Chapter V: Johnson's Works (1)

In his lifetime Johnson was chiefly thought of as a great writer. To-day we think of him chiefly as a great man. That is the measure of Boswell's genius: no other biographer of a great writer has unconsciously and unintentionally thrown his hero's own works into the shade. Scott will always have a hundred times as many readers as Lockhart, and Macaulay as Trevelyan. But in this, as in some other ways, Boswell's involuntary greatness has upset the balance of truth. Johnson's writings are now much less read than they deserve to be. For this there are a variety of causes. Fourteen years before he died, William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth; and fourteen years after his death Wordsworth and Coleridge published the volume which, more perhaps than any {172} other, started English literature on its great voyage into seas unsailed and unimagined by Johnson. The triumph of the Romantic movement inevitably brought with it the depreciation of the prophet of common sense in literature and in life. The great forces in the literature of the next seventy or eighty years were: in poetry, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats; in prose, Scott, and then later on, Carlyle and Ruskin; every single one of them providing a wine by no means to be put into Johnsonian bottles.

Johnson, even more than other men in the eighteenth century, was abstract and general in his habit of mind and expression. The men of the new age were just the opposite; they were concrete and particular, lovers of detail and circumstance. The note of his writings had been common sense and rugged veracity; the dominant notes of theirs were picturesqueness, eloquence, emotion, even sentimentalism. Both the exaggerated hopes and the exaggerated fears aroused by the French Revolution disinclined their victims to listen to the middling sanity of Johnson. The hopes built themselves fancy castles of equality and fraternity which instinctively shrunk from the broadsides of Johnsonian ridicule. The fears hid themselves in caves of mediaeval reaction and did not care to expose their eyes {173} to the smarting daylight of Johnsonian common sense. His appeal had always been to argument: the new appeal was at worst to sentiment, at best to history for which Johnson was too true to his century to care anything. When Voltaire writes an article on monasticism, he has nothing to say about how it arose and developed; he neither knows nor cares anything about that. For him it is, like everything else, a thing to be judged in a court of abstract rationality, altogether independent of time and circumstance, and as such he has no difficulty in dismissing it with brilliant and witty contempt without telling us anything about what it actually is or was. It was this unhistorical spirit which, as Burke rightly preached, was the most fatal element in the French Revolution. But the French are not to be blamed alone for an intellectual atmosphere which was then universal in Europe. Little as Johnson would have liked the association, it must be admitted that he was in his way as pure and unhistorical a rationalist as Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists; and that it was inevitable that the reaction in favour of history which Burke set in motion would tell against him as well as against them. Against the discovery that things can neither be rightly judged nor wisely reformed except by examining how they came to be what they {174} are, the whole eighteenth century, and in it Johnson as well as Rousseau and Voltaire, stands naked. And the abstract rationalizing of that century was soon to have another enemy in alliance with history, the new force of science. Nothing has been more fatal to the arbitrary despotism of mere reason than the idea of development, of evolution. Directly it is seen that all life exhibits itself in stages it becomes obvious that the dry light of reason will not provide the materials for true judgment until it has been coloured by a sympathetic insight into the conditions of the particular stage under discussion.

All these things, then, were against Johnson. Alike to the new Liberalism ever more and more drenched in sentiment, to the new Conservatism ever more and more looking for a base in history, to Romanticism in literature with its stir, colour and emotion, to science with its new studies and new methods, the works of Johnson almost inevitably appeared as the dry bones of a dead age. He had laughed at the Romans: and behold the Romans had played a great part in the greatest of Revolutions. He had laughed at "noble prospects" and behold the world was gone after them, and his, "Who _can_ like the Highlands?" was drowned in the poetry of Scott and Byron, and made {175} to appear narrow and vulgar in the presence of Wordsworth. Only in one field did any great change take place likely to be favourable to Johnson's influence. The religious and ecclesiastical revival which was so conspicuous in England during the first half of the nineteenth century was naturally inclined to exalt Johnson as the only strong Churchman, and almost the only definite Christian among the great writers of the eighteenth century. The fact, too, that the most conspicuous centre of the revival was Oxford, where Johnson's name had always been affectionately remembered, helped to send its votaries back to him. But this alliance could not be more than partial. The Oxford Movement soon degenerated into Mediaevalism and Ritualism, and no man was less fitted than Johnson to be the prophet of either. The genius of common sense was the very last leader their devotees could wish for. And as the revival became increasingly a reaction, relying more and more on supposed precedent and less on the essential reason of things, it inevitably got further away from Johnson who cared everything for reason and nothing at all for dubious history.

