# Six Essays on Johnson/Essay 6

VI JOHNSON’S LIVES OF THE POETS
The most memorable of Johnson’s literary works was not initiated or planned by himself. On May 3, 1777, he wrote to Boswell, ‘I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of The English Poets.’ The whole course of his life and studies had been an admirable preparation for this task of biography, and when, at the age of sixty-seven, he consented to forego his leisure, he must have felt how timely was the opportunity to establish his great critical reputation upon a solid base.
The origin of the scheme was explained by Mr. Edward Dilly in a letter to Boswell. The Martins, an Edinburgh firm, had printed, and had put on sale in London, an edition of the English Poets, presenting a very inaccurate text in type hardly large enough to be readable. This roused the London booksellers, who, in order to protect their own copyrights and to keep possession of the market, agreed together to produce an elegant and uniform edition of all the English Poets of repute, from Chaucer onwards, with a concise account of the life of each of them. A deputation waited upon Johnson; he ‘seemed exceedingly pleased with the proposal,’ and named two hundred guineas as his fee. We are not told how it happened that the earlier poets, from Chaucer to Cowley, dropped out of the scheme; doubtless the desire to preserve copyright in the later ​poets put great pressure upon the space available. Forty-eight poets were included in the booksellers’ list: to these Johnson himself added the names of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and Yalden. On the title-page of the first separate edition of the Lives thirty-six booksellers figure as proprietors of the work.
When this separate edition appeared, and the book was an assured success, the booksellers, of their own free motion, sent the author another hundred guineas. Malone comments on the extraordinary moderation of Johnson’s demand. ‘Had he asked one thousand, or even fifteen hundred guineas, the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would doubtless have readily given it.’ But Johnson refused to listen to any blame of them. ‘Sir,’ he said to Boswell, ‘I have always said the booksellers were a generous set of men. Nor, in the present instance, have I reason to complain. The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but that I have written too much.’ In the statement prefixed to the separate edition he explains this further: ‘My purpose was only to have allotted to every Poet an Advertisement, like those which we find in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character, but I have been led beyond my intention, I hope, by the honest desire of giving useful pleasure.’
It is idle to challenge an agreement made between free agents. Johnson was a bad bargainer. He paid ‘less attention to profit from his labours,’ says Boswell, ‘than any man to whom literature has been a profession.’ He took a hundred pounds for Rasselas—to which the booksellers added twenty-five pounds later. Nothing would have induced him to chaffer about his wage; and he did not think it a hardship to stand by his agreements. ​He thought himself happy in the character of the men with whom he had to deal. Speaking of the booksellers of Dryden’s time he says: ‘To the mercantile ruggedness of that race the delicacy of the poet was sometimes exposed.’
No discovery of importance emerges from this ancient controversy. It is very creditable to publishers that almost all the talking on the question has been done by authors. The hardship is not all on one side. Some authors are grasping and skilled in negotiation; some publishers are superstitious, and pay for a name more than a name is worth. Authors on the whole have this advantage, that they are in the habit of enjoying life, and so have a less eager anxiety for the future. Johnson could live on his pension; and the idea of writing the Lives pleased him. The two-hundred guineas may well have seemed to him an addition of luxury to his competence. An author will often take very little money for doing what he likes. A publisher must be more careful; he needs all the money he can get in order that he may do what he likes at some future day. His children may wish to be authors. The balance seems not unfair; and the relations between the two were more humane in Johnson’s time than they can ever be when authors combine in a league of mutual defence and common aggression.
Johnson made his covenant with the booksellers on Easter Eve, 1777. The Lives were finished four years later, in March, 1781. ‘I wrote them,’ he says, ‘in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste.’ They were written, no doubt, partly at No. 8, Bolt Court, and partly in the room which was always kept for him at Mrs. Thrale’s house at ​Streatham. Boswell, who had the manuscript in his possession, says that it was wonderful to see how correctly it was written at the first heat. ‘I observe the fair hand of Mrs. Thrale,’ he adds, ‘as one of the copyists of selected passages.’
These Lives are the maturest and strongest of Johnson’s works. It ought to be a comfort to men past middle life to find that Johnson, like Dryden, wrote his best prose in his latest years. Good poetry has been written by young, even by very young, men; the best prose is out of their reach. They are too full of ideas which have never borne the test of practice; their prose tends to rhapsody, or argument, or the abstract graces of the mathematics. In poetry they can give shape to vague hopes and desires; in the more matter-of-fact treatment which prose demands, if they strike the personal note, they fear to be foolish, and are foolish. The confessions of a young man are always too defiant or too exclusively self-conscious; he has his account yet to settle with the world, and does not know exactly how he stands. He is dealing with an unknown and powerful adversary, so that even while he aims at truth, the instinct of self-preservation overmasters him, and he achieves only diplomacy. The best prose is rightly called pedestrian; at every step it must find a foothold on the ground of experience, firm enough to support its weight. It is more various than poetry, and richer in implied meaning; it assumes in the reader an old acquaintance with the facts of life, and keeps him in touch with them by a hundred quiet devices of irony, reminiscence, and allusion. It is a commentary on the world; not a complete exposition of it. The breadth of the vision of poetry can be attained by one who looks on human life from a distance; ​only the scarred veterans are fit to write a prose account of the battle.
In his Life of Waller Johnson defends the cause of age. Fenton, who produced a carefully annotated edition of Waller’s poems, had remarked that after his fifty-fifth year the genius of the poet ‘began to decline apace from its meridian.’ ‘This,’ says Johnson, ‘is to allot the mind but a small portion. Intellectual decay is doubtless not uncommon; but it seems not to be universal. Newton was in his eighty-fifth year improving his Chronology, a few days before his death; and Waller appears not, in my opinion, to have lost at eighty-two any part of his poetical power.’ The famous lines in the epilogue to the Divine Poems, which were written at about the age of eighty, may well be quoted here, for they contain Waller’s contribution to the question:
The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, Lets in new light thro’ chinks that time has made: Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become, As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.
The Lives of the Poets shows Johnson’s vigour of judgement, as a critic of life and of letters, at its zenith. His power of putting into a single sentence all that can be profitably said on a subject, whether by way of summary or of comment, was never more brilliantly displayed. Addison’s Spectator could not be better described than by being ranked, as Johnson ranks it, among those books which attempt ‘to teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress ​hourly vexation.’ Prior’s Solomon could not be better criticized than in the sentence which remarks on the importance of its single fault: ‘Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults; negligences or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole: other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself.’
Indeed, the Lives are crowded with good sayings. Here are some, taken from the first of them, the Life of Cowley:—
The true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
The basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power.
Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness.
If that be considered as Wit which is at once natural and new, that which though not obvious is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.
If their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think.
Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed the same way.
The artifice of inversion, by which the established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new words or new meanings of words are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.
What is fit for every thing can fit nothing well.
Whoever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once.
Not all these sayings, even when their application is limited by the context, carry immediate conviction with them; but there is none of them that does not compel ​thought. They are weighted with meaning; and if they are dogmatic are not tyrannical; they belong rather to that genial kind of conversational dogma which suggests rich themes for friendly debate.
