JOHNSON'S WORKS
In his lifetime Johnson was chiefly thought of as a great writer.
To-day we think of him chiefly as a great man. That is the measure of
Boswell's genius: no other biographer of a great writer has
unconsciously and unintentionally thrown his hero's own works into the
shade. Scott will always have a hundred times as many readers as
Lockhart, and Macaulay as Trevelyan. But in this, as in some other
ways, Boswell's involuntary greatness has upset the balance of truth.
Johnson's writings are now much less read than they deserve to be. For
this there are a variety of causes. Fourteen years before he died,
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth; and fourteen years after
his death Wordsworth and Coleridge published the volume which, more
perhaps than any {172} other, started English literature on its great
voyage into seas unsailed and unimagined by Johnson. The triumph of
the Romantic movement inevitably brought with it the depreciation of
the prophet of common sense in literature and in life. The great
forces in the literature of the next seventy or eighty years were: in
poetry, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats; in prose,
Scott, and then later on, Carlyle and Ruskin; every single one of them
providing a wine by no means to be put into Johnsonian bottles.
Johnson, even more than other men in the eighteenth century, was
abstract and general in his habit of mind and expression. The men of
the new age were just the opposite; they were concrete and particular,
lovers of detail and circumstance. The note of his writings had been
common sense and rugged veracity; the dominant notes of theirs were
picturesqueness, eloquence, emotion, even sentimentalism. Both the
exaggerated hopes and the exaggerated fears aroused by the French
Revolution disinclined their victims to listen to the middling sanity
of Johnson. The hopes built themselves fancy castles of equality and
fraternity which instinctively shrunk from the broadsides of Johnsonian
ridicule. The fears hid themselves in caves of mediaeval reaction and
did not care to expose their eyes {173} to the smarting daylight of
Johnsonian common sense. His appeal had always been to argument: the
new appeal was at worst to sentiment, at best to history for which
Johnson was too true to his century to care anything. When Voltaire
writes an article on monasticism, he has nothing to say about how it
arose and developed; he neither knows nor cares anything about that.
For him it is, like everything else, a thing to be judged in a court of
abstract rationality, altogether independent of time and circumstance,
and as such he has no difficulty in dismissing it with brilliant and
witty contempt without telling us anything about what it actually is or
was. It was this unhistorical spirit which, as Burke rightly preached,
was the most fatal element in the French Revolution. But the French
are not to be blamed alone for an intellectual atmosphere which was
then universal in Europe. Little as Johnson would have liked the
association, it must be admitted that he was in his way as pure and
unhistorical a rationalist as Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists; and
that it was inevitable that the reaction in favour of history which
Burke set in motion would tell against him as well as against them.
Against the discovery that things can neither be rightly judged nor
wisely reformed except by examining how they came to be what they {174}
are, the whole eighteenth century, and in it Johnson as well as
Rousseau and Voltaire, stands naked. And the abstract rationalizing of
that century was soon to have another enemy in alliance with history,
the new force of science. Nothing has been more fatal to the arbitrary
despotism of mere reason than the idea of development, of evolution.
Directly it is seen that all life exhibits itself in stages it becomes
obvious that the dry light of reason will not provide the materials for
true judgment until it has been coloured by a sympathetic insight into
the conditions of the particular stage under discussion.
All these things, then, were against Johnson. Alike to the new
Liberalism ever more and more drenched in sentiment, to the new
Conservatism ever more and more looking for a base in history, to
Romanticism in literature with its stir, colour and emotion, to science
with its new studies and new methods, the works of Johnson almost
inevitably appeared as the dry bones of a dead age. He had laughed at
the Romans: and behold the Romans had played a great part in the
greatest of Revolutions. He had laughed at "noble prospects" and
behold the world was gone after them, and his, "Who _can_ like the
Highlands?" was drowned in the poetry of Scott and Byron, and made
{175} to appear narrow and vulgar in the presence of Wordsworth. Only
in one field did any great change take place likely to be favourable to
Johnson's influence. The religious and ecclesiastical revival which
was so conspicuous in England during the first half of the nineteenth
century was naturally inclined to exalt Johnson as the only strong
Churchman, and almost the only definite Christian among the great
writers of the eighteenth century. The fact, too, that the most
conspicuous centre of the revival was Oxford, where Johnson's name had
always been affectionately remembered, helped to send its votaries back
to him. But this alliance could not be more than partial. The Oxford
Movement soon degenerated into Mediaevalism and Ritualism, and no man
was less fitted than Johnson to be the prophet of either. The genius
of common sense was the very last leader their devotees could wish for.
And as the revival became increasingly a reaction, relying more and
more on supposed precedent and less on the essential reason of things,
it inevitably got further away from Johnson who cared everything for
reason and nothing at all for dubious history.
But it was not merely the changes that came over the general mind of
the nation that went against Johnson; it was still more the revolution
in his own special branch of literature. {176} He was the last great
English critic who treated poets, not as great men to be under stood,
but as school-boys to be corrected. He still applied, as the French
have always done, a preordained standard to the work he was discussing,
and declared it correct or not according to that test. The new
criticism inaugurated by Coleridge aimed at interpretation rather than
at magisterial regulation; and no one will now revert to the old. We
never now find an English critic writing such notes, common till lately
in France, as "cela n'est pas français," "cela ne se dit pas," "il faut
écrire"--such and such a phrase, and not the phrase used by the poet
receiving chastisement. But Johnson does conclude his plays of
Shakespeare with such remarks as: "The conduct of this play is
deficient." "The passions are directed to their true end." "In this
play are some passages which ought not to have been exhibited, as we
are told they were, to a maiden Queen." The substance of these
comments may often be just, but for us their tone is altogether wrong.
We no longer think that a critic, even if he be Johnson, should
distribute praise or blame to poets, even of much less importance than
Shakespeare, with the confident assurance of a school-master looking
over a boy's exercise. Johnson's manner, {177} then, as a critic was
against him with the nineteenth century. But so also was his matter.
The poetry he really believed in was that of what the nineteenth
century came to regard as the age of prose. Of his three great _Lives_
we feel that those of Dryden and Pope express the pleasure he
spontaneously and unconsciously felt, while that of Milton is a
reluctant tribute extorted from him by a genius he could not resist.
Among the few poets in his long list for whom the nineteenth century
cared much are Gray and Collins; and of Collins he says almost nothing
in the way of admiration, and of Gray very little. Even when he wrote
of Shakespeare, to whom he paid a tribute that will long outlive those
of blind idolatry, what he praised is not what seemed greatest to the
lovers of poetry in the next generation. A critic who found "no nice
discriminations of character in Macbeth," and defended Tate's "happy
family" ending of Lear, was not unnaturally dismissed or ignored by
those who had sat at the feet of Coleridge or Lamb.