But it was not merely the changes that came over the general mind of the nation that went against Johnson; it was still more the revolution in his own special branch of literature. {176} He was the last great English critic who treated poets, not as great men to be under stood, but as school-boys to be corrected. He still applied, as the French have always done, a preordained standard to the work he was discussing, and declared it correct or not according to that test. The new criticism inaugurated by Coleridge aimed at interpretation rather than at magisterial regulation; and no one will now revert to the old. We never now find an English critic writing such notes, common till lately in France, as "cela n'est pas français," "cela ne se dit pas," "il faut écrire"--such and such a phrase, and not the phrase used by the poet receiving chastisement. But Johnson does conclude his plays of Shakespeare with such remarks as: "The conduct of this play is deficient." "The passions are directed to their true end." "In this play are some passages which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden Queen." The substance of these comments may often be just, but for us their tone is altogether wrong. We no longer think that a critic, even if he be Johnson, should distribute praise or blame to poets, even of much less importance than Shakespeare, with the confident assurance of a school-master looking over a boy's exercise. Johnson's manner, {177} then, as a critic was against him with the nineteenth century. But so also was his matter. The poetry he really believed in was that of what the nineteenth century came to regard as the age of prose. Of his three great _Lives_ we feel that those of Dryden and Pope express the pleasure he spontaneously and unconsciously felt, while that of Milton is a reluctant tribute extorted from him by a genius he could not resist. Among the few poets in his long list for whom the nineteenth century cared much are Gray and Collins; and of Collins he says almost nothing in the way of admiration, and of Gray very little. Even when he wrote of Shakespeare, to whom he paid a tribute that will long outlive those of blind idolatry, what he praised is not what seemed greatest to the lovers of poetry in the next generation. A critic who found "no nice discriminations of character in Macbeth," and defended Tate's "happy family" ending of Lear, was not unnaturally dismissed or ignored by those who had sat at the feet of Coleridge or Lamb.

There is still one other thing which told against him. No one influenced the course of English literature in the nineteenth century so much as Wordsworth. And Wordsworth was a determined reformer not only of the matter of poetry but of its very language. {178} He overstated his demands and did not get his ideas clear to his own mind, as may be seen by the fact that he instinctively recoiled from applying the whole of them in his own poetical practice. But he plainly advocated two things as essential parts of his reform; poetry was to go back for its subject to the primary universal facts of human life, and it was to use as far as possible the language actually used by plain men in speaking to each other. Both these demands had to submit to modification; but both profoundly influenced the subsequent development of English poetry: and both were, as Wordsworth knew, opposed to the teaching and practice of Johnson. The return to simplicity involved a preference for such poetry as Percy's Ballads which Johnson had ridiculed, and a distaste for the poetry of the town which Johnson admired. And both in the famous _Preface_ and in the _Appendix_ and _Essay Supplementary_ added to it Wordsworth refers to Johnson and seems to recognize him as the most dangerous authority with whom he has to contend. In that contest Wordsworth was on the whole decidedly victorious; and to that extent again Johnson was discredited. Nor was it the language of poetry only which was affected. Under the influences which Wordsworth, Scott and Byron set {179} moving, the old colourless, abstract, professedly classical language was supplanted even in prose. The new prose was enriched by a hundred qualities of music, colour and suggestion, at which the prose of the eighteenth century had never aimed. Those who had enjoyed the easy grace of Lamb, the swift lightnings of Carlyle, the eloquence, playfulness and tenderness of Ruskin, the lucid suavity of Newman, were sure to conclude in their haste that the prose of Johnson was a thing pompous, empty and dull.

But against all these indictments a reaction has now begun. Like other reactions its first utterances are apt to be extravagant. In literature as in politics those who at last take their courage in their hands and defy the established opinion are obliged to shout to keep their spirits up. So Sir Walter Raleigh, whose _Six Essays_ at once put the position of Johnson on a new footing, has allowed himself to say of some sentences from _The Rambler_ that they are "prose which will not suffer much by comparison with the best in the language." But, apart from these inevitable over-statements of defiance, what he has said about Johnson is unanswered and unanswerable. And at last it is able to fall upon a soil prepared for it. In all directions the Gothic movement, which was so inevitably {180} unfavourable to the fame of Johnson, has crumbled and collapsed. A counter movement seems to be in progress. The classical revival in architecture is extending into other fields and though no one wishes to undo the poetic achievement of the nineteenth century, every one has come to wish to understand that of the eighteenth. We shall never again think that Dryden and Pope had the essence of poetry in them to the same extent, as, for instance, Wordsworth or Shelley; but neither shall we ever again treat them with the superficial and ignorant contempt which was not uncommon twenty or thirty years ago. The twentieth century is not so confident as its predecessor that the poetry and criticism of the eighteenth may safely be ignored.