A discerning reader, who cares for the critic as much as for any of the poets whom the critic passes in review, will find that the Lives abound in personal reminiscence, and reflect light at many points on Johnson’s own character and career. Sometimes they record curious facts of which the interest to Johnson was mainly personal, as, for instance, where, speaking of the marriages of John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, he says: ‘It is observable that the Duke’s three wives were all widows.’ Sometimes he embroiders his story with reflections borrowed from his own experience. After describing, on the authority of the early biographers, the regular course of Milton’s day, and the exact assignment of its hours, he adds, ‘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. Visiters, 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.’ There is more, again, of Johnson than of Milton in the remarks on Milton’s omission of a set hour for prayers: ‘Of this omission the reason has been sought, upon a supposition which ought never to be made, that men live with their own approbation, and justify their conduct to themselves. Prayer certainly was not thought superfluous by him, who represents our first parents as praying acceptably in the state of innocence, and efficaciously after their fall. That he lived without prayer can hardly ​be affirmed; his studies and meditations were an habitual prayer. The neglect of it in his family was probably a fault for which he condemned himself, and which he intended to correct, but that death, as too often happens, intercepted his reformation.’ Johnson is willing to believe that Milton, like himself, was continually making vows of self-reformation. The generosity of his criticism is seen in his severe reproof to possible objectors. Samson Agonistes certainly has in it a humility foreign to the earlier poems. Yet the idea of Milton condemning himself for a fault which he strove in vain to amend is difficult to accept. Perhaps it is not irreverent to say that the evidence for this attitude in Milton is of the slightest.
The same fellow-feeling dictates the last paragraph of the Life, where the poet is praised for his independence of spirit and lofty demeanour in adversity: ‘He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities and disdainful of help or hindrance; he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified or favour gained, no exchange of praise nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first.’
When Johnson first came to London from the obscurity of Lichfield, Henry Hervey, then an officer of the army, had paid him attention, and had entertained him among genteel company. ‘He was a vicious man,’ said Johnson, ​speaking of this to Boswell, ‘but very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.’ In the Life of Walsh he attributes a similar gratitude to Pope: ‘The kindnesses which are first experienced are seldom forgotten. Pope always retained a grateful memory of Walsh’s notice, and mentioned him in one of his latter pieces among those that had encouraged his juvenile studies:
Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh would tell me I could write.’
This is allowing too much to Pope, whose mention of Walsh, like his mention of his own mother, is artfully contrived to heighten his proper reputation for genius and virtue.
Johnson’s very natural tendency to interpret the lives and characters of other poets by the likeness of his own is explicitly noted by Boswell. ‘In drawing Dryden’s character,’ says Boswell, ‘Johnson has given, I suppose unintentionally, some touches of his own.’ It is not possible to identify precisely the passages that were in Boswell’s mind; but no doubt these are some of them: ‘He appears to have had a mind very comprehensive by nature, and much enriched with acquired knowledge. The power that predominated in his intellectual operations was rather strong reason than quick sensibility… With the simple and elemental passions, as they spring separate in the mind, he seems not much acquainted, and seldom describes them but as they are complicated by the various relations of society and confused in the tumults and agitations of life… When once he had engaged himself in disputation, thoughts flowed in on either side: he was now no longer at a loss; he had always objections and solutions at command… What ​he had once written he dismissed from his thoughts; and, I believe, there is no example to be found of any correction or improvement made by him after publication.’
From his familiar handling of all questions connected with the literary profession, and his confident judgements on them, it would be easy to tell that the author of the Lives was a professional man of letters. And surely no professional man of letters ever spoke of his profession with so much modesty and good sense. The writer who condescends to the public which is to give him fame and money receives no manner of countenance from Johnson. Edmund Smith’s tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolitus failed on the stage. Addison, who had written a prologue for it, mentioned its failure as disgraceful to the nation. ‘The authority of Addison is great,’ says Johnson, ‘yet the voice of the people, when to please the people is the purpose, deserves regard. In this question, I cannot but think the people in the right.’ When Cowley’s play, The Cutter of Coleman Street, failed, Cowley, according to Dryden, received the news ‘not with so much firmness as might have been expected from so great a man.’ Johnson, though he highly commends the play, does not excuse Cowley. ‘He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man perhaps has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence.’ The common weakness of authors in this matter is skilfully laid bare by Johnson when he comes to speak of ​Savage’s single successful poem, The Bastard. ‘Though he did not lose the opportunity which success gave him, of setting a high rate upon his abilities, but paid due deference to the suffrages of mankind when they were given in his favour, he did not suffer his esteem of himself to depend upon others, nor found any thing sacred in the voice of the people when they were inclined to censure him; he then readily shewed the folly of expecting that the publick should judge right, observed how slowly poetical merit had often forced its way into the world: he contented himself with the applause of men of judgement, and was somewhat disposed to exclude all those from the character of men of judgement who did not applaud him.’
Johnson often returns to this topic—as, indeed, it is often suggested by the records of the lives of authors—and never loses an opportunity of repeating his verdict. Can an author judge truly of his own productions? Dryden had asked the question, and had discussed it, not unfairly, in the preface to Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen. Self-love, he had admitted, may easily deceive. But this does not satisfy Johnson, who is for treating the question more drastically, and adds: ‘He might have observed, that what is good only because it pleases cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please.’
This view of literature opposes Johnson to those authors who refuse to plead before the tribunal of public opinion. Gibbon, in his Memoirs, says that ‘the author himself is the best judge of his own performance,’ and his opinion has the support of almost all the romantic poets that ever lived. Among these Pope (one of the most romantic of poets in his attitude to himself and his ​own work) comes up for judgement. In a passage of splendid directness and sincerity Johnson deals with Pope’s habitual disguises: ‘He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as on emmets of a hillock below his serious attention, and sometimes with glowing indignation, as on monsters more worthy of hatred than of pity. These were dispositions apparently counterfeited. How could he despise those whom he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation his esteem of himself was superstructed? Why should he hate those to whose favour he owed his honour and his ease? Of things that terminate in human life the world is the proper judge: to despise its sentence, if it were possible, is not just; and if it were just is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper; he was sufficiently “a fool to Fame,” and his fault was that he pretended to neglect it. His levity and his sullenness were only in his letters; he passed through common life, sometimes vexed and sometimes pleased, with the natural emotions of common men.’
An old-established public reputation is not, in Johnson’s opinion, a thing that can be lightly set aside. Books find their proper level. ‘Of a work so much read,’ he says, speaking of Addison’s Cato, ‘it is difficult to say any thing new. About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right.’ And again, speaking of Gray, he states the doctrine boldly and fully: ‘In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism ​of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’
His own behaviour was in strict conformity with this belief. When his play, Irene, failed, ‘this great man,’ says Boswell, ‘instead of peevishly complaining of the bad taste of the town, submitted to its decision without a murmur. He had, indeed, upon all occasions, a great deference for the general opinion: “A man (said he) who writes a book thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.”’
I do not know where else to find an author in whom modesty and self-respect are so perfectly and equably blended. He is as he describes himself in the Prologue to Irene:
Studious to please, yet not asham’d to fail.
He pictures Milton suffering neglect, ‘calm and confident, little disappointed, not at all dejected;’ and where he finds evidence of irritation and rage in authors at the ill reception of their works it is one of the few things of which he is contemptuous. There are two of the English poets whom Johnson, in casual fashion, calls ‘poor’—‘poor Dryden’ and ‘poor Lyttelton.’ There would be nothing remarkable in the phrase ‘poor Dryden’ if Carlyle had used it—or indeed in ‘poor Dante,’ ‘poor Homer,’ or ‘poor Isaiah.’ A certain exercise of contempt was necessary to Carlyle’s mind, to keep it in health. But ‘poor Dryden’ from Johnson is remarkable. The epithet is provoked by Dryden’s agitation of mind when Settle’s Empress of Morocco met with public applause. ‘Dryden could not now repress those ​emotions, which he called indignation, and others jealousy; but wrote upon the play and the dedication such criticism as malignant impatience could pour out in haste.’ Settle’s play, when it was published, was embellished with ‘sculptures.’ ‘These ornaments,’ says Johnson, ‘seem to have given poor Dryden great disturbance.’
