Chapter I: From Addison to Johnson (4)

On the whole, however, I have little doubt—and it is this which gives the essay its real interest for me—that one main reason of Johnson’s antipathy to Gray’s poetry was the same as that for which we like it. He suspected, if he did not fully perceive, the romantic snake in Gray’s classically waving grass. And he had on his own grounds good reason for suspecting it. Gray might use Greek and Latin tags almost extravagantly. But he sedulously eschewed the couplet; and, while preferring lyric, he chose lyrical forms which, though Johnson was too much of a scholar to dare to call them irregular, violated his own theories of the prompt and orderly recurrence of rhyme, and the duty of maintaining a length of line as even as possible. The sense of nature, the love of the despised “prospect,” was everywhere; even the forbidden “streak of the tulip” might be detected. And, lastly, Gray had too obvious leanings to classes of subject and literature which lay outside of the consecrated range—early English and French, Welsh, Norse, and the like. It is no real evidence of critical incapacity, but of something quite the reverse, that Johnson should have disliked Gray. He spied the great Romantic beard under the Pindaric and Horatian muffler—and he did not like it.

On the whole, it may be safely said that, however widely a man may differ from Johnson’s critical theory, he will, provided that he possesses some real tincture of the critical spirit himself, think more and more highly of the _Lives of the Poets_ the more he reads them, and the more he compares them with the greater classics of critical literature. [Sidenote: _The critical greatness of the_ Lives _and of Johnson_.] As a book, they have not missed their due meed of praise; as a critical book, one may think that they have. The peculiarity of their position as a body of direct critical appraisement of the poetical work of England for a long period should escape no one. But the discussion of them, which possesses, and is long likely to possess, prerogative authority as coming from one who was both himself a master of the craft and a master of English, admirable and delightful as it is and always will be, is not, critically speaking, quite satisfactory. Mr Arnold speaks of the Six Lives which he selected in very high terms: but he rather pooh-poohs the others, and, even in regard to the chosen Six, he puts upon himself—and in his amiable, but for all that exceedingly peremptory, way, insists in putting on his readers—a huge pair of blinkers. We are to regard the late seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century as an Age of Prose: and we are to regard Johnson, whether he was speaking of the poets of this age or of others, as the spokesman of an age of prose. Far be it from me to deny that there is an element of truth in this: but it is not the whole truth, and the critic must strive, though he may not boast, to “find the whole.”

The whole truth, as it seems to me, about Johnson is that he was very much more than the critic of an age of prose, though he was not (who has been? even Longinus? even Coleridge?)

“The King who ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit”

as regards poetic criticism. He saw far beyond prose, as in those few words of the concluding and reconciling eulogy of Gray which have been quoted above. It is poetry and not prose which has the gift of putting new things so that the man who reads them ingenuously thinks that they are merely a neat statement of what he has always thought. And Johnson was far more than merely a critic of the eighteenth-century Neo-Classic theory, though he was this. A most noteworthy passage in the _Rambler_ (No. 156), which I have purposely kept for comment in this place, though it is delivered on the wrong side, shows us, as the great critics always do show us, what a range of sight the writer had. In this he expresses a doubt whether we ought “to judge genius merely by the event,” and, applying this to Shakespeare, takes the odd, but for an eighteenth-century critic most tell-tale and interesting, line that if genius succeeds by means which are wrong according to rule, we may think higher of the genius but less highly of the work. It is hardly necessary to point out that this is, though in no way a discreditable, a transparent evasion of the difficulty which is pressing on the defenders of the Rules. “Show me,” one may without irreverence retort, “thy genius without thy works; and I will show thee my genius by my works.” If Shakespeare shows genius in neglecting the Rules, the inexorable voice of Logic, greater than Fortune, greater than all other things save Fate, will point out that the Rules are evidently not necessary, and, with something like the Lucretian _Te sequar_, will add, “Then for what _are_ they necessary?” But Johnson’s power is only a little soured and not at all quenched by this. He has seen what others refused—perhaps were unable—to see, and what some flatly denied,—that a process of literary judgment “by the event” is possible, and that its verdicts, in some respects at any rate, cannot be challenged or reversed. These great critical _aperçus_, though sometimes delivered half unwillingly or on the wrong side, establish Johnson’s claim to a place not often to be given to critics; but they do not establish it more certainly than his surveys of his actual subjects. It was an unfortunate consequence of Mr Arnold’s generous impatience of all but “the chief and principal things,” and of his curious dislike to literary history as such, that he should have swept away the minor Lives. One may not care for Stepney or Yalden, Duke or King, much more, or at all more, than he did. But with a really great member of the craft his admissions and omissions, his paradoxes, his extravagances, his very mistakes pure and simple, are all critically edifying. How does he apply his own critical theory? is what we must ask: and, with Johnson, I think we shall never ask it in vain.