There is still one other thing which told against him. No one
influenced the course of English literature in the nineteenth century
so much as Wordsworth. And Wordsworth was a determined reformer not
only of the matter of poetry but of its very language. {178} He
overstated his demands and did not get his ideas clear to his own mind,
as may be seen by the fact that he instinctively recoiled from applying
the whole of them in his own poetical practice. But he plainly
advocated two things as essential parts of his reform; poetry was to go
back for its subject to the primary universal facts of human life, and
it was to use as far as possible the language actually used by plain
men in speaking to each other. Both these demands had to submit to
modification; but both profoundly influenced the subsequent development
of English poetry: and both were, as Wordsworth knew, opposed to the
teaching and practice of Johnson. The return to simplicity involved a
preference for such poetry as Percy's Ballads which Johnson had
ridiculed, and a distaste for the poetry of the town which Johnson
admired. And both in the famous _Preface_ and in the _Appendix_ and
_Essay Supplementary_ added to it Wordsworth refers to Johnson and
seems to recognize him as the most dangerous authority with whom he has
to contend. In that contest Wordsworth was on the whole decidedly
victorious; and to that extent again Johnson was discredited. Nor was
it the language of poetry only which was affected. Under the
influences which Wordsworth, Scott and Byron set {179} moving, the old
colourless, abstract, professedly classical language was supplanted
even in prose. The new prose was enriched by a hundred qualities of
music, colour and suggestion, at which the prose of the eighteenth
century had never aimed. Those who had enjoyed the easy grace of Lamb,
the swift lightnings of Carlyle, the eloquence, playfulness and
tenderness of Ruskin, the lucid suavity of Newman, were sure to
conclude in their haste that the prose of Johnson was a thing pompous,
empty and dull.
But against all these indictments a reaction has now begun. Like other
reactions its first utterances are apt to be extravagant. In
literature as in politics those who at last take their courage in their
hands and defy the established opinion are obliged to shout to keep
their spirits up. So Sir Walter Raleigh, whose _Six Essays_ at once
put the position of Johnson on a new footing, has allowed himself to
say of some sentences from _The Rambler_ that they are "prose which
will not suffer much by comparison with the best in the language."
But, apart from these inevitable over-statements of defiance, what he
has said about Johnson is unanswered and unanswerable. And at last it
is able to fall upon a soil prepared for it. In all directions the
Gothic movement, which was so inevitably {180} unfavourable to the fame
of Johnson, has crumbled and collapsed. A counter movement seems to be
in progress. The classical revival in architecture is extending into
other fields and though no one wishes to undo the poetic achievement of
the nineteenth century, every one has come to wish to understand that
of the eighteenth. We shall never again think that Dryden and Pope had
the essence of poetry in them to the same extent, as, for instance,
Wordsworth or Shelley; but neither shall we ever again treat them with
the superficial and ignorant contempt which was not uncommon twenty or
thirty years ago. The twentieth century is not so confident as its
predecessor that the poetry and criticism of the eighteenth may safely
be ignored.
If, then, we are not to ignore Johnson's writing, what are we to
remember? In a sketch like this the point of view to be taken is that
of the man with a general interest in English letters, not that of the
specialist in the eighteenth century, or indeed, that of any specialist
at all. Well, then, first of all Johnson wrote verses which though not
great poetry have some fine qualities. They are, like so much of the
verse of that century, chiefly "good sense put into good metre." That
is what Twining, the Aristotelian critic, said of them when Johnson
died. He had a much {181} finer sense of poetry than Johnson, and he
was perfectly right in this criticism. But it is a loss and not a gain
that, since Wordsworth gave us such a high conception of what poetry
should be, we have ceased to take pleasure in good verses simply for
their own sake. In the eighteenth century a new volume of verse became
at once the talk of the town and every cultivated person read it. Now
we have allowed poetry to become a thing so esoteric in its exaltation
that only the poetically minded can read it. Neither the _Excursion_
nor the _Epipsychidion_ could possibly be read by the great public.
All the world could and did read Pope's _Epistles_ and Goldsmith's
_Traveller_. It may have been worth while to pay the price for the new
greatness of poetry that came in with the nineteenth century; but it is
at any rate right to remember that there was a price, and that it has
had to be paid. It may be that some day we shall be able again to take
pleasure in well-turned verses without losing our appreciation of
higher things. Good verse is, really, a delightful thing even when it
is not great poetry, and we are too apt now-a-days to forget that verse
has one great inherent advantage over prose, that it impresses itself
on the memory as no prose can. We can all quote scores of lines from
Pope, though we {182} may not know who it is whom we are quoting. That
is the pleasure of art. And if the lines, as often, utter the voice of
good sense in morals or politics, it is its accidental utility also.
Johnson has, of course, little of Pope's amazing dexterity, wit and
finish. But he has some qualities of which Pope had nothing or not
very much. In his verse, as everywhere else, he shows a sense of the
real issues of things quite out of the reach of a well-to-do wit living
in his library, like Pope; what he writes may be in form an imitation
of Juvenal, but it is in essence a picture of life and often of his own
life.
How large a part of the business of poetry consists in giving new
expression to the old truths of experience, is known to all the great
poets and seen in their practice. Johnson can do this with a force
that refuses to be forgotten.
"But few there are whom hours like these await,
Who set unclouded in the gulfs of fate.
From Lydia's monarch should the search descend,
By Solon cautioned to regard his end,
In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise!
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show."
Such lines almost challenge Pope on his own {183} ground, meeting his
rapier-like dexterity of neatness with heavy sword-strokes of sincerity
and strength. But here, as in the prose, the true Johnsonian
excellence is best seen when he is in the confessional.
"Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee--
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."
There, and in such lines as the stanza on Levett--
"His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed,"
one hears the authentic unique voice of Johnson; not that of a great
poet but of a real man to whom it is always worth while to listen, and
not least when he puts his thoughts into the pointed shape of verse.
Still, of course, prose and not verse is his natural medium. And here
a word should be said about that prose style of his which had an
immense vogue for a time and plainly {184} influenced most of the
writers of his own and the following generation, even men so great as
Gibbon and the young Ruskin, and women so brilliant as Fanny Burney.
Then a reaction came and it was generally denounced as pompous, empty
and verbose. After the Revolution people gave up wearing wigs, and
with the passing of wigs and buckle-shoes there came a dislike of the
dignified deportment of the eighteenth century in weightier matters
than costume. Now Johnson, whatever he did at other times, was
commonly inclined to put on his wig before he took up his pen. His
elaborate and antithetical phrases are apt to go into pairs like people
in a Court procession, and seem at first sight to belong altogether to
what we should call an artificial as well as a ceremonious age. His
style is the exact opposite of Dryden's, of which he said that, having
"no prominent or discriminative characters," it "could not easily be
imitated either seriously or ludicrously." Johnson's could be, and
often was, imitated in both spirits. Even in his lifetime, when it was
most admired, it was already parodied. Goldsmith was talking once of
the art of writing fables, and of the necessity, if your fable be about
"little fishes," of making them talk like "little fishes"; Johnson
laughed: upon which Goldsmith said, "Why, Dr. Johnson, {185} this is
not so easy as you seem to think: for if you were to make little fishes
talk, they would talk like whales." That was the weak spot in Johnson
on which the wits and critics seized at once: there is a good deal of
misplaced magniloquence in his writings. When the sage in _Rasselas_
says, "I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and
the happy commerce of domestic tenderness," we now feel at once that
the simple and natural thought gains nothing and loses much by this
heavy pomp of abstract eloquence. So when Johnson wants to say in the
eleventh _Idler_ that it is wrong and absurd to let our spirits depend
on the weather, he makes his reader laugh or yawn, rather than listen,
by the ill-timed elaboration of his phrases: "to call upon the sun for
peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm
us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly." So much
must be admitted. Johnson is often turgid and pompous, often grandiose
with an artificial and undesired grandiloquence. No one, however, who
has read his prose works will pretend that this is a fair account of
his ordinary style. You may read many _Ramblers_ in succession and
scarcely find a marked instance of it; and, as every one knows, his
last, longest and pleasantest work, the _Lives of the Poets_, is almost
free from it. All through {186} his life one can trace a kind of
progress as he gradually shakes off these mannerisms, and writes as
easily as he talked. They are most conspicuous in _The Rambler_ and
_Rasselas_. But even there, through all the heaviness, born perhaps of
the too obvious desire to instruct and improve, we get more than
occasional suggestions of the trenchant force which we most associate
with the pages of Boswell.
