Chapter I: From Addison to Johnson (3)

The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part, absent, while much more than the merit of either, in method and closeness to the aim, is present, in the very remarkable _Philosophy of Rhetoric_[616] which Dr George Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early as 1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty years later (1777). [Sidenote: _Campbell._] It may indeed be admitted that this piecemeal composition is not without its effect on the book, which contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from the exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly episodic. It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author’s strictly professional and educational design, in retaining as much of the mere business part of the ancient Rhetoric as would or might be useful to future preachers, advocates, or members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant” writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play than that of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and the book, however much we may disagree with occasional expressions in it, remains the most important treatise on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth century produced. Indeed, strange as it may seem, Whately’s, its principal formal successor in the nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in comparison.

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Footnote 616:

I use the Tegg edition, London, 1850.

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The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism—this is what Campbell really attempts. [Sidenote: _The_ Philosophy of Rhetoric.] He is rather chary of acknowledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his title, seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt partly from that unlucky contempt of scholastic appellations which shows itself in his well-known attack on Logic. But his definition of “Eloquence”—the term which he employs as a preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under Quintilian’s _scientia bene dicendi_ and _dicere secundum virtutem orationis_, asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero’s description of the best orator as he who _dicendo animos delectat audientium et docet et permovet_, is manifestly far more extensive than the latter of these, and much less vague than the former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.

It has been allowed that this bold and admirable challenge of the whole province—for “discourse” is soon seen to include “writing”—is not always so well supported. After an interesting introduction (vindicating the challenge, and noting Kames more especially as one who, though in a different way, had made it before him), Campbell for a time, either because he is rather afraid of his own boldness, or to conciliate received opinions on the matter (or, it has been suggested, because the book was written at different times, and with perhaps slightly different ends), proceeds to discuss various matters which have very little to do with his general subject. Sometimes, as in the Chapter, before referred to, on “The Nature and Use of the Scholastic Art of Syllogising,” he wrecks himself in a galley which he had not the slightest need to enter. The longer discourse on Evidence which precedes this is, of course, fully justified on the old conception of Rhetoric, but digressory, or at least excursory, on his own. The above-mentioned sections on Ridicule, and on the æsthetic pleasure derivable from painful subjects, are excursions into the debatable kinds between literature and Ethics, though much less extravagant than those of Kames, and perhaps, as excursions, not absolutely to be barred or banned; while chapters vii.-x., which deal with the “Consideration of Hearers,” &c., &c., are once more Aristotelian relapses, pardonable if not strictly necessary. But not quite a third part of the whole treatise is occupied by this First Book of the three into which it is divided; and not a little of this third is, strictly or by a little allowance, to the point. The remaining two-thirds are to that point without exception or digression of any kind, so that the Aristotelian distribution is exactly reversed.

The titles of the two Books, “The Foundations and Essential Properties of Elocution,” and “The Discriminating Properties of Elocution,” must be taken with due regard to Campbell’s use of the last word.[617] But they require hardly any other proviso or allowance. He first, with that mixture of boldness and straight-hitting which is his great merit, attacks the general principles of the use of Language, and proceeds to lay down nine Canons of Verbal Criticism, which are in the main so sound and so acute that they are not obsolete to the present day. There is more that is arbitrary elsewhere, and Campbell seems sometimes to retrograde over the line which separates Rhetoric and Composition. But it must be remembered that this line has never been very exactly drawn, and has, both in Scotland and in America, if not also in England, been often treated as almost non-existent up to the present day. In his subsequent distinction of five rhetorical Qualities of Style—Perspicuity, Vivacity, Elegance, Animation, and Music—Campbell may be thought to be not wholly happy. For the three middle qualities are practically one, and it is even questionable whether Music would not be best included with them in some general term, designating whatever is added by style proper to Perspicuity, or the sufficient but unadorned conveyance of meaning. As, however, is very common, if not universal, with him, his treatment is in advance of his nomenclature, for the rest of the book—nearly a full half of it—is in fact devoted to the _two_ heads of Perspicuity and Vivacity, the latter tacitly subsuming all the three minor qualities. And there is new and good method in the treatment of Vivacity, as shown first by the choice of words, secondly by their number, and thirdly by their arrangement, while a section under the first head on “words considered as sounds” comes very near to the truth. That there should be a considerable section on Tropes was to be expected, and, as Campbell treats it, it is in no way objectionable. His iconoclasm as to logical Forms becomes much more in place, and much more effective, in regard to rhetorical Figures.