His idea of English poetry was the application to certain classes of subjects, not rigidly limited to, but mainly arranged by, the canons of the classical writers—of what seemed to him and his generation the supreme form of English language and metre, brought in by Mr Waller and perfected by Mr Pope, yet not so as to exclude from admiration the _Allegro_ of Milton and the _Elegy_ of Gray. We may trace his applications of this, if we have a real love of literature and a real sense of criticism, nearly as profitably and pleasantly in relation to John Pomfret as in relation to Alexander Pope. We may trace his failures (as we are pleased, quite rightly in a way, to call them), the failures arising from the inadequacy, not of his genius, but of his scheme, not less agreeably in relation to Dyer than in relation to Dryden. We are not less informed by his passing the _Castle of Indolence_ almost _sub silentio_ than we are by that at first sight astounding criticism of _Lycidas_. This Cæsar never does wrong but with just cause—to use the phrase which was too much for the equanimity or the intelligence of his great namesake Ben, in the work of one whom both admired yet could not quite stomach.

Now, this it is which makes the greatness of a critic. That Johnson might have been greater still at other times need not necessarily be denied; though it is at least open to doubt whether any other time would have suited his whole disposition better. But, as he is, he is great. The critics who deserve that name are not those who, like, for instance, Christopher North and Mr Ruskin, are at the mercy of different kinds of caprice—with whom you must be always on the _qui vive_ to be certain what particular watchword they have adopted, what special side they are taking. It may even be doubted whether such a critic as Lamb, though infinitely delightful, is exactly “great” because of the singular gaps and arbitrariness of his likes and dislikes. Nay, Hazlitt, one of the greatest critics of the world on the whole, goes near to forfeit his right to the title by the occasional outbursts of almost insane prejudice that cloud his vision. Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his prejudice is not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly sound on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstractions, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgment; he has not judged literature in the exhausted receiver of mere art, and yet has never neglected the artistic criterion; he has kept in constant touch with life, and yet has never descended to mere gossip. We may freely disagree with his judgments, but we can never justly disable his judgment; and this is the real criterion of a great critic.

Johnson is so much the eighteenth-century orthodox critic in quintessence (though, as I have tried to show, in transcendence also) that he will dispense us from saying very much more about the rank and file, the ordinary or inferior examples, of the kind. [Sidenote: _Minor Criticism: Periodical and other._] If we were able to devote this Book, or even this volume, to the subject of the present chapter, there would be no lack of material. Critical exercitations of a kind formed now, of course, a regular part of the work of literature, and a very large part of its hack-work. The _Gentleman’s Magazine_ devoted much attention to the subject; and for a great part of the century two regular _Reviews_, the _Critical_ and the _Monthly_,[640] were recognised organs of literary censorship, and employed some really eminent hands, notably Smollett and Goldsmith. The periodicals which, now in single spies, now (about the middle of the century) in battalions, endeavoured to renew the success of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were critical by kind; and dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of separate critical publications, large and small, issued from the press.[641] But, with the rarest exceptions, they must take the _non_-benefit of the warning which was laid down in the Preface to the First Volume. Something we must say of Goldsmith; then we may take two contrasted examples, Knox and Scott of Amwell, of the critic in Johnson’s last days who inclined undoubtingly to the classical, and of the critic of the same time who had qualms and stirrings of Romanticism, but was hardly yet a heretic. And then, reserving summary, we may close the record.