"My curiosity," said Rasselas, "does not very strongly lead me to
survey piles of stone, or mounds of earth; my business is with man. I
came hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choaked
aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present
world. . . . To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the
past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be
known."
There is nothing here of the intimacy and charm which, as Dryden and
Cowley had already shown, and Johnson himself was occasionally to show
in his last years, a plain prose may possess; but of the lucidity and
force which are its most necessary characteristics never prose
exhibited more. Those who know their Boswell will catch in the passage
a pleasant foretaste of the outburst to Thrale when he wanted Johnson
to contrast {187} French and English scenery: "Never heed such
nonsense, sir; a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in
one country or another; let us, if we _do_ talk, talk about something;
men and women are my subjects of inquiry: let us see how these differ
from those we have left behind."
This natural trenchancy gets freer play, of course, in the talk than in
the writings. But it is in them all from the first, even in
_Rasselas_, even in _The Rambler_. "The same actions performed by
different hands produce different effects, and, instead of rating the
man by his performances we rate too frequently the performances by the
man. . . . Benefits which are received as gifts from wealth are
exacted as debts from indigence; and he that in a high station is
celebrated for superfluous goodness would in a meaner condition have
barely been confessed to have done his duty."
It is not necessary to multiply citations. What is found even in _The
Rambler_, which he himself in later years found "too wordy," is found
much more abundantly in the Dictionary and the _Shakespeare_; and as he
grows old, and, with age and authority, increasingly indifferent to
criticism and increasingly confident in his own judgment, there
gradually comes an ease and familiarity which without {188} diminishing
the perfect lucidity of the phrases adds sometimes to the old
contemptuous force, and occasionally brings a new intimacy and
indulgence. The writing becomes gradually more like the talk. Nobody
in his earlier work was ever quite so unceremoniously kicked downstairs
as Wilkes was in _The False Alarm_.
"All wrong ought to be rectified. If Mr. Wilkes is deprived of a
lawful seat, both he and his electors have reason to complain, but it
will not be easily found why, among the innumerable wrongs of which a
great part of mankind are hourly complaining, the whole care of the
publick should be transferred to Mr. Wilkes and the freeholders of
Middlesex, who might all sink into non-existence without any other
effect than that there would be room made for a new rabble and a new
retailer of sedition and obscenity."
This is the old power of invective indulged now with the reckless
indifference of a man who is talking among friends, knows his power and
enjoys using it. But the ease of his later manner more commonly takes
the form of a redoubled directness in his old appeal to universal
experience, or that of these natural indulgences of old age, anecdote
and autobiography. Take, for instance, the first volume of his
_Lives_. It is not only full {189} of such admirable generalizations
as that in which he sums up the case for a literary as against a
mathematical or scientific education: "The truth is that the knowledge
of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or
includes are not the great or the frequent business of the human
mind. . . . We are perpetually moralists: we are geometricians only by
chance"; or that in which he expresses his contempt for Dryden
exchanging Billingsgate with Settle: "Minds are not levelled in their
powers, but when they are first levelled in their desires"; or the
pregnant commonplace with which he prefaces his derision of the
artificial love-poems which Cowley thought it necessary to address to
an imaginary mistress: "It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of
a college or in the bustle of the world, to find useful studies and
serious employment." This is the Johnson his readers had known from
the beginning. What is newer are the personal touches sprinkled all
over the book. Here he will bring in a fact about his friend, Sir
Joshua Reynolds; there he will give a piece of information derived from
"my father, an old bookseller." He who studied life and manners before
all things loves to record the personal habits of his poets and to try
their writings rather by the tests of life than {190} of criticism. He
was, perhaps, the first great critic to take the seeming trifles of
daily life out of the hands of gossips and anecdote-mongers, and give
them their due place in the study of a great man. All this necessarily
gave him something of the colloquial ease of the writer of
recollections. Nothing could be simpler than his style when he tells
us of Milton that "when he first rose he heard a chapter in the Hebrew
Bible and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an
hour; then dined; then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another
sing; then studied; to six; then entertained his visitors till eight;
then supped, and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to
bed." On which his comment is characteristic and plainly
autobiographical. "So is his life described; but this even tenour
appears attainable only in colleges. He that lives in the world will
sometimes have the succession of his practice broken and confused.
Visitors, of whom Milton is represented to have had great numbers, will
come and stay unseasonably: business, of which every man has some, must
be done when others will do it." This may still have about it
something of the style of a school-master, but of a school-master who
teaches the art of living, not without having learnt by experience the
difficulty of practising it.
{191}
So we may trace the gradual diminution, but never the entire
disappearance, of the excessive "deportment" which is the best known
feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by
hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at
all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means
merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it
should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense,
few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good
writers, Scott, for instance, and the authors of the Book of Common
Prayer, in whom a hurried reader might frequently omit half a phrase
without depriving his hearers of an ounce of meaning. But you cannot
do that with Johnson. Words that add neither information nor argument
to what has gone before are exceptionally rare in him. Take his style
at its worst. "It is therefore to me a severe aggravation of a
calamity, when it is such as in the common opinion will not justify the
acerbity of exclamation, or support the solemnity of vocal grief."
Heavier writing there could scarcely be. But every word has its duty
to do. The supposed speaker has been saying that he is, like Sancho
Panza, quite unable to suffer in silence; and he adds {192} that this
makes many a misfortune harder for him to bear than it need be: for it
may arise from an injury which other people think too trifling to
justify any open expression of anger, or from an accident that may seem
to them so petty that they will not endure any serious lamentation
about it. Johnson's way of saying this is pompous and rather absurd;
but it is not verbose. So when he says that he knows nothing of Mallet
except "what is supplied by the unauthorized loquacity of common fame,"
it is possible to dislike the phrase; it is not possible to deny that
the words are as full of meaning as words can be.
The fact is that Johnson's style has the merits and defects of
scholarship. He knows, as a scholar will, how every word came upon the
paper, consequently he seldom uses language which is either empty or
inexact; but with the scholar's accuracy he has also the scholar's
pride. The dignity of literature was constantly in his mind as he
wrote; and he did not always write the better for it. Books in his day
and in his eyes were still rather solemn things to be kept above the
linguistic level of conversation. Dryden and Addison had already begun
to make the great discovery that the best prose style has no conscious
air of literature about it; but the new doctrine had not reached the
{193} mass either of writers or readers. And it never completely
reached Johnson. He himself once accidentally gave one of the best
definitions of the new style when he said of Shakespeare's comic
dialogue that it was gathered from that kind of conversation which is
"above grossness and below refinement." And at the end of his life he
even occasionally produced some good specimens of it. But, taking his
work as a whole, it must be admitted that he could rarely bring himself
to be "below refinement," the refinement not of the drawing-room but of
the library. In what he says he is always a man; in the way he says it
he is nearly always too visibly an author. Those who have eyes to see
and the will to look never fail of finding the man; but the author
stares them in the face.