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Footnote 617:

He had, of course, good authority for it, including that of Dryden;
but it is obviously better to limit it in the modern sense than to use
it equivocally. Mason (not Gray’s friend, but an interesting and
little-known person to whom I hope to recur in the next volume) had
already seen this, and expressly referred to it.

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One, however, of the best features of the work has hardly yet been noticed; and that is the abundance of examples, and the thorough way in which they are discussed. To a reader turning the book over without much care it may seem inferior as a _thesaurus_ to Kames, because the passages quoted are as a rule embedded in the text, and not given separately, in the fashion which makes of large parts of the _Elements of Criticism_ a sort of anthology, a collection of beauties or deformities, as the case may be. But this is in accordance with the singularly businesslike character of Campbell’s work throughout. And if it also seem that he does not launch out enough in appreciation of books or authors as wholes, let it be remembered that English criticism was still in a rather rudimentary condition, and that the state of taste in academic circles was not very satisfactory. It would not, of course, be impossible to produce from him examples of those obsessions of the time which we have noticed in his two compatriots, as we shall notice them in the far greater Johnson. But he could not well escape these obsessions, and he suffers from them in a very mild form.

James Harris,[618] author of _Hermes_ (and of the house of Malmesbury, which was ennobled in the next generation), is perhaps the chief writer whom England, in the narrower sense, has to set against Blair, Kames, and Campbell in mid-eighteenth century. [Sidenote: _Harris._] But he is disappointing. It would not be reasonable to quarrel with the _Hermes_ itself for not being literary, because it does not pretend to be anything but grammatical; and the _Philosophical Arrangements_, though they do sometimes approach literature, may plead benefit of title for not doing so oftener. But the _Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry_, and the _Philological Enquiries_—in which Philology is expressly intimated to mean “love of letters” in the higher sense—hold out some prospects. The performance is but little. Readers of Boswell will remember that Johnson, though the author of _Hermes_ was very polite to him, both personally and with the pen, used, to his henchman’s surprise and grief, to speak very roughly of Harris, applying to him on one occasion the famous and damning phrase, “a prig, and a bad prig,” and elsewhere hinting doubts as to his competency in Greek. That the reproach of priggishness was deserved (whether with the aggravation or not) nobody can read half-a-dozen pages of Harris without allowing,—his would-be complimentary observation on Fielding[619] would determine by itself. But the principal note of Harris, as a critic, is not so much priggishness as confused superficiality. These qualities are less visible in the _Dialogue_ (which is an extremely short, not contemptible, but also not unimportant, exercitation in the direction of Æsthetic proper) than in the _Enquiries_, which were written late in life, and which, no doubt, owe something of their extraordinary garrulity to “the irreparable outrage.”

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Footnote 618:

_Works_, Oxford, 1841.

Footnote 619:

Note to Pt. II. chap. vii. of the _Enquiries_, p. 433, ed. cit.

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This book begins, with almost the highest possible promise for us, in a Discussion of the Rise of Criticism, its various species, Philosophical, Historical, and Corrective, &c. [Sidenote: _The_ Philological Enquiries.] It goes on hardly less promisingly, if the mere chapter-headings are taken, with discourses on Numbers, Composition, Quantity, Alliteration, &c.; the Drama, its Fable and its Manners, Diction, and, at the end of the second part, an impassioned defence of Rules. But the Third, which promises a discussion of “the taste and literature of the Middle Age,” raises the expectation almost to agony-point. Here is what we have been waiting for so long: here is the great gap going to be filled. At last a critic not merely takes a philosophic-historic view of criticism, but actually proposes to supplement it with an inquiry into those regions of literature on which his predecessors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the disappointment. Harris’s first part, though by no means ill-planned, is very insufficiently carried out, and the hope of goodness in the third is cruelly dashed beforehand by the sentence, “At length, after a long and barbarous period, when the shades of monkery began to retire,” &c. The writer’s mere enumeration of Renaissance critics is very haphazard, and his remarks, both on them and their successors, perfunctory in the extreme. He hardly dilates on anybody or anything except—following the tradition from Pope and Swift—on Bentley and his mania for correction and conjecture.

