by Harold Bloom
Johnson’s rolling periods grant us a pleasure that only a few other critics can do. His style is equal to the greatness of his subject. Though I wince to hear it, his dismissal of Milton’s magnificent Satan again has the authority of his own grand style:
The malignity of Satan foams in haughtiness and obstinacy; but his expressions are commonly general, and no otherwise offensive than as they are wicked.
I more than forgive Johnson because of the power he then manifests:
The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the progress are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat of Milton’s mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts.
He had considered creation in its whole extent, and his descriptions are therefore learned. He had accustomed his imagination to unrestrained indulgence, and his conceptions therefore were extensive. The characteristick quality of his poem is sublimity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but his natural port is gigantick loftiness. He can please when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish.
He seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others; the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful: he therefore chose a subject on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire his fancy without the censure of extravagance.
The appearances of nature and the occurrences of life did not satiate his appetite of greatness. To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy. Milton’s delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.
But he could not be always in other worlds: he must sometimes revisit earth, and tell of things visible and known. When he cannot raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind he gives delight by its fertility.
Whatever be his subject he never fails to fill the imagination.
No one else has paid tribute to Milton as gloriously as Johnson does. He establishes what my much-lamented friend Angus Fletcher was to call the trope of transumption.
His similes are less numerous and more various than those of his predecessors. But he does not confine himself within the limits of rigorous comparison: his great excellence is amplitude, and he expands the adventitious image beyond the dimensions which the occasion required. Thus, comparing the shield of Satan to the orb of the Moon, he crowds the imagination with the discovery of the telescope and all the wonders which the telescope discovers.
To crowd the imagination is to call back the images of all the precursors, and to ram them together in metaphors that subsume all previous tropes. Johnson is at his finest when he considers Milton’s engagement with religious truth:
We all, indeed, feel the effects of Adam’s disobedience; we all sin like Adam, and like him must all bewail our offences; we have restless and insidious enemies in the fallen angels, and in the blessed spirits we have guardians and friends; in the Redemption of mankind we hope to be included: in the description of heaven and hell we are surely interested, as we are all to reside hereafter either in the regions of horrour or of bliss.
But these truths are too important to be new: they have been taught to our infancy; they have mingled with our solitary thoughts and familiar conversation, and are habitually interwoven with the whole texture of life. Being therefore not new they raise no unaccustomed emotion in the mind: what we knew before we cannot learn; what is not unexpected, cannot surprise.
Of the ideas suggested by these awful scenes, from some we recede with reverence, except when stated hours require their association; and from others we shrink with horrour, or admit them only as salutary inflictions, as counterpoises to our interests and passions. Such images rather obstruct the career of fancy than incite it.
Pleasure and terrour are indeed the genuine sources of poetry; but poetical pleasure must be such as human imagination can at least conceive, and poetical terrour such as human strength and fortitude may combat. The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration.
Known truths however may take a different appearance, and be conveyed to the mind by a new train of intermediate images. This Milton has undertaken, and performed with pregnancy and vigour of mind peculiar to himself. Whoever considers the few radical positions which the Scriptures afforded him will wonder by what energetick operations he expanded them to such extent and ramified them to so much variety, restrained as he was by religious reverence from licentiousness of fiction.
Nothing better has been said as to the difficulty of poetry’s being religious:
The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration.
John Milton and “passive helplessness” are incompatible. Perhaps he did indeed conclude in calm belief, but a Milton humbly adoring anything or anyone is inconceivable. I do not often dispute Dr. Johnson, but clearly Milton was never restrained “by religious reverence from licentiousness of fiction.”
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There is something reluctant in Johnson’s admiration that ensues in a rather dubious observation:
But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
This can be set aside as we rejoice in Johnson’s final judgment of Milton’s epic:
Such are the faults of that wonderful performance Paradise Lost; which he who can put in balance with its beauties must be considered not as nice but as dull, as less to be censured for want of candour, than pitied for want of sensibility.
At the conclusion of the Life of Milton, Johnson’s great voice becomes adequate to Milton’s:
The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epick poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But, of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities, and disdainful of help or hindrance: he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified, or favour gained; no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance, and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first.
Johnson aptly locates one of Milton’s greatest strengths:
He did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, bu
t he did not seek them.
What Johnson saw I myself have devoted years to elaborate. Milton is supreme in his use of allusion. He so performs allusiveness that it becomes a mode of invention. As a defense against poetic tradition, Miltonic allusion wards off his most dangerous precursors, Spenser and Shakespeare. Milton writes, as Angus Fletcher noted, in a transumptive style, featuring a reversal of other poets’ tropes.