His prose works may be divided into two classes, those in which he is
primarily a moralist, and those in which he is primarily a critic.
Life and manners are never out of his mind; but while they are the
direct and avowed subject of _The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Rasselas_,
they only come, as it were, indirectly into the _Dictionary_, the
_Shakespeare_ and the _Lives of the Poets_, where the ostensible
business is the criticism of literature. Outside these categories are
the political pamphlets, the interesting _Journey to the Western
Islands_, {194} and a great quantity of miscellaneous literary
hack-work. All of these have mind and character in them, or they would
not be Johnson's; but they call for no special discussion. Nor do the
_Prayers and Meditations_, which of course he did not publish himself.
It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them,
all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of
the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the
tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to
the battle in which he seemed to himself to be always defeated.
_The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Rasselas_ fill four volumes out of the
twelve in the 1823 library edition of Johnson. When Johnson decided to
bring out a periodical paper he, of course, had the model of the
_Spectator_ and _Tatler_ before him. But he had in him less of the
graces of life than Addison and Steele, and a far deeper sense of the
gravity of its issues; with the result that _The Rambler_ and _The
Idler_ are much heavier than their predecessors, not only in style but
in substance. They deal much more avowedly with instruction. As we
read them we wonder, not at the slow sale of the original papers, but
at the editions which the author lived to see. We stand amazed to-day
at the audacity of a journalist {195} who dares to offer, and at the
patience or wisdom of a public which is content twice a week to read,
not exciting events or entertaining personalities, but sober essays on
the most ancient and apparently threadbare of topics. Here are
Johnson's subjects for the ten _Ramblers_ which appeared between
November 20 and December 22, 1750: the shortness of life, the value of
good-humour, the folly of heirs who live on their expectations,
peevishness, the impossibility of knowing mankind till one has
experienced misfortune, the self-deceptions of conscience, the moral
responsibilities of men of genius, the power of novelty, the justice of
suspecting the suspicious, the pleasures of change and in particular
that of winter following upon summer. None of these can be called
exciting topics. Yet when there is a man of real power to discuss
them, and men of sense to listen to him, they can make up a book which
goes through many editions, is translated into foreign languages, and
is called by a great critic a hundred and fifty years after its
appearance, a "splendid repository of wisdom and truth." With the
exception of the first word, Sir Walter Raleigh's daring praise may be
accepted as strictly true. There is nothing splendid about _The
Rambler_ or _The Idler_. The more shining qualities {196} of
literature, except occasional eloquence, are conspicuously wanting in
them. There is no imagination, little of the fancy, wit and readiness
of illustration so omnipresent in Johnson's talk, little power of
drawing character, very little humour. He often puts his essay into
the form of a story, but it remains an essay still. His strength is
always in the reflections, never in the facts related or the persons
described. The club of Essex gentlemen who fancied themselves to be
satirized in _The Rambler_ were only an extreme instance of the common
vanity which loves to fancy itself the subject of other people's
thoughts. Johnson's portraits have not life enough to be caricatures;
still less can posterity find in them the finer truth of human beings.
His was a profounder mind than Addison's; but he could not have drawn
Sir Roger de Coverley. He had not "run about the world," as he said,
for nothing, and he knew a great deal about men and women; but he could
not create. _Rasselas_, his only professed story, is a total failure
as a story. It is a series of moral essays, and whoever reads it must
read it for the same reasons as he reads _The Rambler_. The remark
Johnson absurdly made of Richardson's masterpiece is exactly true of
his own _Rasselas_: "If you were to read it for the story {197} your
impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself."
In all these things, as elsewhere, his strength lies in shrewdness, in
a common sense that has been through the fire of experience, in a real
love of wisdom and truth. There is a story that Charlotte Brontë, when
a girl of sixteen, broke out very angrily at some one who said she was
always talking about clever men such as Johnson and Sheridan. "Now you
don't know the meaning of clever," she said; "Sheridan might be
clever--scamps often are, but Johnson hadn't a spark of 'cleverality'
in him." That remark gives the essence of _The Rambler_. Whoever
wants "cleverality," whoever wants what Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton
supply so brilliantly and abundantly to the present generation, had
best leave Johnson alone. The signal merit of his writings is the
exact opposite of "cleverality"; it is that he always means exactly
what he says. He often talked for victory, but except, perhaps, in the
political pamphlets he always wrote for truth.
Books like _The Rambler_ and _Rasselas_ do not easily lend themselves
to illustration; the effect they produce is a cumulative effect.
Slowly, as we read paper after paper, the mind and character of Johnson
take hold of us; what we began with impatience or {198} perhaps with
contempt, we put down with respect and admiration. At the end we feel
that we would gladly put our lives into the hands of this rough, wise,
human, limited, lovable man. To get to that impression the books must
be read; but one or two illustrations may be given. There is nothing
new to say about death, but the human heart will itself be dead when it
is willing to give up saying again the old things that have been said
on that subject from the beginning of the world. Who puts more of it
into saying them than Johnson?
"When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for
every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand
endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a
thousand favours unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish,
vainly wish, for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that
we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we
never understood."
Where in this is the pompous pedant who is so commonly supposed to be
the writer of Johnson's books? The English language has not often been
more beautifully handled. It is true that, until one looks closely,
the last words of the first sentence appear to be a piece of empty
verbiage; but taken as a {199} whole the passage moves with a grave
music fitted to its sober truth. The art in it is as admirable as the
emotion is sincere.
Or take a different illustration from a _Rambler_, in which he is
discussing the well-known fact that the commonest cause of shyness is
self-importance.
"Those who are oppressed by their own reputation will perhaps not be
comforted by hearing that their cares are unnecessary. But the truth
is that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that
considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn
how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we
see multitudes passing before us of whom, perhaps, not one appears to
deserve our notice or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we,
likewise, are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to
glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that
the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant
hour with prattle, and be forgotten."
All good writers write of themselves; not, as vain people talk, of
their triumphs, and grievances and diseases, but of what they have
succeeded in grasping as their own out of all the floating wisdom of
the world. In {200} a passage like this one almost hears Johnson
reflecting aloud as he walks back in his old age to his lonely rooms
after an evening at "The Club" or the Mitre. It is the graver side of
what he once said humorously to Boswell: "I may leave this town and go
to Grand Cairo without being missed here or observed there." But the
autobiographical note is sometimes even plainer. Of whom could he be
thinking so much as of himself when he wrote the 101st _Rambler_?
"Perhaps no kind of superiority is more flattering or alluring than
that which is conferred by the powers of conversation, by
extemporaneous sprightliness of fancy, copiousness of language, and
fertility of sentiment. In other exertions of genius, the greater part
of the praise is unknown and unenjoyed; the writer, indeed, spreads his
reputation to a wider extent, but receives little pleasure or advantage
from the diffusion of his name, and only obtains a kind of nominal
sovereignty over regions which pay no tribute. The colloquial wit has
always his own radiance reflected on himself, and enjoys all the
pleasure which he bestows; he finds his power confessed by every one
that approaches him, sees friendship kindling with rapture and
attention swelling into praise."