‘Poor Lyttelton’ is a longer story. The words gave deep offence to Lyttelton’s admirers, especially in blue-stocking circles. Mr. William Weller Pepys, writing to Mrs. Montagu, laments that ‘our dear and respectable friend should be handed down to succeeding generations under the appellation of poor Lyttelton.’ ‘Mrs. Vesey sounded the trumpet,’ says Horace Walpole, and ‘at a blue-stocking meeting held by Lady Lucan, Mrs. Montagu and Dr. Johnson kept at different ends of the chamber, and set up altar against altar there.’ The passage in the Life of Lyttelton which caused these broils describes the reception of the Dialogues of the Dead. ‘When they were first published,’ Johnson wrote, ‘they were kindly commended by the Critical Reviewers, and poor Lyttelton with humble gratitude returned, in a note which I have read, acknowledgements which can never be proper, since they must be paid either for flattery or for justice.’ We have not read the note, so we cannot judge. Boswell dares to dispute Johnson’s opinion on this point of conduct. An upright man, he says, who has been arraigned on a false charge, may, when he is acquitted, make a bow to the jury.
I quote these two expressions of contempt, because they indicate in brief Johnson’s code for an author. The approbation of the public is important; and a man should not affect to despise it. But it ranks with money and other external goods; he must not abase himself to gain ​or keep it, nor, when he misses it, must he vex his soul. As for literary rivalry and hostilities, no one was ever less touched by them than Johnson. ‘Reputation,’ he said, ‘would be of little worth, were it in the power of every concealed enemy to deprive us of it;’ and he was fond of quoting Bentley’s saying: ‘Depend upon it, no man was ever written down but by himself.’
The passages already quoted from the Life of Milton are conspicuous examples of Johnson’s fairness. He was vigorously accused in his own day of prejudice and injustice towards certain of the English poets; and the echoes of that protest have not yet died away. ‘Men,’ as he himself remarked, ‘are seldom satisfied with praise introduced or followed by any mention of defect.’ This is a profound truth; there is something mysterious in the power of a single qualification to mar the effect of praise. Where love or admiration possesses the mind, there is no room for the thought of defect. A lover does not weigh faults against merits, and after striking a balance, proclaim his enthusiasm for the surplus. In these personal relations only the simplest statements are acceptable. It is a question not of balance, but of direction; not of various conflicting motives, but of the resulting action as it is seen in progress this way or that. When the progress is reversed, even for a moment, the change gives cause to suspect that the hostile forces are stronger than appears. If they were not very strong, they would not be visible.
All this is true; and it is true that Johnson does not offer unmixed praise to any of his fifty-two poets. He was an old man; the heat of his early affections was abated. He had to judge not only of men, but of books, which are sometimes good in parts. His was a new ​experiment; of praise and blame there had been more than enough; he set himself to show the reason of things by a process of detailed criticism and analysis, so that his book is more than a history; it is a philosophy of letters. Many of the earlier writers of Lives had been servile eulogists. ‘We have had too many honeysuckle Lives of Milton’ he said to Malone; ‘mine shall be in another strain.’ It is in another strain; a strain of a higher mood than if he had called on all the flowers of the valley
To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies.
He strives to be just; and is most just in this, that when he comes to Paradise Lost he gives over all reckoning of faults, and breaks into unmeasured praise. The magic of Milton’s early poems he had not felt; and he felt just enough of rational dislike for some parts of them to conceal from himself the operation of his strong political prejudice. But for this prejudice, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, which he praises with subtle discrimination, might perhaps have given him occasion for one of his great memorable passages of critical appreciation.
In treating of the events of Milton’s life, he is sometimes fairer than the poet’s devotees. A great man will concede more than a little man understands how to claim. Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, pupil, and biographer, was exercised in mind about Milton’s school-keeping, and says: ‘Possibly his having proceeded so far in the education of youth may have been the occasion of some of his adversaries calling him pedagogue and school-master; whereas it is well known he never set up for a publick school to teach all the young fry of a parish, but only was willing to impart his learning ​and knowledge to relations and the sons of gentlemen who were his intimate friends, and that neither his writings nor his way of teaching ever savoured in the least of pedantry.’ ‘Thus laboriously,’ says Johnson, ‘does his nephew extenuate what cannot be denied, and what might be confessed without disgrace. Milton was not a man who could become mean by a mean employment. This, however, his warmest friends seem not to have found; they therefore shift and palliate. He did not sell literature to all comers at an open shop; he was a chamber-milliner, and measured his commodities only to his friends.’
This same strong sense, which makes Phillips ridiculous by reminding him that a school-master’s is an honest calling, finds ample exercise among the sentimentalities of literary history. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, it is well known, has a highwayman for its hero. Its representation was said to have caused a large increase in the number of street-robbers. ‘But this opinion,’ says Johnson, ‘is surely exaggerated. The play, like many others, was plainly written only to divert, without any moral purpose, and is therefore not likely to do good; nor can it be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil. Highwaymen and house breakers seldom frequent the play-house or mingle in any elegant diversion; nor is it possible for any one to imagine that he may rob with safety because he sees Macheath reprieved upon the stage.’ There is a sentence in the Preface to Shakespeare which might well be applied to clinch this matter: ‘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 that the players are only players.’ ​Johnson was not in the least likely to fall into that solemn error which supposes that the populace, because they read few books, are not able to recognize the play of fancy.
Sometimes he takes an almost mischievous delight in judging poetical situations by the standard of common sense and daily practice. For instance, he calls Henry and Emma, Prior’s adaptation of The Nut-brown Maid, ‘a dull and tedious dialogue, which excites neither esteem for the man, nor tenderness for the woman. The example of Emma, who resolves to follow an outlawed murderer wherever fear and guilt shall drive him, deserves no imitation; and the experiment by which Henry tries the lady’s constancy is such as must end either in infamy to her, or in disappointment to himself.’ These Cowper calls ‘his old fusty-rusty remarks upon Henry and Emma,’ yet adds: ‘I agree with him, that morally considered both the knight and his lady are bad characters, and that each exhibits an example which ought not to be followed. The man dissembles in a way that would have justified the woman had she renounced him; and the woman resolves to follow him at the expense of delicacy, propriety, and even modesty itself. But when the critic calls it a dull dialogue, who but a critic will believe him?’ These two verdicts are not much at odds; where they differ, modern opinion would probably support Johnson. Prior’s poem is not only dull, but absurd. The wonderful simplicity and directness of the original Nut-brown Maid is exchanged for the stilted nonsense of a blue-stocking rhetorician, and, to make her language yet more incredible, a realistic plot is substituted for the delightfully playful setting of the fifteenth-century poem. In the original the man ​and the woman conduct an artificial debate after the mediaeval fashion; he dramatically invents every circumstance that may shake her attachment to him, and she accepts them all,—hunger, misery, and danger; when at last he avows that there waits for him in the greenwood one who is fairer than the Nut-brown Maid, and dearer to his heart, she replies that she will gladly wait on them both as their servant; and the cause is won. The occasion is imaginary, but the sincerity and passion of the pleading have made the poem a monument to the constancy of women. By changing all this into a love-story of real life, Prior destroys the character of the dialogue and of the persons; the man becomes merely brutal, and the woman shameless; so that the naked ugliness of the situation is very ill concealed under the garlands of decayed mythology which are hung about it. The two versions, set side by side in a very short example, will more than vindicate Johnson’s censure. Here is the Nut-brown Maid—
O Lorde, what is this worldes blisse, that chaungeth as the mone? My somers day, in lusty may, is derked before the none; I hear you say farwel, nay, nay, we departe not soo sone; Why say ye so, wheder wyl ye goo, alas! what have ye done? Alle my welfare to sorow and care shulde chaunge yf ye were gon; For in my mynde, of all mankynde, I love but you alone.
