jealousy of his scholarship--had not availed to sharpen
these practised and these interested eyes into the detection of an
oversight which argues a sudden Lethean forgetfulness on the part of
Milton; and in many generations of readers, however alive and awake with
malice, a corresponding forgetfulness not less astonishing. Two readers
only I have ever heard of that escaped this lethargic inattention; one of
which two is myself; and I ascribe my success partly to good luck, but
partly to some merit on my own part in having cultivated a habit of
systematically accurate reading. If I read at all, I make it a duty to
read truly and faithfully. I profess allegiance for the time to the man
whom I undertake to study; and I am as loyal to all the engagements
involved in such a contract, as if I had come under a _sacramentum
militare_. So it was that, whilst yet a boy, I came to perceive, with a
wonder not yet exhausted, that unaccountable blunder which Milton has
committed in the main narrative on which the epic fable of the 'Paradise
Lost' turns as its hinges. And many a year afterwards I found that Paul
Richter, whose vigilance nothing escaped, who carried with him through
life 'the eye of the hawk, and the fire therein,' had not failed to make
the same discovery. It is this: The archangel Satan has designs upon man;
he meditates his ruin; and it is known that he does. Specially to
counteract these designs, and for no other purpose whatever, a choir of
angelic police is stationed at the gates of Paradise, having (I repeat)
one sole commission, viz., to keep watch and ward over the threatened
safety of the newly created human pair. Even at the very first this duty
is neglected so thoroughly, that Satan gains access without challenge or
suspicion. That is awful: for, ask yourself, reader, how a constable or an
inspector of police would be received who had been stationed at No. 6, on
a secret information, and spent the night in making love at No. 15.
Through the regular surveillance at the gates, Satan passes without
objection; and he is first of all detected by a purely accidental
collision during the rounds of the junior angels. The result of this
collision, and of the examination which follows, is what no reader can
ever forget--so unspeakable is the grandeur of that scene between the two
hostile archangels, when the _Fiend_ (so named at the moment under
the fine machinery used by Milton for exalting or depressing the ideas of
his nature) finally takes his flight as an incarnation of darkness,
'And fled
Murmuring; and with him fled the shades of night.
The darkness flying with him, naturally we have the feeling that he
_is_ the darkness, and that all darkness has some essential relation
to Satan.
But now, having thus witnessed his terrific expulsion, naturally we ask
what was the sequel. Four books, however, are interposed before we reach
the answer to that question. This is the reason that we fail to remark the
extraordinary oversight of Milton. Dislocated from its immediate plan in
the succession of incidents, that sequel eludes our notice, which else and
in its natural place would have shocked us beyond measure. The simple
abstract of the whole story is, that Satan, being ejected, and sternly
charged under Almighty menaces not to intrude upon the young Paradise of
God, 'rides with darkness' for exactly one week, and, having digested his
wrath rather than his fears on the octave of his solemn banishment,
without demur, or doubt, or tremor, back he plunges into the very centre
of Eden. On a Friday, suppose, he is expelled through the main entrance:
on the Friday following he re-enters upon the forbidden premises through a
clandestine entrance. The upshot is, that the heavenly police suffer, in
the first place, the one sole enemy, who was or could be the object of
their vigilance, to pass without inquest or suspicion; thus they
_inaugurate_ their task; secondly, by the merest accident (no thanks
to their fidelity) they detect him, and with awful adjurations sentence
him to perpetual banishment; but, thirdly, on his immediate return, in
utter contempt of their sentence, they ignore him altogether, and
apparently act upon Dogberry's direction, that, upon meeting a thief, the
police may suspect him to be no true man; and, with such manner of men,
the less they meddle or make, the more it will be for their honesty.