In the second part he gives himself more room, and is better worth reading, but the sense of disappointment continues. In fact, Harris is positively irritating. He lays it down, for instance, that “nothing excellent in a literary way happens merely by chance,” a thesis from the discussion of which much might come. But he simply goes off into a loose discussion of the effects and causes of literary pleasure, with a good many examples in which the excellence of his precept, “seek the cause,” is more apparent than the success of his own researches. The rest is extremely discursive, and seldom very satisfactory, being occupied in great part with such tenth-rate stuff as Lillo’s _Fatal Curiosity_. As for Harris’s defence of the Rules, he does not, in fact, defend them at all; but, as is so common with controversialists, frames an indictment, which no sensible antagonist would ever bring, in order to refute it. He says that “he never knew any genius cramped by rules, and had known great geniuses miserably err by neglecting them.” A single example of this last would have been worth the whole treatise. But Harris does not give it. Finally, “the Taste and Literature of the Middle Age” seem to him to be satisfactorily discussed by ridiculing the Judgment of God, talking at some length about Byzantine writers, giving a rather long account of Greek philosophy in its ancient stages, quoting freely from travellers to Athens and Constantinople, introducing “the Arabians,” with anecdotes of divers caliphs, saying something of the Schoolmen, a little about the Provençal poets, something (to do him justice) of the rise of accentual prosody,[620] and a very, very little about Chaucer, Petrarch, Mandeville, Marco Polo, Sir John Fortescue, and—Sannazar! “And now having done with the Middle Age,” he concludes—having, that is to say, shown that, except a _pot-pourri_ of mainly historical anecdote, he knew nothing whatever about it; or, if this seem harsh, that his knowledge was not of any kind that could possibly condition his judgment of literature favourably. In fact, no one shows that curious eighteenth-century confusion of mind, which we shall notice frequently in other countries, better than Harris. He is, as we have seen, a fervent devotee of the Rules—he believes[621] that, before any examples of poetry, there was an abstract schedule of Epic, Tragedy, and everything else down to Epigram, which you cannot follow but to your good, and cannot neglect but to your peril. Yet, on the one hand, he feels the philosophic impulse, and on the other, the literary and historical curiosity, before which these rules were bound to vanish.

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Footnote 620:

Harris deserves a good word for his prosodic studies, which may
entitle him to reappear in the next volume.

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[Sidenote: _“Estimate” Brown: his_ History of Poetry.]

A few allusions,[622] in contemporaries of abiding fame, have kept half alive the name—though very few, save specialists, are likely to be otherwise than accidentally acquainted with the work—of John Brown of Newcastle, author of the once famous _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_,[623] and afterwards, when he had gained reputation by this, of a _Dissertation on the Rise of Poetry and Music_,[624] later still slightly altered, and re-christened _History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry_.[625] The _Estimate_ itself is one of those possibly half-unconscious pieces of quackery which from time to time put (in a manner which somehow or other tickles the longer ears among their contemporaries) the old cry that _every_thing is rotten in the state of Denmark. There is not much in it that is directly literary; the chief point of the kind is an attack on the Universities: it may be noted that quacks generally do attack Universities. The _Dissertation-History_ is a much less claptrap piece, but far more amusing to read. Brown is one of those rash but frank persons who attempt creation as well as criticism; and those who will may hear how

“Peace on Nature’s lap reposes [why not _vice versa_?]
Pleasure strews her guiltless roses,”

and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important. In the second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could, as appealing to a special public only. He believes in _Ossian_, then quite new. He thinks it contains “Pictures which no civilised modern could ever _imbibe_ in their strength, nor consequently could ever _throw out_”—an image so excessively Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing a picture) that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown rejoices and wallows in the naturalistic generalisation of his century. He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it down that, at religious and other festivals, men danced and sang, that then organised professional effort supplemented unorganised, and so poets arose. Then comes about a sort of Established Choir, whence the various kinds are developed. And we have the Chinese—the inevitable Chinese—Fow-hi, and Chao-hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.

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Footnote 621:

“There never was a time when rules did not exist; they always made a
part of that immutable truth,” &c.—P. 450.

Footnote 622:

The best known is Cowper’s, in _Table Talk_, ll. 384, 385—

“The inestimable Estimate of Brown
Rose like a paper-kite and charmed the town.”

See also Chesterfield, to the Bishop of Waterford, April 14, 1758.
Chesterfield was no Bottom, but, being melancholy at the time, he was
tickled.

Footnote 623:

London, 1757, 8vo.

Footnote 624:

London, 1763, 4to.

Footnote 625:

Newcastle, 1764, 8vo.

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But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here ὁ μέγας.