If, then, we are not to ignore Johnson's writing, what are we to remember? In a sketch like this the point of view to be taken is that of the man with a general interest in English letters, not that of the specialist in the eighteenth century, or indeed, that of any specialist at all. Well, then, first of all Johnson wrote verses which though not great poetry have some fine qualities. They are, like so much of the verse of that century, chiefly "good sense put into good metre." That is what Twining, the Aristotelian critic, said of them when Johnson died. He had a much {181} finer sense of poetry than Johnson, and he was perfectly right in this criticism. But it is a loss and not a gain that, since Wordsworth gave us such a high conception of what poetry should be, we have ceased to take pleasure in good verses simply for their own sake. In the eighteenth century a new volume of verse became at once the talk of the town and every cultivated person read it. Now we have allowed poetry to become a thing so esoteric in its exaltation that only the poetically minded can read it. Neither the _Excursion_ nor the _Epipsychidion_ could possibly be read by the great public. All the world could and did read Pope's _Epistles_ and Goldsmith's _Traveller_. It may have been worth while to pay the price for the new greatness of poetry that came in with the nineteenth century; but it is at any rate right to remember that there was a price, and that it has had to be paid. It may be that some day we shall be able again to take pleasure in well-turned verses without losing our appreciation of higher things. Good verse is, really, a delightful thing even when it is not great poetry, and we are too apt now-a-days to forget that verse has one great inherent advantage over prose, that it impresses itself on the memory as no prose can. We can all quote scores of lines from Pope, though we {182} may not know who it is whom we are quoting. That is the pleasure of art. And if the lines, as often, utter the voice of good sense in morals or politics, it is its accidental utility also. Johnson has, of course, little of Pope's amazing dexterity, wit and finish. But he has some qualities of which Pope had nothing or not very much. In his verse, as everywhere else, he shows a sense of the real issues of things quite out of the reach of a well-to-do wit living in his library, like Pope; what he writes may be in form an imitation of Juvenal, but it is in essence a picture of life and often of his own life.

How large a part of the business of poetry consists in giving new expression to the old truths of experience, is known to all the great poets and seen in their practice. Johnson can do this with a force that refuses to be forgotten.

"But few there are whom hours like these await,
Who set unclouded in the gulfs of fate.
From Lydia's monarch should the search descend,
By Solon cautioned to regard his end,
In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise!
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show."

Such lines almost challenge Pope on his own {183} ground, meeting his rapier-like dexterity of neatness with heavy sword-strokes of sincerity and strength. But here, as in the prose, the true Johnsonian excellence is best seen when he is in the confessional.

"Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee--
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."

There, and in such lines as the stanza on Levett--

"His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed,"

one hears the authentic unique voice of Johnson; not that of a great poet but of a real man to whom it is always worth while to listen, and not least when he puts his thoughts into the pointed shape of verse.

Still, of course, prose and not verse is his natural medium. And here a word should be said about that prose style of his which had an immense vogue for a time and plainly {184} influenced most of the writers of his own and the following generation, even men so great as Gibbon and the young Ruskin, and women so brilliant as Fanny Burney. Then a reaction came and it was generally denounced as pompous, empty and verbose. After the Revolution people gave up wearing wigs, and with the passing of wigs and buckle-shoes there came a dislike of the dignified deportment of the eighteenth century in weightier matters than costume. Now Johnson, whatever he did at other times, was commonly inclined to put on his wig before he took up his pen. His elaborate and antithetical phrases are apt to go into pairs like people in a Court procession, and seem at first sight to belong altogether to what we should call an artificial as well as a ceremonious age. His style is the exact opposite of Dryden's, of which he said that, having "no prominent or discriminative characters," it "could not easily be imitated either seriously or ludicrously." Johnson's could be, and often was, imitated in both spirits. Even in his lifetime, when it was most admired, it was already parodied. Goldsmith was talking once of the art of writing fables, and of the necessity, if your fable be about "little fishes," of making them talk like "little fishes"; Johnson laughed: upon which Goldsmith said, "Why, Dr. Johnson, {185} this is not so easy as you seem to think: for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales." That was the weak spot in Johnson on which the wits and critics seized at once: there is a good deal of misplaced magniloquence in his writings. When the sage in _Rasselas_ says, "I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness," we now feel at once that the simple and natural thought gains nothing and loses much by this heavy pomp of abstract eloquence. So when Johnson wants to say in the eleventh _Idler_ that it is wrong and absurd to let our spirits depend on the weather, he makes his reader laugh or yawn, rather than listen, by the ill-timed elaboration of his phrases: "to call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly." So much must be admitted. Johnson is often turgid and pompous, often grandiose with an artificial and undesired grandiloquence. No one, however, who has read his prose works will pretend that this is a fair account of his ordinary style. You may read many _Ramblers_ in succession and scarcely find a marked instance of it; and, as every one knows, his last, longest and pleasantest work, the _Lives of the Poets_, is almost free from it. All through {186} his life one can trace a kind of progress as he gradually shakes off these mannerisms, and writes as easily as he talked. They are most conspicuous in _The Rambler_ and _Rasselas_. But even there, through all the heaviness, born perhaps of the too obvious desire to instruct and improve, we get more than occasional suggestions of the trenchant force which we most associate with the pages of Boswell.

