No one needs an excuse for re-opening the _Lives of the Poets_; the book
is too delightful. It is not, of course, as delightful as Boswell; but
who re-opens Boswell? Boswell is in another category; because, as every
one knows, when he has once been opened he can never be shut. But, on
its different level, the _Lives_ will always hold a firm and comfortable
place in our affections. After Boswell, it is the book which brings us
nearer than any other to the mind of Dr. Johnson. That is its primary
import. We do not go to it for information or for instruction, or that
our tastes may be improved, or that our sympathies may be widened; we go
to it to see what Dr. Johnson thought. Doubtless, during the process, we
are informed and instructed and improved in various ways; but these
benefits are incidental, like the invigoration which comes from a
mountain walk. It is not for the sake of the exercise that we set out;
but for the sake of the view. The view from the mountain which is Samuel
Johnson is so familiar, and has been so constantly analysed and admired,
that further description would be superfluous. It is sufficient for us
to recognise that he is a mountain, and to pay all the reverence that is
due. In one of Emerson's poems a mountain and a squirrel begin to
discuss each other's merits; and the squirrel comes to the triumphant
conclusion that he is very much the better of the two, since he can
crack a nut, while the mountain can do no such thing. The parallel is
close enough between this impudence and the attitude--implied, if not
expressed--of too much modern criticism towards the sort of
qualities--the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality,
the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence
of thought--which went to the making of the _Lives of the Poets_. There
is only, perhaps, one flaw in the analogy: that, in this particular
instance, the mountain was able to crack nuts a great deal better than
any squirrel that ever lived.
That the _Lives_ continue to be read, admired, and edited, is in itself
a high proof of the eminence of Johnson's intellect; because, as serious
criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far
removed from the futile. Johnson's aesthetic judgments are almost
invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality
to recommend them--except one: they are never right. That is an
unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up
for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so
cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral
to his poem on Walpole's cat with a reminder to the fair that all that
glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this is 'of no relation to
the purpose; if _what glistered_ had been _gold_, the cat would not have
gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.'
Could anything be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously
true? But then, to use Johnson's own phrase, could anything be of less
'relation to the purpose'? It is his wit--and we are speaking, of
course, of wit in its widest sense--that has sanctified Johnson's
peversities and errors, that has embalmed them for ever, and that has
put his book, with all its mass of antiquated doctrine, beyond the reach
of time.
For it is not only in particular details that Johnson's criticism fails
to convince us; his entire point of view is patently out of date. Our
judgments differ from his, not only because our tastes are different,
but because our whole method of judging has changed. Thus, to the
historian of letters, the _Lives_ have a special interest, for they
afford a standing example of a great dead tradition--a tradition whose
characteristics throw more than one curious light upon the literary
feelings and ways which have become habitual to ourselves. Perhaps the
most striking difference between the critical methods of the eighteenth
century and those of the present day, is the difference in sympathy. The
most cursory glance at Johnson's book is enough to show that he judged
authors as if they were criminals in the dock, answerable for every
infraction of the rules and regulations laid down by the laws of art,
which it was his business to administer without fear or favour. Johnson
never inquired what poets were trying to do; he merely aimed at
discovering whether what they had done complied with the canons of
poetry. Such a system of criticism was clearly unexceptionable, upon one
condition--that the critic was quite certain what the canons of poetry
were; but the moment that it became obvious that the only way of
arriving at a conclusion upon the subject was by consulting the poets
themselves, the whole situation completely changed. The judge had to bow
to the prisoner's ruling. In other words, the critic discovered that his
first duty was, not to criticise, but to understand the object of his
criticism. That is the essential distinction between the school of
Johnson and the school of Sainte-Beuve. No one can doubt the greater
width and profundity of the modern method; but it is not without its
drawbacks. An excessive sympathy with one's author brings its own set of
errors: the critic is so happy to explain everything, to show how this
was the product of the age, how that was the product of environment, and
how the other was the inevitable result of inborn qualities and
tastes--that he sometimes forgets to mention whether the work in
question has any value. It is then that one cannot help regretting the
Johnsonian black cap.
