Chapter V: Johnson's Works (2)

To have done all this, and to have explained what was done and what was attempted in language of such manliness, modesty and eloquence as that of the great Preface, is to have rendered one of the greatest services that can be rendered to the literature of a nation. "The chief glory of every people," says Johnson, "arises from its authors." That would be a bold thing to say to-day and was a bolder then, especially in so prosaic a place as the preface to a dictionary. But the world sees its truth more and more. And it is less out of place in a dictionary than appears at first sight. For that glory is not easily gained or recognized till both authors {211} and people realize that their language is the peer of the greatest in the world, a fit vehicle for the highest thoughts that can enter the mind of man. And towards that result in England only a few works of genius have contributed more than Johnson's Dictionary.

After the language itself comes the most priceless of its monuments. The services Johnson rendered to Shakespeare are only second to those he rendered to the language in which Shakespeare wrote. The Preface to his edition of Shakespeare is certainly the most masterly piece of his literary criticism: and it may still be doubted, after all that has been written about Shakespeare in the century and a half that separate it from our own day, whether the world can yet show any sixty pages about Shakespeare exhibiting so much truth and wisdom as these. All Johnson's gifts are seen at their best in it: the lucidity, the virile energy, the individuality of his style: the unique power of first placing himself on the level of the plain man and then lifting the plain man to his: the resolute insistence on life and reason, not learning or ingenuity, as the standard by which books are to be judged. No one ever was so free as Johnson from that pest of literature which a fine French critic, one of the subtlest of his countrymen, called "l'ingénieux sans bon {212} sens"; and he never showed himself so free of it as in his Shakespeare. The master of life who "whether life or nature be his subject, shows plainly that he has seen with his own eyes," inspired the great critic with more even than his usual measure of sanity: and perhaps the very best things in the Preface and the notes are the frequent summonings of ingenious sophistries to the bar of a merciless common sense. Let those who, with a good living writer, fancy his criticism merely a lifeless application of mechanical rules, read again the famous passage in the preface where he dismisses the claim of the unities of place and time to be necessary to the proper illusion of drama. Never did critic show himself freer of the easy slavery to traditional rules which afflicts or consoles sluggish minds. In Johnson's pages at any rate, there is "always an appeal open," as he says, "from criticism to nature." And, though all his prejudices, except those of the Anti-Gallican, must have carried him to the side of the unities, he goes straight to the truth of experience, obtains there a decisive answer, and records it in a few pages of masterly reasoning. The first breath of the facts, as known to every one who has visited a theatre, is brought to demolish the airy castles of pedantry: and it is shown that unity is required not for the sake of deceiving {213} the spectators, which is impossible, but for the sake of bringing order into chaos, art into nature, and the immensity of life within limits that can be compassed by the powers of the human mind. The unity of action, which assists the mind, is therefore vital: the unities of time and place, which are apparently meant to deceive it, are empty impostures. For "the truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage and the players only players": "the delight proceeds from our consciousness of fiction: if we thought murders and treasons real they would please no more."

But this is simply one specially famous passage in an essay which is full of matter from the first page to the last. It says little, of course, of the sublime poetry of Shakespeare, and it cannot anticipate that criticism of the imagination which Goethe and Coleridge have taught us to expect from every writer about Shakespeare. The day for that was not yet: and as Johnson, himself among the first to suggest the historical and comparative point of view in criticism, says in this very preface, "every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived and with his own particular opportunities." {214} He had a different task, and he performed it so admirably that what he says can never be out of date. It had not then become superfluous to insist on the greatness of Shakespeare: if it has since become so no small share of that result may be ascribed to Johnson. We forget that, because, as he said of Dryden, it is the fate of a critic who convinces to be lost in the prevalence of his own discovery. Never certainly has the central praise of Shakespeare, as the master of truth and universality, been better set forth than by Johnson. Our ears are delighted, our powers of admiration quickened, our reasons convinced, as we read the succession of luminous and eloquent paragraphs in which he tries Shakespeare by the tests of time, of nature, of universality, and finds him supreme in all. Nor did Johnson ever write anything richer in characteristic and memorable sentences, fit to be quoted and thought over by themselves. "Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature." "Shakespeare always makes nature predominant over accident. . . . His story requires Romans but he thinks only on men"; "there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work"; "nature (_i. e._ genius, what a man inherits at birth) {215} gives no man knowledge"; "upon the whole all pleasure consists in variety"; "love has no great influence upon the sum of life." It is startling to find Johnson anticipating Mr. Bernard Shaw, and more startling still to be told in a study of the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ that love "has little operation in the drama of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world." But when we put ourselves in Johnson's position and compare Shakespeare with the reigning dramatists of France and England, we shall see that it is in fact not the least striking thing about Shakespeare that he has so many plays in which the love interest scarcely appears.