There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s critical opinions were formed quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural bent and influence of environment which, as a rule, forms all such opinions. [Sidenote: _Johnson: his preparation for criticism._] There has been a tendency to regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of considering everything as an open question, of being ready to reverse any opinion at a moment’s notice. As a matter of fact, we have record of not many men who have proceeded in this way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a single person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking, the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in it find, in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world, political, ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits their bent. The bent of their time may assist them in fastening on to this by attraction or repulsion—it really does not much matter which it is. In either case they will insensibly, from an early period, choose their line and shape their course accordingly. They will give a certain independence to it; they will rarely be found merely “swallowing formulas.” It is the _other_ class which does this, with leave reserved to get rid of the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another set, which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the hero will be in the main _Qualis ab incepto_.

Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism being conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort of transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have shown; secondly, by the usual peculiarities of social circumstance and mental constitution; and lastly, by the state of England in his time—a state to discuss which were here impertinent, but which, it may be humbly suggested, will not be quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of the more ordinary views of the eighteenth century.

His view of literature was in part determined by these general influences, in part—perhaps chiefly—by special impinging currents. His mere birth-time had not very much to do with it—Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchelsea, who consciously or unconsciously worked against it, were older, in the lady’s case much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone, who consciously worked against it in different degrees, were not much younger.[626] The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by that natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other things explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not wholly in consequence of his near sight, was entirely insensible to the beauties of nature; he made fun of “prospects”; he held that “one blade of grass is like another” (which it most certainly is not, even in itself, let alone its surroundings); he liked human society in its most artificial form—that provided by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his ear was only less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for music, in the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is quite clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost mathematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he was widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek, still more widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.[627] Fourthly, he was, for a man so much given to reading—for one who ranged from Macrobius in youth to _Parismus and Parismenus_ in age, and from _Travels in Abyssinia_ to _Prince Titi_—not very widely read either in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of the modern languages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or nothing. Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and early manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other wholly, of a certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly, the critical school in which he had been brought up was strictly neo-classic. Seventhly, and to conclude, such rebels to convention as appeared in his time were chiefly men whom he regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt. Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of “the Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Walpole was a spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius; Gray a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical” mannerisms worse than any of Johnson’s own, and whose dilettante shyness and scanty production invited ridicule. Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did not love Cambridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had foibles enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons go far enough, or do not so go, Johnson’s general critical attitude never varies in the least.[628] It was, as has been said, probably formed quite early; it no doubt appeared in those but dimly known contributions to periodical literature which defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly known first twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise, as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in the case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great documents of _The Rambler_, _Rasselas_, the Shakespeare _Preface_, and the _Lives_, we see it in the two first rigid, peremptory, in the _Preface_, curiously and representatively uncertain, in the last conditioned by differences which allow it somewhat freer play, and at some times making a few concessions, but at others more pugnacious and arbitrary than before.

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Footnote 626:

His birth-year was 1709; Thomson’s 1700; Dyer’s perhaps the same;
Shenstone’s 1714; Gray’s 1716. Lady Winchelsea had been born as far
back as 1660.

Footnote 627:

He was perhaps the last man of very great power who entertained the
Renaissance superstition of Latin. He was horrified at the notion of
an English epitaph; and in the first agony of his stroke in 1783 he
rallied and racked his half-paralysed brains to make Latin verses as
the best test of his sanity.

Footnote 628:

Let it be noted, however, that in Johnson, as in most strong men,
there were certain leanings to the other side, certain evidences of
the “identity of contradictories.” His sense of mystery, his
religiosity, his strong passions, his tendency to violence in taste
and opinions—were all rather Romantic than Classical.

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The critical element in _The Rambler_ is necessarily large; but a great deal of it is general and out of our way.[629] [Sidenote: The Rambler _on Milton_.] Directly concerning us are the papers on the aspects (chiefly formal) of Milton’s poetry—especially versification—on which Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers on lesser subjects. The Miltonic _examen_ begins at No. 86. Johnson is as uncompromising as the great Bysshe himself on the nature of English prosody. “The heroick measures of the English language may be properly considered as pure or mixed.” They are pure when “the accent rests on every second syllable through the whole line.” In other words, “purity” is refused to anything but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes further; this is not only “purity” and “the completest harmony possible,” but it ought to be “exactly kept in distichs” and in the last line of a (verse) paragraph.

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Footnote 629:

The Allegory on Criticism (daughter of Labour and Truth, who gives up
her task to Time, but is temporarily personated by Flattery and
Malevolence) in No. 3 almost speaks itself in the parenthetical
description just given. Cf. also 4, on Ancient and Modern Romances;
22, another Allegory on Wit and Learning; 23, on the Contrariety of
Criticism; and 36, 37, on “Pastoral Poetry.”