And here is Emma, or a piece of her, for she is terribly long-winded—
What is our bliss, that changeth with the moon; And day of life, that darkens ere ’tis noon?
What is true passion, if unblest it dies? And where is Emma’s joy, if Henry flies? If love, alas! be pain; the pain I bear No thought can figure and no tongue declare. Ne’er faithful woman felt, nor false one feign’d, The flames which long have in my bosom reign’d: The god of love himself inhabits there, With all his rage, and dread, and grief, and care, His complement of stores, and total war.
If Johnson’s condemnation of this sort of thing is fusty-rusty, Cowper’s confession that he had given the poem a consecrated place in his memory is puffy-muffy—a word which Rossetti coined to describe some of Wordsworth’s colloquial efforts.
Johnson’s matter-of-fact commentary on many poetical conventions and imaginations gives us the clue to his main critical position. More than those who came immediately before him, he stands for the classical doctrine, in language and literature. The right work of his time, as he conceived it, was to reintroduce sincerity into literature; to make it actual and moving; to discard far-fetched themes, empty conventional ornament, extravagant metaphor, outworn poetic tradition; so that poetry might deliver its message in a language easy to understand—‘like a man of this world.’ His practice in this matter falls far short of the doctrine, in which yet he never wavered. His own mind was slow and ponderous in its movement: he had lived much alone in his youth; and it was natural to him to express his own sentiments with deliberate emphasis and measured dignity. On great or difficult themes he never fails; but he cannot always adapt his expression to matter of every day. Prior writes nervous classical English on the most trivial topics, and fails only where passion ​crosses his path; Johnson treats frivolous themes with all the cumbrous elaboration of scholastic philosophy, but when the matter is grave, and thought must follow it outside the traffic of daily intercourse, he is himself again, and strikes at it in English that has no flaw. Even the slightest of his earlier essays is not open to the charge that he brings against Pope. ‘Never,’ he says of the Essay on Man—‘never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse.’ Johnson’s verbosity is duller than Pope’s, less enlivened with plausible rhetoric and formal turns of wit; but it is never empty.
His quarrel with the classical mythology appears again and again in the Lives. He held it to be a meaningless ornament, a useless remainder. The belief in the old gods was long dead, and allusions to them could only be idle. ‘The Fan,’ he says, in the Life of Gay, ‘is one of those mythological fictions which antiquity delivers ready to the hand; but which, like other things that lie open to every one’s use, are of little value. The attention naturally retires from a new tale of Venus, Diana, and Minerva.’ And again, of Waller: ‘He borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from the old mythology, for which it is vain to plead the example of ancient poets: the deities which they introduced so frequently were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images time has tarnished the splendor. A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion or ​slight illustration. No modern monarch can be much exalted by hearing that, as Hercules had his club, he has his navy.’ Even Pope, though he does not very often enter what Johnson calls ‘the dark and dismal regions of mythology,’ yet never enters them without provoking the censure of the critic. Addison, in The Campaign, had derided mythological aids to a feeble poem:
When actions unadorn’d are faint and weak, Cities and countries must be taught to speak. Gods may descend in factions from the skies, And rivers from their oozy beds arise.
‘It is therefore strange,’ says Johnson, speaking of Windsor Forest, ‘that Pope should adopt a fiction not only unnatural but lately censured. The story of Lodona is told with sweetness; but a new metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient: nothing is easier than to tell how a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a rock an obdurate tyrant.’
These protests, which recur in many forms, and on many occasions, are indicative of Johnson’s attitude. The men of the Renaissance had been captured by the beauty of the classical mythology; they could not revive it as a system of thought, but they felt the charm of the dream from which the world had been awakened, and they ‘cried to sleep again.’ But the aroused imagination would not be denied its full play upon life, and these ancient forms and fables fell gradually out of esteem. They became conventions and trappings of poetry rather than a mode of poetic insight. The history of English poetry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is the history of their decline. The Elizabethans borrowed from Ovid and Virgil; Dryden did more than that; he put himself to school to the Latin poets, and applied ​their lessons to the facts of his own day. Pope’s Imitations of Horace are modern in every detail. But even Pope loved at times to dress himself in the vanities of learning; and the lesser poetry of the eighteenth century is encrusted with dead mythology. All this Johnson opposed; and he, more than any other single writer, delivered poetry from what had now become a tedious bondage, and cleared the way for a more scientific and imaginative treatment of ancient fable by the poets who came after him. He could not foresee this later development; nor did he himself attach any possible value to fictions that deal with what he calls ‘exploded beings.’ When once their use as ornament was disallowed, his own profound and sincere religious convictions forbade him to seek for truth in them, or to tolerate them in connexion with serious subjects and real events. His criticism on the epitaph which Pope had written for Rowe’s tomb in Westminster Abbey shows how strongly and consistently he felt on this matter. One of the lines of the epitaph ran—
Peace to thy gentle shade, and endless rest!
‘To wish Peace to thy shade,’ says Johnson, ‘is too mythological to be admitted into a Christian temple; the ancient worship has infected almost all our other compositions, and might therefore be contented to spare our epitaphs. Let fiction, at least, cease with life, and let us be serious over the grave.’
Another ancient piece of poetic machinery was invariably condemned by Johnson. Pastoral allegory, which was brought into modern literature by the Renaissance imitators of Theocritus and Virgil, seemed to him to be a mere trick for supplying the form of poetry ​where the reality was lacking. Why should a poet pretend to be a shepherd, and translate real passion into the jargon of a rustic trade? The famous criticism on Lycidas was not primarily dictated by personal or political hostility to Milton; the substance of it is repeated in many passages of the Lives. The Elegies of Hammond are criticized in almost the same words. ‘The truth is,’ says Johnson, ‘these elegies have neither passion, nature, nor manners. Where there is fiction, there is no passion; he that describes himself as a shepherd, and his Neaera or Delia as a shepherdess, and talks of goats and lambs, feels no passion. He that courts his mistress with Roman imagery, deserves to lose her; for she may with good reason suspect his sincerity.’ And again, of Shenstone’s Pastoral Ballad he says: ‘I cannot but regret that it is pastoral; an intelligent reader acquainted with the scenes of real life sickens at the mention of the crook, the pipe, the sheep, and the kids.’ Lord Lyttelton is even more summarily treated. ‘Of his Progress of Love,’ says the biographer, ‘it is sufficient blame to say that it is pastoral.’
Where Johnson repeats a thought many times, it is always worth while to pause, and look for his meaning. He found Lycidas lacking in that deep personal affection and regret which, to him, was the soul of an elegy. ‘What image of tenderness,’ he asks, ‘can be excited by these lines?—
We drove a field, and both together heard What time the grey fly winds her sultry horn, Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night.
‘We know that they never drove a field, and that they had no flocks to batten; and though it be allowed that the representation may be allegorical, the true meaning ​is so uncertain and remote that it is never sought because it cannot be known when it is found.’