"My curiosity," said Rasselas, "does not very strongly lead me to survey piles of stone, or mounds of earth; my business is with man. I came hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choaked aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present world. . . . To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known."

There is nothing here of the intimacy and charm which, as Dryden and Cowley had already shown, and Johnson himself was occasionally to show in his last years, a plain prose may possess; but of the lucidity and force which are its most necessary characteristics never prose exhibited more. Those who know their Boswell will catch in the passage a pleasant foretaste of the outburst to Thrale when he wanted Johnson to contrast {187} French and English scenery: "Never heed such nonsense, sir; a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another; let us, if we _do_ talk, talk about something; men and women are my subjects of inquiry: let us see how these differ from those we have left behind."

This natural trenchancy gets freer play, of course, in the talk than in the writings. But it is in them all from the first, even in _Rasselas_, even in _The Rambler_. "The same actions performed by different hands produce different effects, and, instead of rating the man by his performances we rate too frequently the performances by the man. . . . Benefits which are received as gifts from wealth are exacted as debts from indigence; and he that in a high station is celebrated for superfluous goodness would in a meaner condition have barely been confessed to have done his duty."

It is not necessary to multiply citations. What is found even in _The Rambler_, which he himself in later years found "too wordy," is found much more abundantly in the Dictionary and the _Shakespeare_; and as he grows old, and, with age and authority, increasingly indifferent to criticism and increasingly confident in his own judgment, there gradually comes an ease and familiarity which without {188} diminishing the perfect lucidity of the phrases adds sometimes to the old contemptuous force, and occasionally brings a new intimacy and indulgence. The writing becomes gradually more like the talk. Nobody in his earlier work was ever quite so unceremoniously kicked downstairs as Wilkes was in _The False Alarm_.

"All wrong ought to be rectified. If Mr. Wilkes is deprived of a lawful seat, both he and his electors have reason to complain, but it will not be easily found why, among the innumerable wrongs of which a great part of mankind are hourly complaining, the whole care of the publick should be transferred to Mr. Wilkes and the freeholders of Middlesex, who might all sink into non-existence without any other effect than that there would be room made for a new rabble and a new retailer of sedition and obscenity."

This is the old power of invective indulged now with the reckless indifference of a man who is talking among friends, knows his power and enjoys using it. But the ease of his later manner more commonly takes the form of a redoubled directness in his old appeal to universal experience, or that of these natural indulgences of old age, anecdote and autobiography. Take, for instance, the first volume of his _Lives_. It is not only full {189} of such admirable generalizations as that in which he sums up the case for a literary as against a mathematical or scientific education: "The truth is that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. . . . We are perpetually moralists: we are geometricians only by chance"; or that in which he expresses his contempt for Dryden exchanging Billingsgate with Settle: "Minds are not levelled in their powers, but when they are first levelled in their desires"; or the pregnant commonplace with which he prefaces his derision of the artificial love-poems which Cowley thought it necessary to address to an imaginary mistress: "It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of a college or in the bustle of the world, to find useful studies and serious employment." This is the Johnson his readers had known from the beginning. What is newer are the personal touches sprinkled all over the book. Here he will bring in a fact about his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds; there he will give a piece of information derived from "my father, an old bookseller." He who studied life and manners before all things loves to record the personal habits of his poets and to try their writings rather by the tests of life than {190} of criticism. He was, perhaps, the first great critic to take the seeming trifles of daily life out of the hands of gossips and anecdote-mongers, and give them their due place in the study of a great man. All this necessarily gave him something of the colloquial ease of the writer of recollections. Nothing could be simpler than his style when he tells us of Milton that "when he first rose he heard a chapter in the Hebrew Bible and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an hour; then dined; then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another sing; then studied; to six; then entertained his visitors till eight; then supped, and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to bed." On which his comment is characteristic and plainly autobiographical. "So is his life described; but this even tenour appears attainable only in colleges. He that lives in the world will sometimes have the succession of his practice broken and confused. Visitors, of whom Milton is represented to have had great numbers, will come and stay unseasonably: business, of which every man has some, must be done when others will do it." This may still have about it something of the style of a school-master, but of a school-master who teaches the art of living, not without having learnt by experience the difficulty of practising it.