In that shrewd observation lies the secret {201} of the comparative
unproductiveness of his later years. Men like Dryden and Gibbon and
Lecky are the men to get through immense literary labours: to a great
talker like Johnson what can the praises of reviewers or of posterity
be in comparison with the flashing eyes, and attentive ears, the
expectant silence and spontaneous applause, of the friends in whom he
has an immediate mirror of his success?
It is impossible and unnecessary to multiply illustrations. The only
thing that need be added is that even in _Rasselas_ and the essays,
Johnson's slow-moving style is constantly relieved by those brief and
pregnant generalizations of which he is one of the greatest masters in
our language. They are so close to life as all men know it, that the
careless reader, as we have already seen, is apt to take them for
platitudes; but there is all the difference between the stale
superficiality which coldly repeats what only its ears have heard, and
these sayings of Johnson heated to new energy in the fires of
conscience, thought and experience. "I have already enjoyed too much,"
says the Prince in _Rasselas_; "give me something to desire." And
then, a little later, as so often happens with the wise, comes the
other side of the medal of truth: "Human life is everywhere {202} a
state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Or
take such sentences as that embodying the favourite Johnsonian and
Socratic distinction: "to man is permitted the contemplation of the
skies, but the practice of virtue is commanded"; or, "we will not
endeavour to fix the destiny of kingdoms: it is our business to
consider what beings like us may perform"; or such sayings as, "the
truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection
and anticipation fill up almost all our moments"; "marriage has many
pains but celibacy has no pleasures"; "envy is almost the only vice
which is practicable at all times and in every place"; "no place
affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a
public library"; "I have always thought it the duty of an anonymous
author to write as if he expected to be hereafter known"; or, last of
all, to bring citation to an end, that characteristic saying about the
omnipresence of the temptations of idleness: "to do nothing is in every
man's power: we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties."
Johnson's principal work as a scholar and critic of literature is to be
found in his Dictionary, the edition of Shakespeare, and the _Lives of
the Poets_. It has the strength {203} and weakness which might be
anticipated by any intelligent person who had read Boswell and the
_Ramblers_. It abounds in manliness, courage, and modesty: it never
for an instant forgets that literature exists for the sake of life and
not life for the sake of literature: it has no esoteric or professional
affectations, but says plain things in plain words such as all can
understand. The literary critic can have no more valuable qualities
than these. But they do not complete his equipment. The criticism of
Johnson has many limitations. He was entirely without aesthetic
capacity. Not only were music and the plastic arts nothing to him--as
indeed they have been to many good judges of poetry--but he does not
appear to have possessed any musical ear or much power of imagination.
It is not going too far to say that of the highest possibilities of
poetry he had no conception. He imagines he has disposed of _Lycidas_
by exhibiting its "inherent improbability" in the eyes of a crude
common sense: a triumph which is as easy and as futile as his
refutation of Berkeley's metaphysics by striking his foot upon the
ground. The truth is of course that in each case he is beating the
air. The stamp upon the ground would have been a triumphant answer to
a fool who should say that the senses cannot feel: it does not touch
{204} Berkeley who says they cannot know. So the attack on _Lycidas_
might be fatal to a judge who put his judgment into the form of a
pastoral; as the criticism of a poet it is in the main simply
irrelevant. It is evident that what Johnson admires in Milton is the
power of his mind and the elevation of his character, not at all his
purely poetic gifts. He never betrays the slightest suspicion that in
speaking of Milton he is speaking of one of the very greatest artists
the world has ever known. He thought blank verse was verse only to the
eye, and found the "numbers" of _Lycidas_ "unpleasing." He did not
believe that anybody read _Paradise Lost_ for pleasure, and said so
with his usual honesty. He saw nothing in _Samson Agonistes_ but the
weakness of the plot; of the heights and depths of its poetry he
perceived nothing. He preferred the comedies to the tragedies of
Shakespeare: felt the poet in him much less than the omniscient
observer of universal life: and indeed, if we may judge by what he says
in the preface to the Dictionary, hardly thought of him as a master of
poetic language at all. He had evidently no appreciation of the Greek
dramatists. The thing that moves him in poetry is eloquence of
expression and energy of thought: both good things but things that can
exist outside poetry. The arguments {205} in which he states his
objections to devotional poetry in the life of Waller show that he
regarded poetry as an artful intellectual embroidery, not as the only
fit utterance of an exalted mood.
To such a conception we can never return after all that has been done
for us by Wordsworth and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to say nothing
of some living critics like Mr. Yeats. No one who cares at all for
poetry now could think of regretting an unwritten epic in the language
Johnson uses about Dryden's: "it would doubtless have improved our
numbers and enlarged our language; and might perhaps have contributed
by pleasing instruction to rectify our opinions and purify our
manners." It is not that such criticism is false but that it is beside
the mark. An epic poem may do all these things, as a statesman may
play golf or act as churchwarden: but when he dies it is not his golf
or his churchwardenship that we feel the loss of. Put this remark of
Johnson's by the side of such sayings as have now become the
commonplaces of criticism. We need not go out to look for them. They
are everywhere, in the mouths of all who speak of poetry. One opens
Keats' letters at random and finds him saying, "Poetry should be great
and unobtrusive, a thing that enters {206} into one's soul." One takes
up the work of a living critic, Mr. Eccles, and one finds him saying,
in his book on French poetry, that when we go to the very root of
poetry one of the things we discern is the "mystical collaboration of a
consecrated element of form in the travail of the spirit." Language of
this sort is now almost the ordinary language of criticism. Blake and
Wordsworth did not conquer the kingdom of criticism in a moment or a
year: but when at last they did its whole tone and attitude necessarily
changed. Where Johnson, even while praising Milton's "skill in
harmony" as "not less than his learning," discusses it merely as
"skill," as a sort of artisanship, and misses all its subtler and rarer
mysteries, we see in it an inspiration as much an art, life itself
raised as it were to a higher denomination, a power of spirit--
"Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce."
It is the measure of the distance we have travelled away from Johnson
that even plain people to-day, if they care for poetry at all, find
much more in it than a piece of cunning craftsmanship. It is always
that no doubt: but for us to-day it is also something far higher: a
symbol of eternity. And more than a symbol, a sacrament: for it not
only {207} suggests but reveals: it _is_ the truth which it signifies;
itself a part, as all those who have ever profoundly felt its influence
are assured, of the eternal order of things to which it points.
Plainly, then, some of the things which now seem to us to be of the
very innermost essence of poetry are not things which can be weighed in
any scales known to Johnson. Yet in spite of his limitations he is
certainly one of the masters of English criticism. The great critic
may be said to be one who leaves the subject-matter of his criticism
more respected and better understood than he found it. Johnson's
principal subjects were the English language, the plays of Shakespeare,
and the poets from Cowley to his own day. There can be no question of
the services he rendered to the English language. His Dictionary, as
was inevitable, had many faults, especially of etymology: but its
publication marks an epoch in the history of English. It was a kind of
challenge to the world. Other nations had till then inclined to look
upon our language and literature as barbarous: and we had not been very
sure ourselves that we had any right to a place on the Parnassus of the
nations. Great men in Italy and France had thought those {208}
languages worth the labours of a lifetime. In England before Johnson's
Dictionary, nothing had been done to claim for English an equal place
with Italian or French in the future of the literature and civilization
of the world. What companies of learned men had taken generations to
do for foreign countries had now been done for England in a few years
by the industry, and abilities of a single scholar. Englishmen who
took a pride in their language might now do so with understanding:
foreigners who wished to learn English could now learn in the method
and spirit of a scholar, no longer merely as travellers or tradesmen.