But other defects, besides lack of sympathy, mar the _Lives of the
Poets_. One cannot help feeling that no matter how anxious Johnson might
have been to enter into the spirit of some of the greatest of the
masters with whom he was concerned, he never could have succeeded.
Whatever critical method he might have adopted, he still would have
been unable to appreciate certain literary qualities, which, to our
minds at any rate, appear to be the most important of all. His opinion
of _Lycidas_ is well known: he found that poem 'easy, vulgar, and
therefore disgusting.' Of the songs in _Comus_ he remarks: 'they are
harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.' He could
see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but 'glittering
accumulations of ungraceful ornaments.' The passionate intensity of
Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a
writer could be so absurd. Such preposterous judgments can only be
accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, and
he had no imagination. These are, indeed, grievous disabilities in a
critic. What could have induced such a man, the impatient reader is
sometimes tempted to ask, to set himself up as a judge of poetry?
The answer to the question is to be found in the remarkable change which
has come over our entire conception of poetry, since the time when
Johnson wrote. It has often been stated that the essential
characteristic of that great Romantic Movement which began at the end of
the eighteenth century, was the re-introduction of Nature into the
domain of poetry. Incidentally, it is curious to observe that nearly
every literary revolution has been hailed by its supporters as a return
to Nature. No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the
school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the
champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne
himself--the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the
seventeenth century--wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction
against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance. Precisely the
same contradictions took place in France. Nature was the watchword of
Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor
Hugo. To judge by the successive proclamations of poets, the development
of literature offers a singular paradox. The further it goes back, the
more sophisticated it becomes; and it grows more and more natural as it
grows distant from the State of Nature. However this may be, it is at
least certain that the Romantic revival peculiarly deserves to be called
Naturalistic, because it succeeded in bringing into vogue the operations
of the external world--'the Vegetable Universe,' as Blake called it--as
subject-matter for poetry. But it would have done very little, if it had
done nothing more than this. Thomson, in the full meridian of the
eighteenth century, wrote poems upon the subject of Nature; but it would
be foolish to suppose that Wordsworth and Coleridge merely carried on a
fashion which Thomson had begun. Nature, with them, was something more
than a peg for descriptive and didactic verse; it was the manifestation
of the vast and mysterious forces of the world. The publication of _The
Ancient Mariner_ is a landmark in the history of letters, not because of
its descriptions of natural objects, but because it swept into the
poet's vision a whole new universe of infinite and eternal things; it
was the discovery of the Unknown. We are still under the spell of _The
Ancient Mariner_; and poetry to us means, primarily, something which
suggests, by means of words, mysteries and infinitudes. Thus, music and
imagination seem to us the most essential qualities of poetry, because
they are the most potent means by which such suggestions may be invoked.
But the eighteenth century knew none of these things. To Lord
Chesterfield and to Pope, to Prior and to Horace Walpole, there was
nothing at all strange about the world; it was charming, it was
disgusting, it was ridiculous, and it was just what one might have
expected. In such a world, why should poetry, more than anything else,
be mysterious? No! Let it be sensible; that was enough.
The new edition of the _Lives_, which Dr. Birkbeck Hill prepared for
publication before his death, and which has been issued by the Clarendon
Press, with a brief Memoir of the editor, would probably have astonished
Dr. Johnson. But, though the elaborate erudition of the notes and
appendices might have surprised him, it would not have put him to
shame. One can imagine his growling scorn of the scientific
conscientiousness of the present day. And indeed, the three tomes of Dr.
Hill's edition, with all their solid wealth of information, their
voluminous scholarship, their accumulation of vast research, are a
little ponderous and a little ugly; the hand is soon wearied with the
weight, and the eye is soon distracted by the varying types, and the
compressed columns of the notes, and the paragraphic numerals in the
margins. This is the price that must be paid for increased efficiency.
The wise reader will divide his attention between the new business-like
edition and one of the charming old ones, in four comfortable volumes,
where the text is supreme upon the page, and the paragraphs follow one
another at leisurely intervals. The type may be a little faded, and the
paper a little yellow; but what of that? It is all quiet and easy; and,
as one reads, the brilliant sentences seem to come to one, out of the
Past, with the friendliness of a conversation.
1906.