The hot partisans of Milton have not answered this criticism. Is the grey fly a real grey fly? If it is, what is it doing among the allegorical flocks? If not, what does it mean? The fact, no doubt, is that Milton was recalling real experiences, and imperfectly veiling them under similitudes beautiful in themselves, and somewhat mistily applied to the facts. Johnson complains of this vagueness because it seems to him to belie the poignancy of the mourner’s grief. He contrasts with Lycidas Cowley’s elegy on his friend Hervey; and, indeed, there can be no question which of the two poems is the more vivid in its memories and the tenderer in its affection:—
Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say, Have ye not seen us walking every day? Was there a Tree about which did not know The Love betwixt us two? Henceforth, ye gentle Trees for ever fade; Or your sad branches thicker joyn, And into darksome shades combine, Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is laid.
But there is no need to bring Cowley into the question; Johnson has himself left an elegy which illustrates his creed by his practice. The lines On the Death of Dr. Robert Levett, Johnson’s friend and pensioner, who practised medicine among the very poor, are the best explanation of his doctrine.
No summons mock’d by chill delay, No petty gains disdain’d by pride; The modest wants of every day The toil of every day supply’d.
His virtues walk’d their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void; And sure the Eternal Master found His single talent well employ’d.
The busy day, the peaceful night, Unfelt, uncounted, glided by; His frame was firm, his powers were bright, Though now his eightieth year was nigh.
Then, with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
This is a poor thing, perhaps, to set beside the splendours of Lycidas; yet it has in it all that Johnson looked for, half puzzled, in that greater elegy, and looked for in vain. It tells us more of Levett than of Johnson; in Lycidas we are told more of Milton than of Edward King.
Johnson’s dislike of blank verse is easily explained; it is of a piece with the rest of his doctrine. Poetry, according to him, should express natural sentiments in language, dignified indeed, but not too remote from the speech of daily life. The use of new words, or of an unfamiliar order of words, destroys, as he remarks in his essay on Cowley, the intimacy and confidence of the relation between writer and reader. But if this be so, it may at once be objected that verse is at a disadvantage compared with prose. If all is to be on an easy, natural level of probability and familiarity, why not write in prose?
Johnson could not have answered this question quite so confidently as some other poets can. His own diction tends to the prosaic. Where it fails to be simple, it fails by dropping into the extravagances not of verse, but of prose. He wrote prose better than verse; and it may be suspected that he would have agreed with Sir Henry Savile, who, when asked his opinion of poetry, declared that he liked it best of all kinds of writing, next to prose. ​Yet, of course, Johnson knew the addition of pleasure which comes from verse—the pleasure of melody and pattern. Coleridge, in his Table Talk, offers what he calls ‘my homely definitions of prose and poetry.’ Prose, he says, is ‘words in their best order;’ poetry is ‘the best words in the best order.’ But this seems not to be sufficient. The best words may be set in the best order even by a prose writer. Poetry aims rather at increasing, by metrical devices, the number of best places for the best words in the best order. Of these devices rhyme is perhaps the chief. Johnson held rhyme to be almost essential to poetry; disallowing, as he did, inversions of order and novelties of diction, he believed that blank verse was without the necessary means of poetic emphasis. Blank verse, written in the quiet fashion that he liked, seemed to him to be merely prose, cut into lengths, and oscillating to a hardly recognizable tune.
His view of this matter is expounded in the essay on Milton; ‘Poetry may subsist without rhyme; but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared, but where the subject is well able to support itself.’ His criticism of Somervile’s Rural Sports adds clearness to the explanation: ‘If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose; and familiar images in laboured language have nothing to recommend them but absurd novelty, which, wanting the attractions of Nature, cannot please long.’
There are three of the English poets whose blank verse Johnson commends; they are Milton, Thomson, and Young. The reasons that he gives for allowing these exceptions prove that he had pondered the question with an open mind, and was not the victim of a mere ​prejudice. Of Thomson’s Seasons he says: ‘His is one of the works in which blank verse seems properly used; Thomson’s wide expansion of general views, and his enumeration of circumstantial varieties, would have been obstructed and embarrassed by the frequent intersections of the sense which are the necessary effects of rhyme. His descriptions of extended scenes and general effects bring before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether pleasing or dreadful.’ Of Young’s Night Thoughts he says: ‘This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme.’ As for Milton—‘I cannot wish his work,’ says Johnson, ‘to be other than it is; yet like other heroes he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.’
Blank verse, therefore, is permitted to poets who would describe wide landscapes, or indulge unfettered imagination, or express conceptions of superhuman majesty in unusual and gorgeous language. Such poets are warned, in the essay on Akenside, of the risk they run: ‘The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such self-indulgence that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.’
​These are reasonable and well-argued opinions, worth the hearing. Johnson, it may be said, had no ear for the subtleties of metrical cadence. But the habits and pleasures of the ear vary so amazingly from generation to generation, that all dogmatic judgement is unsafe. It is praise enough for the critic that his account of the perils attending on blank verse has been illustrated many times in the work of later poets.
To get rid of the affectations, conventions, and extravagances of literature; to make it speak to the heart on themes of universal human interest; to wed poetry with life;—these were Johnson’s aims. It is a little bewildering to the student of literary history to find that Pope, Johnson, and Wordsworth, each and all regarded themselves as the champions of a Return to Nature. Johnson, like Pope, confined nature somewhat too rigorously to human nature, and over-estimated the power of direct moral teaching. He speaks slightingly of the innovators who ‘seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do good and avoid evil.’ Yet in criticizing the works of other men he does not apply this doctrine in any narrow or unintelligent fashion. He praised Shakespeare; he praised Boccaccio; and he would doubtless have praised the great poets of the nineteenth century, whose work conforms very little to his own stricter code. Perhaps his chief difference from the critics of other schools is to be found in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of poetry; and this was due, not to any contempt, for he had been all his life a reader and lover of poetry, but to his deep sense of the greater issues of life and death. Literature ​can but describe what all men, literate and illiterate alike, have to suffer and enjoy. The goodness of a poem, is, at best, a subordinate kind of goodness. This view finds amusing expression in his comment on the Reverend Mr. Milbourne, who attacked Dryden’s translation of Virgil. ‘His outrages,’ says Johnson, ‘seem to be the ebullitions of a mind agitated by stronger resentment than bad poetry can excite.’
Yet he is so far from narrow, that in many of his opinions he is in sympathy with later Romantic criticism. When he tells how Denham, in his earlier practice of the rhyming couplet, carried on the sense from line to line, and broke the unity of the couplet, he adds:—‘From this concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has perhaps been with rather too much constancy pursued.’ The war against the closed couplet, which was so fiercely waged by Keats, has its apologist even in Johnson.
Nor will he allow the carping of prosaic critics against the freedoms of poetic language. In Astraea Redux the following couplet occurs:
An horrid stillness first invades the ear, And in that silence we a tempest fear.
For this Dryden was ‘persecuted with perpetual ridicule:’ Johnson defends him in a passage of notable good sense: ‘Silence is indeed mere privation; and, so considered, cannot invade; but privation likewise certainly is darkness, and probably cold, yet poetry has never been refused the right of ascribing effects or agency to them as to positive powers. No man scruples to say that darkness hinders him from his work, or that cold has ​killed the plants. Death is also privation, yet who has made any difficulty of assigning to Death a dart and the power of striking?’