The two folio volumes of the Dictionary were the visible evidence that
English had taken its place in the literary polity of Europe. They
were the fit precursors of the triumphant progress soon to be made by
Burke and Scott and Byron. The other great service which Johnson
rendered to our language by his Dictionary and its Preface could only
have been rendered by a man so superior to the narrowness of
scholarship as Johnson. No doubt as a single individual in a private
position he was not exposed to such temptations to law-giving arrogance
as the French Academicians. But nevertheless it is to his credit that
he frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209}
life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of
the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the
seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile
immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was
to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be
punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both
his melancholy and his common sense taught him that "language is the
work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be
derived." He knew that words coming from human mouths must follow the
law of life: "when they are not gaining strength they are losing it."
His business was not the vain folly of trying to bind the future in
fetters: it was to record the present use and past history of words as
accurately as he could ascertain them, and, by showing Englishmen what
their heritage was and whence they had received it, to make them proud
of its past and jealous of its future. The pedant wishes to apply a
code of Median rigidity to correct the barbarous freedom of a language
to which scholarship has never applied itself. Johnson gave our
savages laws and made them citizens of a constitutional state: but,
however venerable the laws and however little to be {210} changed
without grave reason, he knew that, if the literary polity of England
lived and grew, new needs would arise, old customs become obsolete, and
the laws of language, like all others, would have to be changed to meet
the new conditions. But the urgent business at that moment was to
codify the floating and uncertain rules which a student of English
found it difficult to collect and impossible to reconcile. Johnson
might often be wrong: but after him there was at least an authority to
appeal to: and that, as he himself felt, was a great step forward: for
it is of more importance that the law should be known than that it
should be right.
To have done all this, and to have explained what was done and what was
attempted in language of such manliness, modesty and eloquence as that
of the great Preface, is to have rendered one of the greatest services
that can be rendered to the literature of a nation. "The chief glory
of every people," says Johnson, "arises from its authors." That would
be a bold thing to say to-day and was a bolder then, especially in so
prosaic a place as the preface to a dictionary. But the world sees its
truth more and more. And it is less out of place in a dictionary than
appears at first sight. For that glory is not easily gained or
recognized till both authors {211} and people realize that their
language is the peer of the greatest in the world, a fit vehicle for
the highest thoughts that can enter the mind of man. And towards that
result in England only a few works of genius have contributed more than
Johnson's Dictionary.
After the language itself comes the most priceless of its monuments.
The services Johnson rendered to Shakespeare are only second to those
he rendered to the language in which Shakespeare wrote. The Preface to
his edition of Shakespeare is certainly the most masterly piece of his
literary criticism: and it may still be doubted, after all that has
been written about Shakespeare in the century and a half that separate
it from our own day, whether the world can yet show any sixty pages
about Shakespeare exhibiting so much truth and wisdom as these. All
Johnson's gifts are seen at their best in it: the lucidity, the virile
energy, the individuality of his style: the unique power of first
placing himself on the level of the plain man and then lifting the
plain man to his: the resolute insistence on life and reason, not
learning or ingenuity, as the standard by which books are to be judged.
No one ever was so free as Johnson from that pest of literature which a
fine French critic, one of the subtlest of his countrymen, called
"l'ingénieux sans bon {212} sens"; and he never showed himself so free
of it as in his Shakespeare. The master of life who "whether life or
nature be his subject, shows plainly that he has seen with his own
eyes," inspired the great critic with more even than his usual measure
of sanity: and perhaps the very best things in the Preface and the
notes are the frequent summonings of ingenious sophistries to the bar
of a merciless common sense. Let those who, with a good living writer,
fancy his criticism merely a lifeless application of mechanical rules,
read again the famous passage in the preface where he dismisses the
claim of the unities of place and time to be necessary to the proper
illusion of drama. Never did critic show himself freer of the easy
slavery to traditional rules which afflicts or consoles sluggish minds.
In Johnson's pages at any rate, there is "always an appeal open," as he
says, "from criticism to nature." And, though all his prejudices,
except those of the Anti-Gallican, must have carried him to the side of
the unities, he goes straight to the truth of experience, obtains there
a decisive answer, and records it in a few pages of masterly reasoning.
The first breath of the facts, as known to every one who has visited a
theatre, is brought to demolish the airy castles of pedantry: and it is
shown that unity is required not for the sake of deceiving {213} the
spectators, which is impossible, but for the sake of bringing order
into chaos, art into nature, and the immensity of life within limits
that can be compassed by the powers of the human mind. The unity of
action, which assists the mind, is therefore vital: the unities of time
and place, which are apparently meant to deceive it, are empty
impostures. For "the truth is that the spectators are always in their
senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is
only a stage and the players only players": "the delight proceeds from
our consciousness of fiction: if we thought murders and treasons real
they would please no more."
But this is simply one specially famous passage in an essay which is
full of matter from the first page to the last. It says little, of
course, of the sublime poetry of Shakespeare, and it cannot anticipate
that criticism of the imagination which Goethe and Coleridge have
taught us to expect from every writer about Shakespeare. The day for
that was not yet: and as Johnson, himself among the first to suggest
the historical and comparative point of view in criticism, says in this
very preface, "every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must
be compared with the state of the age in which he lived and with his
own particular opportunities." {214} He had a different task, and he
performed it so admirably that what he says can never be out of date.
It had not then become superfluous to insist on the greatness of
Shakespeare: if it has since become so no small share of that result
may be ascribed to Johnson. We forget that, because, as he said of
Dryden, it is the fate of a critic who convinces to be lost in the
prevalence of his own discovery. Never certainly has the central
praise of Shakespeare, as the master of truth and universality, been
better set forth than by Johnson. Our ears are delighted, our powers
of admiration quickened, our reasons convinced, as we read the
succession of luminous and eloquent paragraphs in which he tries
Shakespeare by the tests of time, of nature, of universality, and finds
him supreme in all. Nor did Johnson ever write anything richer in
characteristic and memorable sentences, fit to be quoted and thought
over by themselves. "Nothing can please many and please long but just
representations of general nature." "Shakespeare always makes nature
predominant over accident. . . . His story requires Romans but he
thinks only on men"; "there is a kind of intellectual remoteness
necessary for the comprehension of any great work"; "nature (_i. e._
genius, what a man inherits at birth) {215} gives no man knowledge";
"upon the whole all pleasure consists in variety"; "love has no great
influence upon the sum of life." It is startling to find Johnson
anticipating Mr. Bernard Shaw, and more startling still to be told in a
study of the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ that love "has little
operation in the drama of a poet who caught his ideas from the living
world." But when we put ourselves in Johnson's position and compare
Shakespeare with the reigning dramatists of France and England, we
shall see that it is in fact not the least striking thing about
Shakespeare that he has so many plays in which the love interest
scarcely appears.
The service Johnson rendered to the study of Shakespeare is, however,
by no means confined to these general considerations. No man did more,
perhaps, to call criticism back from paths that led to nowhere, or to
suggest directions in which discoveries might be made. The most marked
contrast between him and earlier critics is his caution about altering
the received text. He first stemmed the tide of rash emendation, and
the ebb which began with him has continued ever since. The case for
moderation in this respect has never been better stated than in his
words: "It has been my settled principle that the reading of {216} the
ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be disturbed
for the sake of elegance, perspicuity or mere improvement of the sense.