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Nevertheless, for variety’s sake, the “mixed” measure is allowed; “though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself,” it makes us appreciate the “harmonious” lines better. And we soon perceive that even this exceedingly grudging, and in strictness illogical, licence is limited merely to substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In

“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, _both stood,
Both turned_,”

the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “the accent is on two syllables together and both strong”; while he would seem to regard “And when,” in the line

“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,”

as a pyrrhic (“both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“deviation or inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first place, but elsewhere is “remarkably inharmonious,” as, for instance, in Cowley’s beautiful line,

“And the soft wings of peace _cover_ him round.”

The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to “elision,” by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-syllabic possibility into consideration) such a case as

“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind.”

This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds some severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it. He even objects to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.

In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more plays the rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting one line with another, is _never_ to make a full pause at less than three syllables from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all lines pause at the fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a whole paper to Milton’s accommodation of the sound to the sense, and winds up his Miltonic exercitations, after a very considerable interval, with a set critique (139) of _Samson Agonistes_, partly on its general character as an Aristotelian tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers show no _animus_ against Milton. There are even expressions of admiration for him, which may be called enthusiastic. But they do show that the critic was not in range with his author. Almost every one of his axioms and postulates is questionable.

Of the remaining critical papers in the _Rambler_ it is very important to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and the Impropriety of imitating Spenser.” [Sidenote: _On Spenser._] Johnson’s acuteness was not at fault in distrusting, from his point of view, the consequences of such things as the _Castle of Indolence_ or even the _Schoolmistress_; and he addresses a direct rebuke to “the men of learning and genius” who have introduced the fashion.[630] In so far as his condemnation of “echoes” goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent _parrhesia_[631] which, like many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But on Spenser himself the other idols—the _idola specus_ rather than _fori_—blind him. In following his namesake in the condemnation of Spenser’s language he is, we may think, wrong; yet this at least is an arguable point. But in regard to the Spenserian stanza things are different. Johnson calls it “at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its uniformity, and to the attention by its length,” while he subsequently goes off into the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is here possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at once, but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate the riposte that, not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As for “unpleasing,” so much the worse for the ear which is not pleased by the most exquisite harmonic symphony in the long and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for monotony, it is just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the Italian parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty, but cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto, and the endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser’s rhyme-sound. It is no valid retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If a man, as some men have done, says that Spenser is pleasing and Dryden and Pope are _not_, then the retort is valid. When the position is taken that _both_ rhythms are pleasing, both really poetical, but poetical in a different way, the defender of it may laugh at all assailants.

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Footnote 630:

He was no doubt thinking also of Gilbert West, in his _Life_ of whom
he introduces a _caveat_ against West’s Imitations of Spenser as
“successful” indeed and “amusing” but “only pretty.”

Footnote 631:

“The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for
little more than the skill with which he has ... united the beauties
of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,” and he adds a longish exposure of the
way in which Virgil, determined to imitate at all costs, has put in
his borrowed matter without regard to keeping.

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The criticism of the English historians which immediately follows has an interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written just at the opening of the great age of the department with which it deals. [Sidenote: _On History and Letter-writing._] Prejudices of different kinds would always have prevented Johnson from doing full justice to Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon; but, as it is, he deals with nobody later than Clarendon, and merely throws back to Raleigh and Knolles. Very much the same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary writing: for here also it was the lot of Johnson’s own contemporaries, in work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published, at the date of the _Rambler_, to remove the reproach of England. But the paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.

For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the combination of influences above referred to, might have taken high, if not the highest, degrees in a very different school of criticism. [Sidenote: _On Tragi-comedy._] He puts the great rule _Nec quarta loqui_ into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting some slight shortness of sight; for the very argument he uses will sweep with this a good many other rules to which he still adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly, “without scruple and without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic about the Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of tragic and comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most remarkable, for it is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic system, sounded by its last really great prophet. “_It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact._”

“Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood, that have been in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they are barking and fleeing, infield and outfield, haugh and holme!” With this utterance, this single utterance, all the ruling doctrines of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century criticism receive notice to quit.[632]

The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the _Idler_ (60, 61) are excellent fun, and perhaps Johnson’s chief accomplishment in the direction of humour. [Sidenote: “_Dick Minim._”] The growth of criticism in Dick, his gradual proficiency in all the critical commonplaces of his day (it is to be observed that Johnson, like all true humourists, does not spare himself, and makes one of Minim’s _secrets de Polichinelle_ a censure of Spenser’s stanza), his addiction to Johnson’s pet aversion, “suiting the sound to the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done. Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece to consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But it neither contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine that we cannot find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.[633]

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Footnote 632:

The chief remaining critical _loci_ in the _Rambler_ are the unlucky
strictures in No. 168 on “dun,” “knife,” and “blanket” in _Macbeth_ as
“low”; and the remarks on unfriendly criticism in 176.