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Footnote 640:

Johnson’s relative estimates of the two (_Boswell_, Globe ed., pp.
186, 364) are well known; as is his apology for the _Critical_
Reviewers’ habit [he had been one himself] of not reading the books
through, as the “duller” _Monthly_ fellows were glad to do. Later
generations have perhaps contrived to be dull _and_ not to read.

Footnote 641:

For instance, here is one which I have hunted for years—_Essay on the
New Species of Writing founded by Fielding, with a word or two on
Modern Criticism_ (London? 1751). The better-known _Canons of
Criticism_ of Thomas Edwards (4th ed., London, 1750) may serve as a
specimen of another kind. It is an attack on Warburton’s
_Shakespeare_, uncommonly shrewd in all senses of the word, but, as
Johnson (_Boswell_, Globe ed., p. 87 note) justly enough said, of the
gad-fly kind mainly. A curious little book, which I do not remember to
have seen cited anywhere, is the _Essay upon Poetry and Painting_ of
Charles Lamotte (Du_d_lin (_sic_), 1742). La Motte, who was an F.S.A.,
a D.D., and chaplain to the Duke of Montagu, and who has the still
rarer honour of not appearing in the _Dict. Nat. Biog._, never, I
think, refers to his namesake, but quotes Voltaire and Du Bos
frequently. He is very anxious for “propriety” in all senses, and
seems a little more interested in Painting than in Poetry. As to the
latter, he is a good example of the devouring appetite for sense and
fact which had seized on the critics of this time (save a few rebels)
throughout Europe. The improbabilities of Tasso and of “Camoenus, the
Homer and Virgil of the Portuguese,” afflict him more, because they
amuse him less, than they do in Voltaire’s own case, and to any
liberty with real or supposed history he is simply Rhadamanthine.
“That which jars with probability—that which shocks Sense and
Reason—can never be excused in Poetry.” Mrs Barbauld and _The Ancient
Mariner_ sixty years before date!

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Of Goldsmith as a critic little need be said, though his pen was not much less prolific in this than in other departments. But the angel is too often absent, and Poor Poll distressingly in evidence. [Sidenote: _Goldsmith._] The _Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe_ is simply “prodigious.” It is admirably written—Macaulay owes something to its style, which he only hardened and brazened. The author apes the fashionable philosophastering of the time, and throws in cheap sciolism like the prince of journalists that he was. It is almost always interesting; it is, where it touches life, not literature, sometimes excellently acute; but there is scarcely a critical dictum in it which is other than ridiculous. So in the _Citizen of the World_ the Author’s Club is of course delightful; but why should a sneer at Drayton have been put in the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi? And the miscellaneous Essays, including the _Bee_, which contain so much of Goldsmith’s best work, are perhaps the best evidences of his nullity here. When one thinks how little it would cost anybody of Goldsmith’s genius (to find such an one I confess would cost more) to write a literary parallel to the magnificent _Reverie_, which would be even finer, it is enough to draw iron tears down the critic’s cheek. Goldsmith on Taste, Poetry, Metaphor, &c.,[642] is still the Goldsmith of the _Inquiry_. His “Account of the Augustan Age,”[643] though much better, and (unless I mistake) resorted to by some recent critics as a source of criticism different from that mostly prevalent in the nineteenth century, has all the limitations of its own period. And the Essay on Versification,[644] though it contains expressions which, taken by themselves, might seem to show that Goldsmith had actually emancipated himself from the tyranny of the fixed number of syllables, contains others totally irreconcilable with these, supports English hexameters and sapphics,[645] and as a whole forces on us once more the reluctant belief that he simply had no clear ideas, no accurate knowledge, on the subject.