{191}

So we may trace the gradual diminution, but never the entire disappearance, of the excessive "deportment" which is the best known feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense, few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good writers, Scott, for instance, and the authors of the Book of Common Prayer, in whom a hurried reader might frequently omit half a phrase without depriving his hearers of an ounce of meaning. But you cannot do that with Johnson. Words that add neither information nor argument to what has gone before are exceptionally rare in him. Take his style at its worst. "It is therefore to me a severe aggravation of a calamity, when it is such as in the common opinion will not justify the acerbity of exclamation, or support the solemnity of vocal grief." Heavier writing there could scarcely be. But every word has its duty to do. The supposed speaker has been saying that he is, like Sancho Panza, quite unable to suffer in silence; and he adds {192} that this makes many a misfortune harder for him to bear than it need be: for it may arise from an injury which other people think too trifling to justify any open expression of anger, or from an accident that may seem to them so petty that they will not endure any serious lamentation about it. Johnson's way of saying this is pompous and rather absurd; but it is not verbose. So when he says that he knows nothing of Mallet except "what is supplied by the unauthorized loquacity of common fame," it is possible to dislike the phrase; it is not possible to deny that the words are as full of meaning as words can be.

The fact is that Johnson's style has the merits and defects of scholarship. He knows, as a scholar will, how every word came upon the paper, consequently he seldom uses language which is either empty or inexact; but with the scholar's accuracy he has also the scholar's pride. The dignity of literature was constantly in his mind as he wrote; and he did not always write the better for it. Books in his day and in his eyes were still rather solemn things to be kept above the linguistic level of conversation. Dryden and Addison had already begun to make the great discovery that the best prose style has no conscious air of literature about it; but the new doctrine had not reached the {193} mass either of writers or readers. And it never completely reached Johnson. He himself once accidentally gave one of the best definitions of the new style when he said of Shakespeare's comic dialogue that it was gathered from that kind of conversation which is "above grossness and below refinement." And at the end of his life he even occasionally produced some good specimens of it. But, taking his work as a whole, it must be admitted that he could rarely bring himself to be "below refinement," the refinement not of the drawing-room but of the library. In what he says he is always a man; in the way he says it he is nearly always too visibly an author. Those who have eyes to see and the will to look never fail of finding the man; but the author stares them in the face.

His prose works may be divided into two classes, those in which he is primarily a moralist, and those in which he is primarily a critic. Life and manners are never out of his mind; but while they are the direct and avowed subject of _The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Rasselas_, they only come, as it were, indirectly into the _Dictionary_, the _Shakespeare_ and the _Lives of the Poets_, where the ostensible business is the criticism of literature. Outside these categories are the political pamphlets, the interesting _Journey to the Western Islands_, {194} and a great quantity of miscellaneous literary hack-work. All of these have mind and character in them, or they would not be Johnson's; but they call for no special discussion. Nor do the _Prayers and Meditations_, which of course he did not publish himself. It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them, all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to the battle in which he seemed to himself to be always defeated.