For though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to the
judgment of the first publishers, yet they who had the copy before
their eyes were more likely to read it right than we who read it only
by imagination." And in several other matters he in passing dropped a
seed which has ripened in other minds to the great increase of our
knowledge. "Shakespeare," he says, "has more allusions than other
poets to the traditions and superstition of the vulgar, which must
therefore be traced before he can be understood." Few critical seeds
have had a larger growth than this: and the same may be said of the
pregnant hint about the frequent necessity of looking for Shakespeare's
meaning "among the sports of the field." He neither overestimated the
importance nor under-estimated the difficulties of the critic of
Shakespeare. With his usual sense of the true scale of things he
treats the quarrels of commentators with contempt: "it is not easy to
discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally
proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small
importance: they involve neither property nor liberty"; and in another
place {217} he characteristically bids his angry colleagues to join
with him in remembering amidst their triumphs over the "nonsensical"
opinions of dead rivals that "we likewise are men: that _debemur
morti_, and, as Swift observed to Burnet, we shall soon be among the
dead ourselves." He knows too that "notes are necessary evils" and
advises the young reader to begin by ignoring them and letting
Shakespeare have his way alone. But at the same time he puts aside
with just indignation Pope's supercilious talk about the "dull duty of
an editor"; and after giving an admirable summary of what that dull
duty is, declares that one part of it alone, the business of
conjectural criticism, "demands more than humanity possesses." Yet it
is that part of his functions, the part which appeals most to vanity,
that he exercised with the most sparing caution. He saw that it was
not in emendation but in interpretation that the critic could now be
most useful. For this last task the sanity of his mind, though
sometimes leaning too much to prose, gave him peculiar qualifications.
No one can have used any of the Variorum Shakespeares without being
struck again and again by the masterly way in which Johnson penetrates
through the thicket of obscurities raised by Shakespeare's involved
language and his {218} critics' fanciful explanations, and brings back
for us in plain words the undoubted meaning of many a difficult
passage. He is a master of that rare art, the prose paraphrase of
poetry. The perfect lucidity of his notes makes them always a pleasure
to read: and writers of notes are not usually masters of language.
Take such a note as that on the words of Laertes about Ophelia's
madness--
"Nature is fine in love: and, where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves."
Johnson interprets: "love is the passion by which nature is most
exalted and refined; and as substances, refined and subtilized, easily
obey any impulse, or follow any attraction, some part of nature, so
purified and refined, flies off after the attracting object, after the
thing it loves;--
"As into air the purer spirits flow,
And separate from their kindred dregs below,
So flew her soul."
Nor can a mistake or two in details detract from the value of the
splendid paraphrase of "To be or not to be," or the admirable note on
the character of Polonius. Shakespeare has had subtler and more
poetical critics than Johnson: but no one has equalled the insight,
{219} sobriety, lucidity and finality which Johnson shows in his own
field.
The _Lives of the Poets_ is Johnson's last, longest, and most popular
work. More than any other of his works it was written to please
himself: he did so much more than he was paid to do that he almost
refuted his own doctrine that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except
for money. Instead of being written, like most of his earlier books,
in poverty, if not in obscurity, the _Lives_ were written at his ease,
with his pension in his pocket, with the booksellers at his feet, with
the consciousness of an expectant and admiring public outside. The
obstructions to his work were no longer those of poverty but of
prosperity. He once had to write because if he did not he would
starve: now he might sleep or talk all day with the certainty of
sitting down to more meals than he wanted. In early life he had no
temptation to quit his home, for he could not afford travel or
amusement: now he could go to the Hebrides and talk of going further,
without taking much thought of the expense. He once worked to make his
name known: now his reputation was established and his name better
known than he always found convenient. The result is that the _Lives_
are easily written, full of anecdote and incident and manners, full of
{220} easily traceable allusions to himself and his own experiences,
full of the magisterial decisions of a man whose judgments are no
longer questioned, full, even more than usual, of frank confessions,
open disregard of established opinion, the pleasant refusals of a
wilful old man to reconsider his prejudices or take any more trouble
about his work than he happens to choose. All this increases the
readableness of the book. But it does not all increase its importance,
and the fact is that not even the greatest of the _Lives_ is as fine a
piece of work as the Preface to the Shakespeare. Moreover, the work as
a whole suffers from a disadvantage from which the Shakespeare is
conspicuously exempt. It deals very largely with matters in which
scarcely any one now takes any interest. In its three volumes Johnson
gives us biographical and critical studies of fifty-two poets. Of
these only six--Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Collins and Gray--would
now be considered of first-rate poetic importance. Of the rest it is
difficult to make certain of a dozen whose place in the second class
would be unquestioned. The thirty or more that remain are mostly poets
of whom the ordinary reader of to-day has never read, and if he is wise
will never read, a single line. Great part of the book therefore is
criticism not only upon the unimportant but {221} upon what, so far as
we are now concerned, may be called the non-existent. And even in
Johnson's hands that cannot but mean barren writing and empty reading.
Yet the _Lives of the Poets_ is not only the most popular book of its
kind in the language: it is also a book of real and permanent value.
No short Lives have ever equalled them. The most insignificant of the
poets acquires an momentary interest as he passes through Johnson's
hands. The art of biography is that of giving life to the dead: and
that can only be done by the living. No one was ever more alive than
Johnson. He says himself that he wrote his _Lives_ unwillingly but
with vigour and haste. The haste is apparent in a few places: the
vigour everywhere. He had more pleasure in the biographical part of
his work than in the critical, and consequently did it better. His
strong love of life in all its manifestations prevented his ever
treating an author merely as an author. He always goes straight to the
man. And he knows that the individuality which makes the life of
portraits is a matter of detail. Consequently he takes pains to record
every detail that he can collect about his poets. The clothes of
Milton, the chair Dryden occupied and its situation in summer and in
winter. Pope's silver saucepan {222} and potted lampreys, the reason
why Addison sometimes absented himself from Button's, the remark which
Swift made to Lord Orrery about a servant's faults in waiting at table
and which Lord Orrery himself related to Johnson, these things and a
hundred like them make Johnson's little biographies among the most
vivid in the world. When once we have read them the poets they
describe are for ever delivered from the remoteness of mere fame.
Johnson has gone very close to them and he has taken us with him. And
to have got close to men like Dryden, Pope, Swift and Addison is not
among the smaller experiences of life. Two of them may indeed seem to
us not to be poets at all, and the other two, possessing in such
splendid abundance so many of a great poet's gifts, to have lacked the
greatest and most essential of all: but great men the whole four
undoubtedly were, among the greatest and most representative in the
England of the century between the death of Milton and the birth of
Wordsworth.