The service Johnson rendered to the study of Shakespeare is, however, by no means confined to these general considerations. No man did more, perhaps, to call criticism back from paths that led to nowhere, or to suggest directions in which discoveries might be made. The most marked contrast between him and earlier critics is his caution about altering the received text. He first stemmed the tide of rash emendation, and the ebb which began with him has continued ever since. The case for moderation in this respect has never been better stated than in his words: "It has been my settled principle that the reading of {216} the ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity or mere improvement of the sense. For though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to the judgment of the first publishers, yet they who had the copy before their eyes were more likely to read it right than we who read it only by imagination." And in several other matters he in passing dropped a seed which has ripened in other minds to the great increase of our knowledge. "Shakespeare," he says, "has more allusions than other poets to the traditions and superstition of the vulgar, which must therefore be traced before he can be understood." Few critical seeds have had a larger growth than this: and the same may be said of the pregnant hint about the frequent necessity of looking for Shakespeare's meaning "among the sports of the field." He neither overestimated the importance nor under-estimated the difficulties of the critic of Shakespeare. With his usual sense of the true scale of things he treats the quarrels of commentators with contempt: "it is not easy to discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small importance: they involve neither property nor liberty"; and in another place {217} he characteristically bids his angry colleagues to join with him in remembering amidst their triumphs over the "nonsensical" opinions of dead rivals that "we likewise are men: that _debemur morti_, and, as Swift observed to Burnet, we shall soon be among the dead ourselves." He knows too that "notes are necessary evils" and advises the young reader to begin by ignoring them and letting Shakespeare have his way alone. But at the same time he puts aside with just indignation Pope's supercilious talk about the "dull duty of an editor"; and after giving an admirable summary of what that dull duty is, declares that one part of it alone, the business of conjectural criticism, "demands more than humanity possesses." Yet it is that part of his functions, the part which appeals most to vanity, that he exercised with the most sparing caution. He saw that it was not in emendation but in interpretation that the critic could now be most useful. For this last task the sanity of his mind, though sometimes leaning too much to prose, gave him peculiar qualifications. No one can have used any of the Variorum Shakespeares without being struck again and again by the masterly way in which Johnson penetrates through the thicket of obscurities raised by Shakespeare's involved language and his {218} critics' fanciful explanations, and brings back for us in plain words the undoubted meaning of many a difficult passage. He is a master of that rare art, the prose paraphrase of poetry. The perfect lucidity of his notes makes them always a pleasure to read: and writers of notes are not usually masters of language. Take such a note as that on the words of Laertes about Ophelia's madness--

"Nature is fine in love: and, where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves."

Johnson interprets: "love is the passion by which nature is most exalted and refined; and as substances, refined and subtilized, easily obey any impulse, or follow any attraction, some part of nature, so purified and refined, flies off after the attracting object, after the thing it loves;--

"As into air the purer spirits flow,
And separate from their kindred dregs below,
So flew her soul."

Nor can a mistake or two in details detract from the value of the splendid paraphrase of "To be or not to be," or the admirable note on the character of Polonius. Shakespeare has had subtler and more poetical critics than Johnson: but no one has equalled the insight, {219} sobriety, lucidity and finality which Johnson shows in his own field.

The _Lives of the Poets_ is Johnson's last, longest, and most popular work. More than any other of his works it was written to please himself: he did so much more than he was paid to do that he almost refuted his own doctrine that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Instead of being written, like most of his earlier books, in poverty, if not in obscurity, the _Lives_ were written at his ease, with his pension in his pocket, with the booksellers at his feet, with the consciousness of an expectant and admiring public outside. The obstructions to his work were no longer those of poverty but of prosperity. He once had to write because if he did not he would starve: now he might sleep or talk all day with the certainty of sitting down to more meals than he wanted. In early life he had no temptation to quit his home, for he could not afford travel or amusement: now he could go to the Hebrides and talk of going further, without taking much thought of the expense. He once worked to make his name known: now his reputation was established and his name better known than he always found convenient. The result is that the _Lives_ are easily written, full of anecdote and incident and manners, full of {220} easily traceable allusions to himself and his own experiences, full of the magisterial decisions of a man whose judgments are no longer questioned, full, even more than usual, of frank confessions, open disregard of established opinion, the pleasant refusals of a wilful old man to reconsider his prejudices or take any more trouble about his work than he happens to choose. All this increases the readableness of the book. But it does not all increase its importance, and the fact is that not even the greatest of the _Lives_ is as fine a piece of work as the Preface to the Shakespeare. Moreover, the work as a whole suffers from a disadvantage from which the Shakespeare is conspicuously exempt. It deals very largely with matters in which scarcely any one now takes any interest. In its three volumes Johnson gives us biographical and critical studies of fifty-two poets. Of these only six--Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Collins and Gray--would now be considered of first-rate poetic importance. Of the rest it is difficult to make certain of a dozen whose place in the second class would be unquestioned. The thirty or more that remain are mostly poets of whom the ordinary reader of to-day has never read, and if he is wise will never read, a single line. Great part of the book therefore is criticism not only upon the unimportant but {221} upon what, so far as we are now concerned, may be called the non-existent. And even in Johnson's hands that cannot but mean barren writing and empty reading.