A good deal of ridicule is bestowed by Johnson, in one place and another, on the favourite plea of the poets, that their work owes its excellence to causes beyond their control. He makes fun of Milton for fearing that ‘an age too late, or cold climate,’ may depress his poetic powers. In a fit of wicked humour he tries to comfort the author of Paradise Lost. ‘General causes,’ he says, ‘must operate uniformly in a general abatement of mental power; if less could be performed by the writer, less likewise would content the judges of his work. Among this lagging race of frosty grovellers he might still have risen into eminence by producing something which “they should not willingly let die.” However inferior to the heroes who were born in better ages, he might still be great among his contemporaries, with the hope of growing every day greater in the dwindle of posterity: he might still be the giant of the pygmies, the one-eyed monarch of the blind.’ In his criticism of Pope’s epitaphs Johnson nevertheless allows a kind of inspiration to poets; though he will not allow any poet to allege the absence of it by way of excuse. ‘It will not always happen,’ he says, ‘that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labour. The same observation may be extended to all works of imagination, which are often influenced by causes wholly out of the performer’s power, by hints of which he perceives not the origin, by sudden elevations of mind which he cannot produce in himself, and which sometimes rise when he expects them least.’ The author of the Dictionary knew as well as another man that if a great work of ​compilation can be produced by fixed resolve and hard labour, a great work of imagination cannot.
Johnson was a much more liberal judge of poetry than Boileau and the critics of the French school. Yet Boileau, he says, ‘will be seldom found mistaken,’ and he agrees with Boileau in his opinion of devotional poetry. He treats this matter at large in the essay on Waller. His argument, which is closely reasoned and eloquently expressed, must be quoted in full:
Let no pious ear be offended if I advance, in opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot often please. The doctrines of religion may indeed be defended in a didactick poem, and he who has the happy power of arguing in verse will not lose it because his subject is sacred. A poet may describe the beauty and the grandeur of Nature, the flowers of the Spring, and the harvests of Autumn, the vicissitudes of the Tide, and the revolutions of the Sky, and praise the Maker for his works in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God.
Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator and plead the merits of his Redeemer is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.
The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises, and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but, few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.
From poetry the reader justly expects, and from good poetry always obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and elevation of his fancy; but this is rarely to be hoped by Christians from metrical devotion. Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted; Infinity cannot be amplified; Perfection cannot be improved.
The employments of pious meditation are Faith, Thanksgiving, Repentance, and Supplication. Faith, invariably uniform, cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving, the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a Being without passions, is confined to a few modes, and is to be felt rather than expressed. Repentance, trembling in the presence of the judge, is not at leisure for cadences and epithets. Supplication of man to man may diffuse itself through many topicks of persuasion, but supplication to God can only cry for mercy.
Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that pious verse can do is to help the memory and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.
This is powerful argument, but perhaps it proves more than Johnson intended. If a subject can be too serious for poetry, then poetry, it would seem, must be confined to graceful fiction. If repentance is not at leisure for cadences and epithets, neither is love, nor any other passion. To this Johnson might perhaps have replied that the poet, who can retire from the presence ​of his mistress, and compose his lyrics in solitude, cannot retire from the presence of his Maker. The motives of religion he felt to be too awful and too omnipresent to permit of the play of imagination. His view is based ultimately not on argument, but on reverential fear. Even thanksgiving ‘is to be felt rather than expressed.’ All that can be said of the Supreme Being is said when his name is named.
Dr. Isaac Watts, in his long critical preface to the Horae Lyricae, had argued with no less fervour on the other side. ‘There is nothing,’ he said, ‘amongst all the ancient Fables or later Romances, that have two such Extremes united in them, as the Eternal God becoming an Infant of Days; the Possessor of the Palace of Heaven laid to sleep in a manger;… and the Sovereign of Life stretching his Arms on a Cross, bleeding and expiring: The Heaven and the Hell in our Divinity are infinitely more delightful and dreadful than the Childish Figments of a Dog with three Heads, the Buckets of the Belides, the Furies with snaky Hairs, or all the flowry Stories of Elysium. And if we survey the one as Themes divinely true, and the other as a Medley of Fooleries which we can never believe, the Advantage for touching the Springs of Passion will fall infinitely on the Side of the Christian Poet; our Wonder and our Love, our Pity, Delight, and Sorrow, with the long Train of Hopes and Fears, must needs be under the Command of an harmonious Pen, whose every Line makes a Part of the Reader’s Faith, and is the very Life or Death of his Soul.’
Where theory is thus divided, the appeal must be to practice. Watts himself strengthens his case by quoting the poetry of the Psalms and the Book of Job. ​Mrs. Thrale tells how, when Johnson would try to repeat the Dies Irae, ‘he could never pass the stanza ending thus, Tantus labor non sit cassus, without bursting into a flood of tears; which sensibility (she adds) I used to quote against him when he would inveigh against devotional poetry.’ And the best hymns of Watts deserve a larger allowance of praise than they receive from Johnson. Yet Watts in his religious poetry does illustrate the truth of Johnson’s remarks. He is often splendid, but it is a monotonous and vague splendour. There is usually no progress in his theme, so that the order of his verses might be rearranged, and new poems compounded by selection, without loss of meaning. The following verses, taken from scattered places in the Poems Sacred to Devotion and Piety, show the author’s metaphysical grasp. Some of them describe the Godhead:
Life, Death, and Hell, and Worlds unknown Hang on his firm Decree: He sits on no precarious Throne, Nor borrows Leave to Be.
The Tide of Creatures ebbs and flows, Measuring their Changes by the Moon: No Ebb his Sea of Glory knows; His Age is one Eternal Noon.
Some of them are addressed to the Godhead:
Still restless Nature dies and grows; From Change to Change the Creatures run: Thy Being no Succession knows, And all thy vast Designs are one.
A glance of thine runs thro’ the Globes, Rules the bright Worlds, and moves their Frame: Broad sheets of Light compose thy Robes; Thy Guards are form’d of living Flame.
Reason may grasp the massy Hills And stretch from Pole to Pole, But half thy Name our Spirit fills, And overloads our Soul.
In vain our haughty Reason swells, For nothing’s found in Thee But boundless Unconceivables, And vast Eternity.
If these verses, and others like them, deserve high praise, they also very clearly illustrate Johnson’s objections to devotion in verse. They are a kind of Hymn to Spaciousness. Detail is beneath their notice. The thing once said can only be repeated, with very little novelty of expression. Yet it is strange to remember that Johnson objected to the details in Shakespeare’s description of Dover Cliff, and maintained that in order to impress the mind with an idea of immense height, it should be ‘all vacuum.’ The conclusion would seem to be that his objection to religious poetry cannot be prevented from recoiling with some force on the classical doctrine of his age. A consistent preference for general statements will always, in the long run, make poetry dull.
He was a staunch Englishman: in many disputed questions he cut loose from the orderly doctrines of the Latin peoples, and boldly declared for the freer and more spontaneous usages of English poetry. He defends Shakespeare for neglecting the vaunted dramatic unities. What is more remarkable, he decides against the establishment of a literary academy in England, ‘which I,’ he says, ‘who can never wish to see dependence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy.’ Men of letters in England have always nibbled ​at this idea of an academy. But for the death of King James I., the scheme of Edmund Bolton, which was to establish an order of men of science and literature, and to subordinate it to the Order of the Garter, would probably have been carried through. A similar scheme was set on foot by Dryden and Roscommon; and another by Swift and Harley. Yet nothing was done. The Seventeenth Century incorporated the sciences, and the Eighteenth Century founded an academy of the fine arts; the Nineteenth Century did not complete their work by founding an academy of letters. Macaulay, in the last year of his life, spent an afternoon in drawing up a list of forty names for an imaginary English academy; but the forty are now dead, and the academy is yet to build. What Johnson has to say on the question he says in his Life of Roscommon:—
In this country an academy could be expected to do but little. If an academician’s place were profitable it would be given by interest; if attendance were gratuitous it would be rarely paid, and no man would endure the least disgust. Unanimity is impossible, and debate would separate the assembly.