Footnote 633:

There are, of course, other passages in the _Idler_ touching on
Criticism,—59 on the Causes of Neglect of Books, 68, 69 on
Translation, 77 on “Essay Writing,” 85 on Compilations. But they
contain nothing of exceptional importance.

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The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in _Rasselas_ (chap. x.) may be less amusing; but it is of course much more serious. [Sidenote: Rasselas.] There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives as much of Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character: while it is at least possible that his sentiments are determined in some degree by the menacing appearances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder that in almost all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the best”; that “early writers are in possession of nature and their successors of art”; that “no man was ever great by imitation”; that he must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he must do it on the principle of examining, “not the individual, but the species.” He is to remark “general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shapes in the verdure of the forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking features,” neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be “a being superior to time and place”; must know many languages and sciences; must by incessant practice of style “familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.”

Surely a high calling and election! yet with some questionable points in it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the tulip, if he must merely generalise and sweep; if he must consult the laziness and dulness of his readers by merely portraying prominent and striking features, characteristics alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness—then even Dryden will not do, for he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone must bear the bell. Lady Winchelsea’s horse in twilight, the best part of a century earlier; Tennyson’s ashbuds in the front of March, the best part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,” superfluous if not even bad. Habington’s picture of the pitiless northern sunshine on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats’s of the perilous seas through the magic casements, must be rejected, as too unfamiliar and individual. The poetic strangeness and height are barred _en bloc_. Convention, familiarity, generalisation—these are the keys to the poetical kingdom of heaven. The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!

The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth-century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the English critical position at this time. [Sidenote: _The Shakespeare Preface._] Of the first there are many instances, though perhaps none in the _Preface_ itself quite equal to the famous note on the character of Polonius, which has been generally and justly taken as showing what a triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet even here there is not a little which follows in the wake of Dryden’s great eulogy, and some scattered observations of the highest acuteness, more particularly two famous sentences which, though Johnson’s quotation is directed to a minor matter—Shakespeare’s learning—settle beforehand, with the prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory.[634] The rest, however, is, if not exactly a zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utterance of two distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that merit of nature, of passion; but “his set speeches are commonly cold and weak.” “What he does best he soon ceases to do.” Johnson, here also, has no superstitious reverence for the Unities, and even speaks slightly of dramatic rules; nay, he suggests “the recall of the principles of the drama to a new examination,” the very examination which Lessing was to give it. But he apologises for the period when “_The Death of Arthur_ was the favourite volume,” and hints a doubt whether much of our and his own praise of Shakespeare is not “given by custom and veneration.” “He has corrupted language by every mode of depravation,” yet Johnson echoes Dryden “when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too.” A singular triumph of “depraved language.” In short, throughout the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now some one with a certain bundle of principles or prejudices which Johnson chooses to adopt for the time.

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Footnote 634:

“Jonson, ... who besides that he had no imaginable temptation to
falsehood, wrote at a time when the character and acquisitions of
Shakespeare were known to multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to
decide the controversy, unless some testimony of equal force could be
opposed.”

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It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial nature of poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat down to the _Lives of the Poets_,[635] one of the most fortunate books in English literature. [Sidenote: _The_ Lives of the Poets.] In very few cases have task and artist been so happily associated. For almost all his authors, he had biographical knowledge such as no other living man had, and the access to which has long been closed. If, now and then, his criticism was not in touch with his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a certain value even to the assertions that result—for _we_, do what we will, cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these subjects belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a school and system with which the critic was at once thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy. And, lastly, the form of the work, with its subdivision into a large number of practically independent and not individually burdensome sections, was well suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional indolence, and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally, and only occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has had quite such a chance: but he must indeed have a sublime confidence, both in the strength of his principles and in the competence of his talents, who thinks that, if he had the chance, he could do the task better than Johnson did his.

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Footnote 635:

With Johnson, as with some other writers, I have not thought it
necessary to specify editions. I must, however, mention Mr J. H.
Millar’s issue of the _Lives_ (London, 1896) for the sake of the
excellent _Introduction_ on Johnson’s criticism.