Yet the _Lives of the Poets_ is not only the most popular book of its kind in the language: it is also a book of real and permanent value. No short Lives have ever equalled them. The most insignificant of the poets acquires an momentary interest as he passes through Johnson's hands. The art of biography is that of giving life to the dead: and that can only be done by the living. No one was ever more alive than Johnson. He says himself that he wrote his _Lives_ unwillingly but with vigour and haste. The haste is apparent in a few places: the vigour everywhere. He had more pleasure in the biographical part of his work than in the critical, and consequently did it better. His strong love of life in all its manifestations prevented his ever treating an author merely as an author. He always goes straight to the man. And he knows that the individuality which makes the life of portraits is a matter of detail. Consequently he takes pains to record every detail that he can collect about his poets. The clothes of Milton, the chair Dryden occupied and its situation in summer and in winter. Pope's silver saucepan {222} and potted lampreys, the reason why Addison sometimes absented himself from Button's, the remark which Swift made to Lord Orrery about a servant's faults in waiting at table and which Lord Orrery himself related to Johnson, these things and a hundred like them make Johnson's little biographies among the most vivid in the world. When once we have read them the poets they describe are for ever delivered from the remoteness of mere fame. Johnson has gone very close to them and he has taken us with him. And to have got close to men like Dryden, Pope, Swift and Addison is not among the smaller experiences of life. Two of them may indeed seem to us not to be poets at all, and the other two, possessing in such splendid abundance so many of a great poet's gifts, to have lacked the greatest and most essential of all: but great men the whole four undoubtedly were, among the greatest and most representative in the England of the century between the death of Milton and the birth of Wordsworth.

And Johnson belonged whole-heartedly to that century, lived in it, knew it more intimately perhaps than any man, believed in it and loved it without ever the shadow of a fear that there might be revolutionary surprises in store for the complacent self-assurance of its attitude towards literature, society and {223} life. These were plainly unusual qualifications for interpreting its great men to us. And when to these qualifications is added, as it was in Johnson's case, a mind of great power, and great pleasure in using its power, and a gift of expression which has seldom been surpassed, it is evident that a book like the _Lives_ is certain to be, what it is, one of the great monuments and landmarks of our literature. No literary excursionist who has travelled to look at it has ever regretted his journey. For there is in it the mind of a whole age: yet not fossilized or mummified as in other hands it might so easily have become by now, as the mind of any age must soon become when it is left entirely to itself. Johnson did not leave it entirely to itself. It is true that in all matters of political or literary controversy his mind was narrowly imprisoned in the opinions of his own or his father's age: and that is what makes him such an admirable witness to them; but here as elsewhere the life-giving quality in him lies in his hold on the universal human things which are affected by no controversies and belong to all the ages. None of his books exhibit more of what he himself calls "the two most engaging powers of an author." In it "new things are made familiar and familiar things are made new." The famous criticism of the "metaphysical poets" is so {224} written that a plain man feels at home in it: the thrice-told tale of the lives of Pope and Addison is so retold that every one thinks he reads it for the first time. The man who had in his earlier works sometimes seemed the most general and abstract even of eighteenth-century writers, becomes here, by force of his interest in the primary things of humanity, almost a pioneer of the new love of externalities, a relater of details, an anticipator of his own Boswell.

To the critical discussions he gave less space than to the lives, and no one will pretend to wish he had done the opposite. Allusion has already been made to his limitations as a critic of poetry. He was blind to the most poetic qualities of the greatest men: the purest poetry, the poetry that has refined away all but the absolutely indispensable minimum of prose alloy, often escaped him altogether, sometimes simply irritated his prejudices. _Omne ignotum pro injucundo_. He found people enthusiastic admirers of Milton's _Lycidas_ or Gray's _Odes_, was angry at others enjoying what he found no pleasure in, and vented his temper on Gray and Milton. Though Collins was his friend he makes no mention of the _Ode to Evening_. In these cases and some others the critic is much less scrupulously fair than the biographer, to tell the truth, nearly {225} always is. There is perhaps a malicious touch here and there in the lives of Milton, Swift and Gray: but little as he liked any of them, how fairly in each case the good points of the man are brought out, and how they are left at the end quite overbalancing the rest in our memories! But in the case of their works it is different. He has little to say about Gray's _Elegy_, which he admired, and much about his _Odes_, which he disliked.