And Johnson belonged whole-heartedly to that century, lived in it, knew
it more intimately perhaps than any man, believed in it and loved it
without ever the shadow of a fear that there might be revolutionary
surprises in store for the complacent self-assurance of its attitude
towards literature, society and {223} life. These were plainly unusual
qualifications for interpreting its great men to us. And when to these
qualifications is added, as it was in Johnson's case, a mind of great
power, and great pleasure in using its power, and a gift of expression
which has seldom been surpassed, it is evident that a book like the
_Lives_ is certain to be, what it is, one of the great monuments and
landmarks of our literature. No literary excursionist who has
travelled to look at it has ever regretted his journey. For there is
in it the mind of a whole age: yet not fossilized or mummified as in
other hands it might so easily have become by now, as the mind of any
age must soon become when it is left entirely to itself. Johnson did
not leave it entirely to itself. It is true that in all matters of
political or literary controversy his mind was narrowly imprisoned in
the opinions of his own or his father's age: and that is what makes him
such an admirable witness to them; but here as elsewhere the
life-giving quality in him lies in his hold on the universal human
things which are affected by no controversies and belong to all the
ages. None of his books exhibit more of what he himself calls "the two
most engaging powers of an author." In it "new things are made
familiar and familiar things are made new." The famous criticism of
the "metaphysical poets" is so {224} written that a plain man feels at
home in it: the thrice-told tale of the lives of Pope and Addison is so
retold that every one thinks he reads it for the first time. The man
who had in his earlier works sometimes seemed the most general and
abstract even of eighteenth-century writers, becomes here, by force of
his interest in the primary things of humanity, almost a pioneer of the
new love of externalities, a relater of details, an anticipator of his
own Boswell.
To the critical discussions he gave less space than to the lives, and
no one will pretend to wish he had done the opposite. Allusion has
already been made to his limitations as a critic of poetry. He was
blind to the most poetic qualities of the greatest men: the purest
poetry, the poetry that has refined away all but the absolutely
indispensable minimum of prose alloy, often escaped him altogether,
sometimes simply irritated his prejudices. _Omne ignotum pro
injucundo_. He found people enthusiastic admirers of Milton's
_Lycidas_ or Gray's _Odes_, was angry at others enjoying what he found
no pleasure in, and vented his temper on Gray and Milton. Though
Collins was his friend he makes no mention of the _Ode to Evening_. In
these cases and some others the critic is much less scrupulously fair
than the biographer, to tell the truth, nearly {225} always is. There
is perhaps a malicious touch here and there in the lives of Milton,
Swift and Gray: but little as he liked any of them, how fairly in each
case the good points of the man are brought out, and how they are left
at the end quite overbalancing the rest in our memories! But in the
case of their works it is different. He has little to say about Gray's
_Elegy_, which he admired, and much about his _Odes_, which he disliked.
Yet, in spite of some incapacity and some unfairness, Johnson's
criticism of poetry is still a thing to be read with interest, profit
and admiration. After all poetry is an art as well as an inspiration:
it may almost be said to be a business as well as a pleasure. There is
still, when all has been said, that indispensable alloy of prose in its
composition without which it crumbles into fragments, or evaporates
into mere mist. The critical questions which Horace and Boileau and
Pope discuss do not include the highest: but they include much that no
poet can put aside as beneath him. In this field Johnson ranks among
the masters of criticism. His mind did not travel outside its limits,
but to the work to be done within them it brought knowledge,
reflection, vigour and acuteness. His reading had shown him how the
writing of verses, the construction of sentences, the {226} effective
use of words, had advanced from the uncouthness and extravagance of the
Elizabethans and Jacobeans to the amazing brevity, finish and dexterity
of Pope. It is good for us to see it too with his eyes. We are apt to
see only the beauty and truth that were lost in the process, and the
mechanical clockwork that followed upon its completion. These he could
not see: but we are in no danger of forgetting them, while we are in
danger of forgetting that Pope's achievement gave us the most quotable
verse that ever was written, and that his brilliancy and wit quickened
the powers of expression of a whole nation. To understand this is well
worth while: and Johnson helps us to understand it. Nor will the fact
of his thinking that Pope improved upon Homer and that his translation
is a model of melody, do us any harm: for we are not likely to follow
him in either opinion.
As literary criticism the greatest of the _Lives_ are those of Cowley,
Dryden and Pope. But Johnson is not to be altogether despised even
where he is plainly inadequate. Some of his strictures upon the poets
whom he did not understand are sound enough in themselves: there is
little to say against them except that they stand alone. The defect in
his criticism of _Lycidas_ is not that he attacks the mythological
confusion of the poem--which is in fact {227} its weakness, not its
strength; but that he gives no hint of sensibility to its haunting
beauty of phrase, of melody, of association, of passionate feeling, not
perhaps for its nominal subject, but for the brief life of human
friendship, for the mingled tragedy of love and fame and death. So
again with Collins and Gray. Johnson is perfectly right in saying that
Collins is too harsh and obscure, too apt to lose his way "in quest of
mistaken beauties": where he is wrong is in not saying that he produced
one of the most perfect Odes in our own or any other language. And
even in Gray's case, where he is at his worst, there are things which
an intelligent lover of Gray is the better for reading. There had been
a good deal of unintelligent and too promiscuous admiration of Gray's
_Odes_ in Johnson's day: and he performed a service, which is still a
service, by pointing out that there is in some of their phrases a
certain element of affectation and artificiality. It is true, and
still necessary to be said, that Gray's "art and struggle are too
visible, and that there is in his _Odes_ too little appearance of ease
and nature." The object of criticism is the whole of truth: and to see
only the imaginative power, the metrical learning and skill, the gift
of language, the gift of emotion, in Gray, is not to see the whole. It
is more important to see these things than {228} to see what Johnson
saw: but in a complete criticism of Gray room must be found for an
allusion to that element in him of which Johnson says, with some truth
as well as malice: "he has a kind of strutting dignity and is tall by
walking on tiptoe." In these matters we may listen with advantage to
Johnson's instinct for reality; as we also may to his knowledge of the
art of letters, when he points out quite truly that _Samson Agonistes_
has no plot, and when he puts his finger at once on that central defect
of _Paradise Lost_ that "it comprises neither human actions nor human
manners." That is too broadly stated no doubt: but it is true that the
subject of poetry is the free play of human life, and that, from
supernatural interference and from the peculiar position of Adam and
Eve, there is far too little of this in _Paradise Lost_. Nor was it
likely that a man of Johnson's learning and power of mind would confine
himself in a book of this kind to the mere praise and blame of a
succession of writers. That is his principal business: but of course
he constantly overflows into general topics bearing upon literature or
poetry as a whole. In these everybody who cares to think about the art
of writing or analyse the pleasures of reading will find his account:
they come in everywhere, of course. Now he makes some shrewd remarks,
{229} not so much needed by the poets of his day as by the novelists of
our own, about the danger of detailed enumeration by which description
so often loses all its power: for "of the greatest things the parts are
little." Now he is incidentally laying down the true ideal of the
translator: to "exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of
diction as the author would have given them, had his language been
English." Now he is discoursing at length on what it was Wordsworth's
misfortune never fully to understand, the immense power of association
upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and noblest emotions fail of
their effect if expressed in words ordinarily connected with trivial,
vulgar, or ignoble actions, and therefore necessarily arousing in the
reader a state of mind unfit for the reception of greatness. Or again
he will speak of the value of surprise in literature; "the pleasures of
the mind imply something sudden and unexpected." Or he will enlarge,
as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of
similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls
"exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of
representative metres and onomatopoeic words. No one will pretend that
all he says in these general excursions is final: but it is always the
work of a man who had {230} read a great deal and had applied a very
vigorous mind to what he had read. For all these reasons the _Lives of
the Poets_ will always be eagerly read by those who wish to understand
a great man and a great period of English literature. But they will be
read still more for their pleasantness, humanity and wisdom.