_The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Rasselas_ fill four volumes out of the twelve in the 1823 library edition of Johnson. When Johnson decided to bring out a periodical paper he, of course, had the model of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_ before him. But he had in him less of the graces of life than Addison and Steele, and a far deeper sense of the gravity of its issues; with the result that _The Rambler_ and _The Idler_ are much heavier than their predecessors, not only in style but in substance. They deal much more avowedly with instruction. As we read them we wonder, not at the slow sale of the original papers, but at the editions which the author lived to see. We stand amazed to-day at the audacity of a journalist {195} who dares to offer, and at the patience or wisdom of a public which is content twice a week to read, not exciting events or entertaining personalities, but sober essays on the most ancient and apparently threadbare of topics. Here are Johnson's subjects for the ten _Ramblers_ which appeared between November 20 and December 22, 1750: the shortness of life, the value of good-humour, the folly of heirs who live on their expectations, peevishness, the impossibility of knowing mankind till one has experienced misfortune, the self-deceptions of conscience, the moral responsibilities of men of genius, the power of novelty, the justice of suspecting the suspicious, the pleasures of change and in particular that of winter following upon summer. None of these can be called exciting topics. Yet when there is a man of real power to discuss them, and men of sense to listen to him, they can make up a book which goes through many editions, is translated into foreign languages, and is called by a great critic a hundred and fifty years after its appearance, a "splendid repository of wisdom and truth." With the exception of the first word, Sir Walter Raleigh's daring praise may be accepted as strictly true. There is nothing splendid about _The Rambler_ or _The Idler_. The more shining qualities {196} of literature, except occasional eloquence, are conspicuously wanting in them. There is no imagination, little of the fancy, wit and readiness of illustration so omnipresent in Johnson's talk, little power of drawing character, very little humour. He often puts his essay into the form of a story, but it remains an essay still. His strength is always in the reflections, never in the facts related or the persons described. The club of Essex gentlemen who fancied themselves to be satirized in _The Rambler_ were only an extreme instance of the common vanity which loves to fancy itself the subject of other people's thoughts. Johnson's portraits have not life enough to be caricatures; still less can posterity find in them the finer truth of human beings. His was a profounder mind than Addison's; but he could not have drawn Sir Roger de Coverley. He had not "run about the world," as he said, for nothing, and he knew a great deal about men and women; but he could not create. _Rasselas_, his only professed story, is a total failure as a story. It is a series of moral essays, and whoever reads it must read it for the same reasons as he reads _The Rambler_. The remark Johnson absurdly made of Richardson's masterpiece is exactly true of his own _Rasselas_: "If you were to read it for the story {197} your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself."

In all these things, as elsewhere, his strength lies in shrewdness, in a common sense that has been through the fire of experience, in a real love of wisdom and truth. There is a story that Charlotte Brontë, when a girl of sixteen, broke out very angrily at some one who said she was always talking about clever men such as Johnson and Sheridan. "Now you don't know the meaning of clever," she said; "Sheridan might be clever--scamps often are, but Johnson hadn't a spark of 'cleverality' in him." That remark gives the essence of _The Rambler_. Whoever wants "cleverality," whoever wants what Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton supply so brilliantly and abundantly to the present generation, had best leave Johnson alone. The signal merit of his writings is the exact opposite of "cleverality"; it is that he always means exactly what he says. He often talked for victory, but except, perhaps, in the political pamphlets he always wrote for truth.

Books like _The Rambler_ and _Rasselas_ do not easily lend themselves to illustration; the effect they produce is a cumulative effect. Slowly, as we read paper after paper, the mind and character of Johnson take hold of us; what we began with impatience or {198} perhaps with contempt, we put down with respect and admiration. At the end we feel that we would gladly put our lives into the hands of this rough, wise, human, limited, lovable man. To get to that impression the books must be read; but one or two illustrations may be given. There is nothing new to say about death, but the human heart will itself be dead when it is willing to give up saying again the old things that have been said on that subject from the beginning of the world. Who puts more of it into saying them than Johnson?

"When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favours unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish, for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

Where in this is the pompous pedant who is so commonly supposed to be the writer of Johnson's books? The English language has not often been more beautifully handled. It is true that, until one looks closely, the last words of the first sentence appear to be a piece of empty verbiage; but taken as a {199} whole the passage moves with a grave music fitted to its sober truth. The art in it is as admirable as the emotion is sincere.

Or take a different illustration from a _Rambler_, in which he is discussing the well-known fact that the commonest cause of shyness is self-importance.

"Those who are oppressed by their own reputation will perhaps not be comforted by hearing that their cares are unnecessary. But the truth is that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us of whom, perhaps, not one appears to deserve our notice or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we, likewise, are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten."

All good writers write of themselves; not, as vain people talk, of their triumphs, and grievances and diseases, but of what they have succeeded in grasping as their own out of all the floating wisdom of the world. In {200} a passage like this one almost hears Johnson reflecting aloud as he walks back in his old age to his lonely rooms after an evening at "The Club" or the Mitre. It is the graver side of what he once said humorously to Boswell: "I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo without being missed here or observed there." But the autobiographical note is sometimes even plainer. Of whom could he be thinking so much as of himself when he wrote the 101st _Rambler_?