Yet, in spite of some incapacity and some unfairness, Johnson's criticism of poetry is still a thing to be read with interest, profit and admiration. After all poetry is an art as well as an inspiration: it may almost be said to be a business as well as a pleasure. There is still, when all has been said, that indispensable alloy of prose in its composition without which it crumbles into fragments, or evaporates into mere mist. The critical questions which Horace and Boileau and Pope discuss do not include the highest: but they include much that no poet can put aside as beneath him. In this field Johnson ranks among the masters of criticism. His mind did not travel outside its limits, but to the work to be done within them it brought knowledge, reflection, vigour and acuteness. His reading had shown him how the writing of verses, the construction of sentences, the {226} effective use of words, had advanced from the uncouthness and extravagance of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans to the amazing brevity, finish and dexterity of Pope. It is good for us to see it too with his eyes. We are apt to see only the beauty and truth that were lost in the process, and the mechanical clockwork that followed upon its completion. These he could not see: but we are in no danger of forgetting them, while we are in danger of forgetting that Pope's achievement gave us the most quotable verse that ever was written, and that his brilliancy and wit quickened the powers of expression of a whole nation. To understand this is well worth while: and Johnson helps us to understand it. Nor will the fact of his thinking that Pope improved upon Homer and that his translation is a model of melody, do us any harm: for we are not likely to follow him in either opinion.

As literary criticism the greatest of the _Lives_ are those of Cowley, Dryden and Pope. But Johnson is not to be altogether despised even where he is plainly inadequate. Some of his strictures upon the poets whom he did not understand are sound enough in themselves: there is little to say against them except that they stand alone. The defect in his criticism of _Lycidas_ is not that he attacks the mythological confusion of the poem--which is in fact {227} its weakness, not its strength; but that he gives no hint of sensibility to its haunting beauty of phrase, of melody, of association, of passionate feeling, not perhaps for its nominal subject, but for the brief life of human friendship, for the mingled tragedy of love and fame and death. So again with Collins and Gray. Johnson is perfectly right in saying that Collins is too harsh and obscure, too apt to lose his way "in quest of mistaken beauties": where he is wrong is in not saying that he produced one of the most perfect Odes in our own or any other language. And even in Gray's case, where he is at his worst, there are things which an intelligent lover of Gray is the better for reading. There had been a good deal of unintelligent and too promiscuous admiration of Gray's _Odes_ in Johnson's day: and he performed a service, which is still a service, by pointing out that there is in some of their phrases a certain element of affectation and artificiality. It is true, and still necessary to be said, that Gray's "art and struggle are too visible, and that there is in his _Odes_ too little appearance of ease and nature." The object of criticism is the whole of truth: and to see only the imaginative power, the metrical learning and skill, the gift of language, the gift of emotion, in Gray, is not to see the whole. It is more important to see these things than {228} to see what Johnson saw: but in a complete criticism of Gray room must be found for an allusion to that element in him of which Johnson says, with some truth as well as malice: "he has a kind of strutting dignity and is tall by walking on tiptoe." In these matters we may listen with advantage to Johnson's instinct for reality; as we also may to his knowledge of the art of letters, when he points out quite truly that _Samson Agonistes_ has no plot, and when he puts his finger at once on that central defect of _Paradise Lost_ that "it comprises neither human actions nor human manners." That is too broadly stated no doubt: but it is true that the subject of poetry is the free play of human life, and that, from supernatural interference and from the peculiar position of Adam and Eve, there is far too little of this in _Paradise Lost_. Nor was it likely that a man of Johnson's learning and power of mind would confine himself in a book of this kind to the mere praise and blame of a succession of writers. That is his principal business: but of course he constantly overflows into general topics bearing upon literature or poetry as a whole. In these everybody who cares to think about the art of writing or analyse the pleasures of reading will find his account: they come in everywhere, of course. Now he makes some shrewd remarks, {229} not so much needed by the poets of his day as by the novelists of our own, about the danger of detailed enumeration by which description so often loses all its power: for "of the greatest things the parts are little." Now he is incidentally laying down the true ideal of the translator: to "exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them, had his language been English." Now he is discoursing at length on what it was Wordsworth's misfortune never fully to understand, the immense power of association upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and noblest emotions fail of their effect if expressed in words ordinarily connected with trivial, vulgar, or ignoble actions, and therefore necessarily arousing in the reader a state of mind unfit for the reception of greatness. Or again he will speak of the value of surprise in literature; "the pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected." Or he will enlarge, as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls "exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of representative metres and onomatopoeic words. No one will pretend that all he says in these general excursions is final: but it is always the work of a man who had {230} read a great deal and had applied a very vigorous mind to what he had read. For all these reasons the _Lives of the Poets_ will always be eagerly read by those who wish to understand a great man and a great period of English literature. But they will be read still more for their pleasantness, humanity and wisdom.