But suppose the philological decree made and promulgated, what would be its authority? In absolute governments there is sometimes a general reverence paid to all that has the sanction of power and the countenance of greatness. How little this is the state of our country needs not to be told. We live in an age in which it is a kind of publick sport to refuse all respect that cannot be enforced. The edicts of an English academy would probably be read by many, only that they might be sure to disobey them.
That our language is in perpetual danger of corruption cannot be denied; but what prevention can be found? The present manners of the nation would deride authority, and therefore nothing is left but that every writer should criticise himself.
After all, it is not on vexed questions of literature that Johnson is seen at his best and greatest, but in judgements on human life and human motives. Against these judgements there have been wonderfully few effective appeals. Sometimes he lets fall an impatient dogmatic sentence, which, it will be found, is provoked not so much by the conduct of the poet, as by the partiality and servility of the poet’s abettors and eulogists. The public is an easygoing self-indulgent master, and a very lenient judge of the faults of its favourites. If a man has increased the public stock of wisdom or gaiety, there will always be those who stop their ears to the just complaints of his wife. Johnson practised no such leniency; in his judgement the poetical profession is of no more avail than a mechanical trade to exonerate a man from the common obligations of humanity. Yet when he deals with weakness, inconsistency, and error, where these have not been made the subjects of foolish praise he will always be found quick to understand, and reluctant to condemn. No one knew better than Johnson that if men have much to strive for, they have more to suffer. There is something very moving in the sentence on Savage: ‘If his miseries were sometimes the consequences of his faults, he ought not yet to be wholly excluded from compassion, because his faults were very often the effects of his misfortunes.’
Of Johnson’s care to be just an example may be taken from his Life of Dryden. Controversy has always been exercised upon Dryden’s conversions, in politics and religion. These conversions have seemed to some ​biographers too well timed to be sincere. The poet was born into a parliamentarian family, and after the death of Cromwell praised his rule in a copy of Heroic Stanzas on the late Lord Protector. When the king was restored, the poet welcomed him by publishing Astraea Redux. The rule of Richard Cromwell had converted many backsliders, and Johnson’s verdict is perfectly just: ‘The reproach of inconstancy was, on this occasion, shared with such numbers that it produced neither hatred nor disgrace; if he changed, he changed with the nation. It was, however, not totally forgotten when his reputation raised him enemies.’ On the accession of King James, Dryden declared himself a convert to Roman Catholicism. This has excited graver question, because his position at Court and his emoluments as poet laureate seemed concerned in the change. Yet any one who reads the Religio Laici with care will find, in that apology of a Church of England man, some curious portents of the later event.
Such an omniscient Church we wish indeed; ’Twere worth both Testaments, and cast in the Creed;
—so Dryden had written in 1682. Johnson’s discussion of the change is a model of judgement: ‘That conversion will always be suspected that apparently concurs with interest. He that never finds his error till it hinders his progress towards wealth or honour will not be thought to love Truth only for herself. Yet it may easily happen that information may come at a commodious time; and as truth and interest are not by any fatal necessity at variance, that one may by accident introduce the other. When opinions are struggling into popularity, the arguments by which they are opposed or defended become more known; and he that changes his profession would ​perhaps have changed it before, with the like opportunities of instruction. This was then the state of popery; every artifice was used to shew it in its fairest form: and it must be owned to be a religion of external appearance sufficiently attractive.
‘It is natural to hope that a comprehensive is likewise an elevated soul, and that whoever is wise is also honest. I am willing to believe that Dryden, having employed his mind, active as it was, upon different studies, and filled it, capacious as it was, with other materials, came unprovided to the controversy, and wanted rather skill to discover the right than virtue to maintain it. But enquiries into the heart are not for man; we must now leave him to his Judge.’
Nothing is more admirable in Johnson than his splendid tolerance of bad characters. Boswell was perhaps a little timid in his record of this; it appears most luminously in the conversations recorded by Miss Burney. She stayed with the Thrales at Streatham in August 1778; Johnson was in the house; he had just finished the Life of Dryden, and was engaged on Butler. Some passages of his conversation shall be quoted here, though from a well-known source, because they show the author of the Lives of the Poets at his ease, and exhibit in him that broad enjoyment of human character which fitted him for his biographical task. When mention was made at table that Johnson would not hear Sir John Hawkins abused, he rose to the occasion. ‘As to Sir John,’ he said, ‘why really I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom: but to be sure he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.’ ‘We all laughed (says ​Miss Burney), as he meant we should, at this curious manner of speaking in his favour.’
Some days later a conversation took place which must be given in full. Johnson had been praising Mrs. Thrale for her sense and wit.
‘And yet,’ continued the doctor, with the most comical look, ‘I have known all the wits, from Mrs. Montagu down to Bet Flint!’
‘Bet Flint!’ cried Mrs. Thrale, ‘pray who is she?’
‘Oh, a fine character, madam! She was habitually a slut and a drunkard, and occasionally a thief and a harlot.’
‘And, for heaven’s sake, how came you to know her?’
‘Why, madam, she figured in the literary world, too! Bet Flint wrote her own life, and called herself Cassandra, and it was in verse; it began:—
When Nature first ordained my birth, A diminutive I was born on earth: And then I came from a dark abode, Into a gay and gaudy world.
So Bet brought me her verses to correct; but I gave her half-a-crown, and she liked it as well. Bet had a fine spirit; she advertised for a husband, but she had no success, for she told me no man aspired to her! Then she hired very handsome lodgings and a footboy; and she got a harpsichord, but Bet could not play; however, she put herself in fine attitudes, and drummed.’
Then he gave an account of another of these geniuses, who called herself by some fine name, I have forgotten what.
‘She had not quite the same stock of virtue,’ continued he, ‘nor the same stock of honesty as Bet Flint; but I suppose she envied her accomplishments, for she was so little moved by the power of harmony, that while Bet Flint thought she was drumming very divinely, the other jade had her indicted for a nuisance!’
‘And pray what became of her, sir?’
‘And did she ever get out of jail again, sir?’
‘Yes, madam; when she came to her trial, the judge acquitted her. “So now,” she said to me, “the quilt is my own, and now I’ll make a petticoat of it.” Oh, I loved Bet Flint!’
Oh, how we all laughed! Then he gave an account of another lady, who called herself Laurinda, and who also wrote verses and stole furniture; but he had not the same affection for her, he said, though she too ‘was a lady who had high notions of honour.’
Then followed the history of another, who called herself Hortensia, and who walked up and down the park repeating a book of Virgil.
‘But,’ said he, ‘though I know her story, I never had the good fortune to see her.’
After this he gave us an account of the famous Mrs. Pinkethman. ‘And she,’ he said, ‘told me she owed all her misfortunes to her wit; for she was so unhappy as to marry a man who thought himself also a wit, though I believe she gave him not implicit credit for it, but it occasioned much contradiction and ill-will.’
‘Bless me, sir!’ cried Mrs. Thrale, ‘how can all these vagabonds contrive to get at you, of all people?’
‘O the dear creatures!’ cried he, laughing heartily, ‘I can’t but be glad to see them!’
‘Why, I wonder, sir, you never went to see Mrs. Rudd among the rest?’
‘Why, madam, I believe I should,’ said he, ‘if it was not for the newspapers; but I am prevented many frolics that I should like very well, since I am become such a theme for the papers.’