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The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it could not be expected to be. [Sidenote: _Their general merits._] Some was merely old work, dating from a much less mature period of the writer’s genius, and made to serve again. Some was on subjects so trivial that good nature, or simple indolence, or, if any one pleases, an artistic reluctance to break butterflies on so huge a wheel, made the criticisms almost as insignificant as the criticised. Here and there extra-literary prejudice—political-ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly moral, partly religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as in that of Swift—distorted the presentation. And it is quite possible that a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that Gray’s aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplishments, were fatal to the school of poetry to which the critic himself held.

But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing do the _Lives_ still provide us! In that combination of biography and criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should be so late,[636] they are all but the originals, and are still almost the standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_, but in milder mood and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to us extraordinary and unintelligible praise on John Pomfret’s _Choice_,[637] he is really praising a moral tract couched in verse not unpleasing in itself, and specially pleasing to his ear. When he speaks less favourably of _Grongar Hill_, he is speaking of a piece of nature-poetry, not arranged on his principle of neglecting the streak of the tulip, and availing itself of those Miltonic licences of prosody which he disapproved. But we shall never find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he recognises, he makes any mistake about its relative excellence: and we shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excellence which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as he approves. And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused brilliancy of critical expression, subject to the allowances and conditions just given, the _Lives_ are hardly to be excelled in any language. It is not safe to neglect one of them, though no doubt there are some six or seven which, for this reason or that, take precedence of the rest.

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Footnote 636:

There are blind attempts at it even in antiquity; but Dryden’s Lives
of Lucian and Plutarch are, like other things of his elsewhere, the
real originals here.

Footnote 637:

Let me draw special attention to “John.” I once, unwittingly or
carelessly, called him “Thomas,” and I am afraid that I even neglected
to correct the error in a second edition of the guilty book. A man who
writes “Thomas” for “John,” in the case of a minor poet, can, I am
aware, possess no virtues, and must expect no pardon. But I shall
always henceforth remember to call him “Pomfret, Mr _John_.” “Let this
expiate,” as was remarked in another case of perhaps not less mortal
sin.

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The “Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson’s only considerable attempt at that very important part of criticism, the historical summary of the characteristics of a poetical period or school. [Sidenote: _The_ Cowley.] And, though far from faultless, it is so important and so interesting in its kind that it ranks with his greatest Essays. Only that singular impatience of literary history, as such, which characterised the late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not infrequently marred his own critical work, can have prevented him from including, in his Johnsonian _points de repère_, the Essay which launched, and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition of the “Metaphysical” School—of the school represented earlier by Donne, and later by Cowley himself.

The phrase itself[638] has been both too readily adopted and too indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning of “metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and partly misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a meaning defensible at least from the point of view of the framer, and very important in critical history. Johnson (it is too often forgotten) was a scholar; and he used “metaphysical” in its proper sense—of that which “comes after” the physical or natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole principle of his school of criticism—their whole critical contention—that _they_ were “following nature.” The main objection to the poetry of what Dryden calls the “last Age”—what we call, loosely but conveniently, “Elizabethan” poetry—was that its ideas, and still more its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substituted afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would be delightful to the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals here—but it would not be to the question.

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Footnote 638:

It was of course probably suggested by Dryden (_Essay on Satire_,
“Donne ... affects the metaphysics”), but in Johnson’s hands is much
altered and extended.

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Political and religious prejudice accounts, as has been said, for much in the _Milton_. [Sidenote: _The_ Milton.] But it will not fully account for the facts. The at first sight astonishing, and already often referred to, criticisms on the minor poems show a perfectly honest and genuine dislike to the form as well as to the matter, to the manner as well as to the man. If Johnson calls _Lycidas_ “harsh,” it is because he simply does not hear its music; he can even call the songs in _Comus_ “not very musical in their numbers.” When of the, no doubt unequal but often splendid, sonnets he can write, “of the best it can only be said that they are not bad,” he gives us the real value of his criticism immediately afterwards by laying it down that “the fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has _never_ succeeded in ours.” And when he has earlier stated that “all that short compositions can commonly attain is sweetness and elegance,” we see in this the whole thing. Milton is condemned under statute (though the statute is hopelessly unconstitutional and unjust) on certain counts; on others his judge, though capable and perfectly honest, does not know the part of the code which justifies the accused. Johnson is listening for couplet-music or stanzas with regular recurrence of rhyme, for lines constituted entirely on a dissyllabic, or entirely on a trisyllabic, basis. He does not find these things: and he has no organ to judge what he does find.