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Footnote 642:

Essays, xii.-xvii.

Footnote 643:

_The Bee_, viii.

Footnote 644:

Essay xviii.

Footnote 645:

It is perhaps only fair to hope that this fancy, as later with Southey
and others, was a blind motion for freedom. Yet Goldsmith commits
himself to the hemistich theory of decasyllables.

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Vicesimus Knox[646] is a useful figure in this critical Transition Period. [Sidenote: _Vicesimus Knox._] A scholar and a schoolmaster, he had some of the advantages of the first state and some of the defects of the less gracious second, accentuated in both cases by the dying influences of a “classical” tradition which had not the slightest idea that it was moribund. He carries his admiration for Pope to such a point as to assure us somewhere that Pope was a man of exemplary piety and goodness, while Gay was “uncontaminated with the vices of the world,” which is really more than somewhat blind, and more than a little kind, even if we admit that it is wrong to call Pope a bad man, and that Gay had only tolerable vices. He thinks, in his Fourteenth Essay on the “Fluctuations of Taste,” that the Augustans “arrived at that standard of perfection which,” &c.; that the imitators of Ariosto, Spenser, and the smaller poems of Milton are “pleasingly uncouth” [compare Scott, _infra_, on the metrical renaissance of Dyer], depreciates Gray, and dismisses the Elegy as “a confused heap of splendid ideas”; is certain that Milton’s sonnets “bear no mark of his genius,” and in discussing the versions of “the sensible[647] Sappho” decides that Catullus is much inferior to—Philips! “The Old English Poets [Essay Thirty-Nine] are deservedly forgotten.” Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve “seem to have thought that rhyme was poetry, and even this constituent they applied with extreme negligence”—the one charge which is unfair against even Occleve, and which, in reference to Chaucer, is proof of utter ignorance. Patriotism probably made him more favourable to Dunbar, Douglas, and Lyndsay, though he groans over the necessity of a glossary in their case also. In fact, Knox is but a Johnson without the genius. Let it, however, be counted to him for righteousness that he defended classical education, including verse-writing, against its enemies, who even then imagined vain things.

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Footnote 646:

_Essays, Moral and Literary_, 2nd ed., London, 1774, 8vo.

Footnote 647:

This is perhaps the most delightful instance in (English) existence of
the change which has come over the meaning of the word.

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John Scott of Amwell, once praised by good wits, now much forgotten, was a very respectable critic and a poet of “glimmerings.” [Sidenote: _Scott of Amwell._] In fact, I am not at all sure that he does not deserve to be promoted and postponed to the next volume, as a representative of the rising, not the falling, tide. His Essays on poetry[648] exhibit in a most interesting way the “know-not-what-to-think-of-it” state of public opinion about the later years of Johnson. He defends _Lycidas_ against the Dictator; yet he finds fault with the “daystar” for acting both as a person and an orb of radiance, and admits the “incorrectness” of the poem, without giving us a hint of the nature or authority of “correctness.” He boldly attacks the consecrated _Cooper’s Hill_, and sets the rival eminence of Grongar against it, pronouncing Dyer “a sublime but strangely neglected poet,” yet picking very niggling holes in this poet himself. He often anticipates, and oftener seems to be going to anticipate, Wordsworth, who no doubt owed him a good deal; yet he thinks Pope’s famous epigram on Wit “the most concise and just definition of Poetry.” In _Grongar Hill_ itself he thinks the “admixture of metre [its second, certainly, if not its first great charm] rather displeasing to a nice ear”; and though he defends Gray against Knox, he is altogether yea-nay about _Windsor Forest_, and attacks Thomson’s personifications, without remembering that Gray is at least an equal sinner, and without giving the author of the _Seasons_, and still more of the _Castle of Indolence_, any just compensation for his enthusiasm of nature. In fact, Scott is a man walking in twilight, who actually sees the line of dawn, but dares not step out into it.

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Footnote 648:

_Critical Essays_, London, 1785, 8vo.

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