"Perhaps no kind of superiority is more flattering or alluring than that which is conferred by the powers of conversation, by extemporaneous sprightliness of fancy, copiousness of language, and fertility of sentiment. In other exertions of genius, the greater part of the praise is unknown and unenjoyed; the writer, indeed, spreads his reputation to a wider extent, but receives little pleasure or advantage from the diffusion of his name, and only obtains a kind of nominal sovereignty over regions which pay no tribute. The colloquial wit has always his own radiance reflected on himself, and enjoys all the pleasure which he bestows; he finds his power confessed by every one that approaches him, sees friendship kindling with rapture and attention swelling into praise."

In that shrewd observation lies the secret {201} of the comparative unproductiveness of his later years. Men like Dryden and Gibbon and Lecky are the men to get through immense literary labours: to a great talker like Johnson what can the praises of reviewers or of posterity be in comparison with the flashing eyes, and attentive ears, the expectant silence and spontaneous applause, of the friends in whom he has an immediate mirror of his success?

It is impossible and unnecessary to multiply illustrations. The only thing that need be added is that even in _Rasselas_ and the essays, Johnson's slow-moving style is constantly relieved by those brief and pregnant generalizations of which he is one of the greatest masters in our language. They are so close to life as all men know it, that the careless reader, as we have already seen, is apt to take them for platitudes; but there is all the difference between the stale superficiality which coldly repeats what only its ears have heard, and these sayings of Johnson heated to new energy in the fires of conscience, thought and experience. "I have already enjoyed too much," says the Prince in _Rasselas_; "give me something to desire." And then, a little later, as so often happens with the wise, comes the other side of the medal of truth: "Human life is everywhere {202} a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Or take such sentences as that embodying the favourite Johnsonian and Socratic distinction: "to man is permitted the contemplation of the skies, but the practice of virtue is commanded"; or, "we will not endeavour to fix the destiny of kingdoms: it is our business to consider what beings like us may perform"; or such sayings as, "the truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments"; "marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures"; "envy is almost the only vice which is practicable at all times and in every place"; "no place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library"; "I have always thought it the duty of an anonymous author to write as if he expected to be hereafter known"; or, last of all, to bring citation to an end, that characteristic saying about the omnipresence of the temptations of idleness: "to do nothing is in every man's power: we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties."

Johnson's principal work as a scholar and critic of literature is to be found in his Dictionary, the edition of Shakespeare, and the _Lives of the Poets_. It has the strength {203} and weakness which might be anticipated by any intelligent person who had read Boswell and the _Ramblers_. It abounds in manliness, courage, and modesty: it never for an instant forgets that literature exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of literature: it has no esoteric or professional affectations, but says plain things in plain words such as all can understand. The literary critic can have no more valuable qualities than these. But they do not complete his equipment. The criticism of Johnson has many limitations. He was entirely without aesthetic capacity. Not only were music and the plastic arts nothing to him--as indeed they have been to many good judges of poetry--but he does not appear to have possessed any musical ear or much power of imagination. It is not going too far to say that of the highest possibilities of poetry he had no conception. He imagines he has disposed of _Lycidas_ by exhibiting its "inherent improbability" in the eyes of a crude common sense: a triumph which is as easy and as futile as his refutation of Berkeley's metaphysics by striking his foot upon the ground. The truth is of course that in each case he is beating the air. The stamp upon the ground would have been a triumphant answer to a fool who should say that the senses cannot feel: it does not touch {204} Berkeley who says they cannot know. So the attack on _Lycidas_ might be fatal to a judge who put his judgment into the form of a pastoral; as the criticism of a poet it is in the main simply irrelevant. It is evident that what Johnson admires in Milton is the power of his mind and the elevation of his character, not at all his purely poetic gifts. He never betrays the slightest suspicion that in speaking of Milton he is speaking of one of the very greatest artists the world has ever known. He thought blank verse was verse only to the eye, and found the "numbers" of _Lycidas_ "unpleasing." He did not believe that anybody read _Paradise Lost_ for pleasure, and said so with his usual honesty. He saw nothing in _Samson Agonistes_ but the weakness of the plot; of the heights and depths of its poetry he perceived nothing. He preferred the comedies to the tragedies of Shakespeare: felt the poet in him much less than the omniscient observer of universal life: and indeed, if we may judge by what he says in the preface to the Dictionary, hardly thought of him as a master of poetic language at all. He had evidently no appreciation of the Greek dramatists. The thing that moves him in poetry is eloquence of expression and energy of thought: both good things but things that can exist outside poetry. The arguments {205} in which he states his objections to devotional poetry in the life of Waller show that he regarded poetry as an artful intellectual embroidery, not as the only fit utterance of an exalted mood.