With the lives of Dryden and Pope we are clear of all difficulties, and the critic is in his element. The poets whom he is criticising occupy the same platform as he does; they have in fact been themselves the architects of that platform. [Sidenote: _The_ Dryden _and_ Pope.] There is no fear of the initial incompatibilities which, when aggravated by accident, lead to the apparent enormities of the _Milton_ Essay, and which, even when not so aggravated, condition the usefulness, though they may positively increase the interest, of the _Cowley_. But there is more than this. In no instance, perhaps, was Johnson so well in case to apply his biographical and critical treatment as in regard to Dryden and Pope. With the latter he had himself been contemporary; and when he first came to London the traditions even of the former were still fresh, while there were many still living (Southerne the chief of them) who had known glorious John well. Further, Johnson’s peculiar habits of living, his delight in conversation and society, his excellent memory, and his propensity to the study of human nature, as well as of letters, furnished him abundantly with opportunities. Yet, again, his sympathy with both, on general literary sides, was not unhappily mixed and tempered by a slight, but not uncharitable or Puritanic, disapproval of their moral characters, by regret at Dryden’s desertion of the Anglican Church, and at the half-Romanist half-freethinking attitude of Pope to religion.

The result of all this is a pair of the best critical Essays in the English language. Individual expressions will of course renew for us the sense of difference in the point of view. We shall not agree that Dryden “found English poetry brick and left it marble,” and we shall be only too apt to take up the challenge, “If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” even if we think the implied denial, to which the challenge was a reply, an absurdity. And we may find special interest as well as special difference in the condemnation even of these masters for attempting Pindarics, because Pindarics “want the essential constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence of settled numbers,” seeing in it a fresh instance of that Procrustean tyranny of suiting the form to the bed, not the bed to the form, which distinguishes all neo-classic criticism. But these points occur rarely. The criticism, as a whole, is not merely perfectly just on its own scheme, but requires very little allowance on others; nor, in the difficult and dangerous art of comparative censorship, will any example be found much surpassing Johnson’s parallel of the two poets.

In the _Milton_ and the _Cowley_ we find Johnson dealing with schools of poetry which he regards as out of date and imperfect; in the _Dryden_ and the _Pope_, with subjects which are not to him subjects of any general controversy, but which he can afford to treat almost entirely on their merits. [Sidenote: _The_ Collins _and_ Gray.] In the _Collins_ and the _Gray_ we find a new relation between poet and critic—the relation of decided, though not yet wholly declared, innovation on the part of the poets, and of conscious, though not yet quite wide-eyed and irreconcilable, hostility on the part of the critic. The expression of this is further differentiated by the fact that Johnson regarded Collins with the affection of a personal friend, and the generous sympathy of one who, with all his roughness, had a mind as nearly touched by mortal sorrows as that of any sentimentalist; while it is pretty clear, though we have no positive evidence for it, that he reciprocated the personal and political dislike which Gray certainly felt for him.

The result was, in the case of Collins, a criticism rather inadequate than unjust, and not seldom acute in its indication of faults, if somewhat blind to merits; in that of Gray, one which cannot be quite so favourably spoken of, though the censure which has been heaped upon it—notably by Lord Macaulay and Mr Arnold—seems to me very far to surpass its own injustice. Johnson’s general summing up—that Gray’s “mind had a large grasp; his curiosity[639] was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all, but fastidious and hard to please”—is acute, just, and far from ungenerous. That on the Elegy—“The four stanzas beginning, ‘Yet even these bones,’ are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place. Yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him”—is a magnificent and monumental compliment, said as simply as “Good morning.” He is absolutely right when he says that in all Gray’s Odes “there is a kind of cumbrous splendour that we wish away,” for there never was such an abuser of “poetic diction” (to be a poet) as Gray was. Yet undoubtedly the Essay is not satisfactory; it has not merely, as the _Collins_ has, blindness, but, what the _Collins_ has not, that obvious _denigration_, that determination to pick holes, which always vitiates a critique, no matter what learning and genius be bestowed on it. And the probable reasons of this are interesting. It has been said that they were possibly personal in part. We know that Gray spoke rudely of Johnson; and there were many reasons why Johnson might rather despise Gray, though he certainly should not have called him “dull.”

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Footnote 639:

It must be remembered that this word had no unfavourable connotation
with Johnson. It meant intelligent and scholarly interest.

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