We owe a great debt to Miss Burney for preserving these memoirs of the poetesses. They bring us back from the first man of letters of the day to that Johnson who sheltered ‘whole nests of people in his house;’ who, when he was asked by a lady why he so constantly gave money to beggars, replied, with great feeling, ‘Madam, to enable them to beg on;’ and who, when he found children asleep at night on bulks in the street, would put a penny in their hands, so that they might be able to get a breakfast in the morning.
His delight in human creatures gave zest to his biographical labours, and his long familiarity with the rudiments of life gave sanity and charity to his judgements. Some of the good qualities which he found in his friend Savage were also in himself, and were perhaps no small part of the bond between them. ‘Compassion,’ he says, ‘was indeed the distinguishing quality of Savage; he never appeared inclined to take advantage of weakness, to attack the defenceless, or to press upon the falling: whoever was distressed was certain at least of his good wishes; and when he could give no assistance to extricate them from misfortunes, he endeavoured to soothe them by sympathy and tenderness.’ Intellectual curiosity must have been as strong a tie. When Savage conversed with those who were conspicuous at that time, ‘he watched their looser moments,’ says his biographer, ‘and examined their domestick behaviour with that acuteness which nature had given him, and which the uncommon variety of his life had contributed to increase, and that inquisitiveness which ​must always be produced in a vigorous mind by an absolute freedom from all pressing or domestick engagements.’
This Life of Savage stands alone among the Lives. It was written some five-and-thirty years before the others, and was based largely on personal acquaintance. Johnson’s prose had not yet run clear when he wrote it, yet for delicacy and power it is one of the few great Lives in English. It is an apology for the poetic temperament—the truest and most humane apology that has ever been written or conceived. A French critic says that it is the best possible lesson on the danger of having to do with poets—on their utter lack of principle and morals. ‘If the author,’ he goes on, ‘had intended to satirize his hero, the work would have been delicious; unfortunately, it is written in good faith.’ Johnson is so faithful in his record, and so generous in his verdict, that the breadth of his treatment bewilders a smaller mind. His understanding of ordinary human situations is well exampled in his account of the relations of Savage with Steele. Savage was warmly befriended by Steele, who told him, in language very characteristic, that ‘the inhumanity of his mother had given him a right to find every good man his father.’ Steele even proposed to settle him in life by marrying him to a natural daughter, on whom, when he could find the money, he intended to bestow a thousand pounds. In the meantime Savage was much at his house, and, it seems, was unable to forbear some ridicule of his amiable foibles. This, by the diligence of friends, was brought to Steele’s notice, and he banished Savage from his house. On these facts Johnson comments in a passage extraordinary for its temperance and justice: ‘It is not indeed unlikely that ​Savage might by his imprudence expose himself to the malice of a tale-bearer; for his patron had many follies, which, as his discernment easily discovered, his imagination might sometimes incite him to mention too ludicrously. A little knowledge of the world is sufficient to discover that such weakness is very common, and that there are few who do not sometimes, in the wantonness of thoughtless mirth or the heat of transient resentment, speak of their friends and benefactors with levity and contempt, though in their cooler moments they want neither sense of their kindness nor reverence for their virtue. The fault therefore of Mr. Savage was rather negligence than ingratitude; but Sir Richard must likewise be acquitted of severity, for who is there that can patiently bear contempt from one whom he has relieved and supported, whose establishment he has laboured, and whose interest he has promoted?’
The greatness of Johnson is seen in the generosity of his temper. An intellect may be strong and active; it is only a temper that is great. He is sometimes severe, but his severity has this rare quality, that it is void of bitterness. He seems to be almost a stranger to those little movements of personal resentment and personal pride which so often disturb judgement. Hence the lesson that he draws from the story of Savage is spoken, as it were, with the voice of the recording angel: ‘The reigning error of his life was, that he mistook the love for the practice of virtue, and was indeed not so much a good man as the friend of goodness.’ From almost any other writer, these words would have a flavour of satire; the purity of Johnson’s mind enables him to utter them as mere truth.
In this and the preceding papers I have attempted to ​estimate the character of Johnson, as he may be seen in his works and in the records of his life. The material for such an estimate is plentiful, and is so easily accessible, that any man, with a little trouble, may have it all on a couple of shelves. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, moreover, is generally admitted to be the best biography ever written. There is no room, it may be held, and no need, for any more talk about Johnson.
The argument might be good if it were proposed to leave the original authorities in sole possession, and to gain a knowledge of Johnson by reading his works and the works of his biographers. But this plan has not been much followed. For every reader of Johnson’s works, there have been perhaps fifty readers of Boswell’s Life, and a hundred of Macaulay’s Essays. The cheapest estimate and the most garish portrait of Johnson have captured the popular imagination. The consequence is that he is commonly looked at somewhat quizzically, as an eccentric, or a ‘character.’ Small physical peculiarities, such as may be observed in most men, have swollen, and half filled the picture. These peculiarities are what rivet the attention of children, who, if a man has a wart, cannot see the man for the wart. The peculiarities of Johnson, it is true, are conspicuous; his portrait has been powerfully drawn, and they stand in bold relief; but other men have no fewer, as any man may learn who will consult, not the faded records of other lives, but his knowledge of himself. We can know Johnson better perhaps than any other of our great men; it seems a strange piece of irony that we should make of our unrivalled opportunities a bar to intimacy. His sayings are rightly praised for their humour and quaintness, yet, oftener than the sayings of ​other men, they are merely true. Why, in the pageant of life, should we insist on casting Truth for a comic part?
Boswell, no doubt, is responsible for keeping Johnson a little at a distance. We are still under the spell of his hero-worship; and heroes are people whom we look at, but do not confide in. Yet if Boswell’s advice had weighed with us, we should all be reading The Rambler to-day. We have taken delight in Boswell’s pictures, and have paid too little attention to his text.
Johnson has a large following of enthusiastic admirers who would indignantly repudiate any slur cast upon their devotion. Yet some of them perhaps are worshippers rather than lovers, and lovers rather than friends. At any rate, they do not read his works.
No man—not even Boswell—can claim sole possession of Johnson. He dominated his biographers in life, and, if they were to perish, he would still live. He was always the centre of his circle: where he was, there was society. The mists and miasma of the earlier nineteenth century have partly hidden him from us. The mists will clear away, and he will come by his own.
In the meantime those who love his works enjoy no vulgar pleasure. For some years after his death, his writings were held in huge esteem, and shaped the prose of England. That time has passed. New models have captured the public ear; and at this day Johnson’s noble prose is perhaps studied chiefly by his parodists. Most men who attain to literary immortality depend on their works; the works are still admired, when the man is dead. Johnson has experienced another fate; the man still has disciples, though his works are ​generally believed to be dead. A hearty admirer of Johnson will not hesitate to express complete indifference to his writings. They have their admitted place among English classics, but a love for them is not a mark of literary orthodoxy. One consequence of this is not to be despised: there is no sham admiration for them. When a man professes a liking for Johnson’s prose, he has found it out for himself, and his talk is good to hear.
Some writers enjoy a steady increase of reputation; their fame grows by slow deposit, or is raised by forces not intermittent in their action. The fame of Shakespeare and of Milton is of this kind. Others are subject to violent fluctuations of esteem; they have been so much a part of their age, and are so entangled in its ideas, that what is permanent in them suffers, for a time, with what is local and accidental; a later generation rises against them and disowns them. This was the fate of Dante, of Ronsard, of Donne, and of Johnson. They were all monarchs in their day; and the human mind, out of mere self-respect, deposed them. But virtue does not grow old; and sooner or later they return, to claim, as chiefs of the republic of letters, a power more surely grounded on the consent of mankind.