To such a conception we can never return after all that has been done for us by Wordsworth and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to say nothing of some living critics like Mr. Yeats. No one who cares at all for poetry now could think of regretting an unwritten epic in the language Johnson uses about Dryden's: "it would doubtless have improved our numbers and enlarged our language; and might perhaps have contributed by pleasing instruction to rectify our opinions and purify our manners." It is not that such criticism is false but that it is beside the mark. An epic poem may do all these things, as a statesman may play golf or act as churchwarden: but when he dies it is not his golf or his churchwardenship that we feel the loss of. Put this remark of Johnson's by the side of such sayings as have now become the commonplaces of criticism. We need not go out to look for them. They are everywhere, in the mouths of all who speak of poetry. One opens Keats' letters at random and finds him saying, "Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing that enters {206} into one's soul." One takes up the work of a living critic, Mr. Eccles, and one finds him saying, in his book on French poetry, that when we go to the very root of poetry one of the things we discern is the "mystical collaboration of a consecrated element of form in the travail of the spirit." Language of this sort is now almost the ordinary language of criticism. Blake and Wordsworth did not conquer the kingdom of criticism in a moment or a year: but when at last they did its whole tone and attitude necessarily changed. Where Johnson, even while praising Milton's "skill in harmony" as "not less than his learning," discusses it merely as "skill," as a sort of artisanship, and misses all its subtler and rarer mysteries, we see in it an inspiration as much an art, life itself raised as it were to a higher denomination, a power of spirit--

"Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce."

It is the measure of the distance we have travelled away from Johnson that even plain people to-day, if they care for poetry at all, find much more in it than a piece of cunning craftsmanship. It is always that no doubt: but for us to-day it is also something far higher: a symbol of eternity. And more than a symbol, a sacrament: for it not only {207} suggests but reveals: it _is_ the truth which it signifies; itself a part, as all those who have ever profoundly felt its influence are assured, of the eternal order of things to which it points.

Plainly, then, some of the things which now seem to us to be of the very innermost essence of poetry are not things which can be weighed in any scales known to Johnson. Yet in spite of his limitations he is certainly one of the masters of English criticism. The great critic may be said to be one who leaves the subject-matter of his criticism more respected and better understood than he found it. Johnson's principal subjects were the English language, the plays of Shakespeare, and the poets from Cowley to his own day. There can be no question of the services he rendered to the English language. His Dictionary, as was inevitable, had many faults, especially of etymology: but its publication marks an epoch in the history of English. It was a kind of challenge to the world. Other nations had till then inclined to look upon our language and literature as barbarous: and we had not been very sure ourselves that we had any right to a place on the Parnassus of the nations. Great men in Italy and France had thought those {208} languages worth the labours of a lifetime. In England before Johnson's Dictionary, nothing had been done to claim for English an equal place with Italian or French in the future of the literature and civilization of the world. What companies of learned men had taken generations to do for foreign countries had now been done for England in a few years by the industry, and abilities of a single scholar. Englishmen who took a pride in their language might now do so with understanding: foreigners who wished to learn English could now learn in the method and spirit of a scholar, no longer merely as travellers or tradesmen. The two folio volumes of the Dictionary were the visible evidence that English had taken its place in the literary polity of Europe. They were the fit precursors of the triumphant progress soon to be made by Burke and Scott and Byron. The other great service which Johnson rendered to our language by his Dictionary and its Preface could only have been rendered by a man so superior to the narrowness of scholarship as Johnson. No doubt as a single individual in a private position he was not exposed to such temptations to law-giving arrogance as the French Academicians. But nevertheless it is to his credit that he frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209} life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both his melancholy and his common sense taught him that "language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived." He knew that words coming from human mouths must follow the law of life: "when they are not gaining strength they are losing it." His business was not the vain folly of trying to bind the future in fetters: it was to record the present use and past history of words as accurately as he could ascertain them, and, by showing Englishmen what their heritage was and whence they had received it, to make them proud of its past and jealous of its future. The pedant wishes to apply a code of Median rigidity to correct the barbarous freedom of a language to which scholarship has never applied itself. Johnson gave our savages laws and made them citizens of a constitutional state: but, however venerable the laws and however little to be {210} changed without grave reason, he knew that, if the literary polity of England lived and grew, new needs would arise, old customs become obsolete, and the laws of language, like all others, would have to be changed to meet the new conditions. But the urgent business at that moment was to codify the floating and uncertain rules which a student of English found it difficult to collect and impossible to reconcile. Johnson might often be wrong: but after him there was at least an authority to appeal to: and that, as he himself felt, was a great step forward: for it is of more importance that the law should be known than that it should be right.