Milton was a monist who refused to separate spirit from matter. One of the supreme achievements of Paradise Lost is to exalt unfallen pleasure. The poem gratifies us because it calls out to the yearning of many readers for the expanded senses of Eden. William Blake and the English Romantics after him responded profoundly to this dream of the human form divine. Angus Fletcher suggested that it was from Shakespeare that Milton learned how to embody prophecy within transcendental forms.
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The single essay by Dr. Johnson that wounds me most is from the periodical The Idler: “No. 41. Saturday, 27 January 1759.” Its subject is the death of beloved friends. Johnson remarks: “The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavor tended, is a state of desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror…The dead cannot return, and nothing is left us here but languishment and grief.” At his most searching, Johnson reflects that our happiness is not found in self-contemplation, but is perceived only when it is reflected from another.
Johnson turns to the hope of Revelation. He intimates that the union of souls may still remain. Perhaps we who struggle with sin and sorrow and infirmities may still have our own part in the intention and kindness of those who have finished their course and are now receiving their reward.
With immense dignity, Johnson propounds that authentic alleviation of the loss of our friends, and even a kind of rational tranquillity in facing up to our own disappearance, will be received only from the promises of Jesus, in whose hands are life and death. Turning to Revelation, Johnson reminds us that all tears will be wiped from the eyes and the whole soul shall be filled with joy.
Johnson hated solitude. He relied upon his friends to keep him in good cheer. As his generation waned, his sorrow increased. He always feared judgment, and though he once told Boswell a man was not obliged to do all that he could, he wondered if he had done enough for the sake of heaven.
Johnson should have been a major poet, yet he feared what he termed the dangerous prevalence of the imagination. The other inhibiting shadow was his deep love for the poetry of Alexander Pope. In Johnson’s view, Pope had achieved poetic perfection.
Those who explored ways beyond Pope drew Johnson’s censure. In conversation with Boswell, he characterized Thomas Gray’s two Pindaric odes, The Bard and The Progress of Poecy, as just two cucumbers. And though he delighted in the conversation of his friend William Collins, he could not extend his affection to the beautiful and radical odes composed by Collins as he strove to maintain his perilous balance.
The Johnsonian reaction to Christopher Smart, who urged even acquaintances to pray with him on the streets of London, was to remark, “I had as lief pray with Kit Smart as with anyone else.”
What Johnson could have made of Jubilate Agno, I cannot imagine. The path of the religious enthusiast was not Samuel Johnson’s. He sought a calm, steady belief, and to some degree achieved it. His distrust of devotional poetry stems from his awe for the truths of Christian revelation. He would not have been content with humble adoration since that did not suit his temperament. For all of his distrust of the Sublime, his sense of revelation has to be regarded as sublime in its reach and intensity. Johnson was built on so large a scale that, to find a match for his capaciousness of wisdom and consciousness, you would have to turn to Shakespeare himself.
Johnson would have understood the maxim that a man’s worst difficulties commence when he is free to do as he likes. His early years in London were marked by desperate poverty, which he surmounted by endless literary labors. The memory of those years never left him. Boswell remarks that, even at the apex of his fame, Johnson still tore at his meat like a tiger.
Afflicted by a vile melancholy, Johnson rescued himself with an array of friends who could appreciate his conversational brilliance, and who kept him pragmatically cheerful. A shadow of Dr. Johnson, I once kept going through the kindness of a phalanx of friends, all of them brilliant. They have all gone on, and I speak to ghosts as I read, teach, and write.
Ben Jonson disdained Montaigne’s cheerful use in his own work of what he read as he went along. A friend of Francis Bacon, Jonson strongly chooses Bacon’s essays over Montaigne’s. Just as Shakespeare’s personalities change by overhearing themselves, Montaigne changes as he reads what he himself has written. For all his gifts, you can no more choose Bacon over Montaigne than you could Ben Jonson over Shakespeare. You could not say of Bacon what Emerson observed of Montaigne: “Cut these words, and they bleed; they are vascular and alive.”
Montaigne’s wisdom is not Christian. Jesus is mentioned only nine times in the Essays, and Socrates is cited in one hundred instances. It is not that, for Montaigne, God and Christ do not exist; they are so far away that they are not our concern. Montaigne’s sense of self is entirely his own. He does not argue; he speculates. In doing so, he captures forever everyone’s sense of skepticism.
Montaigne’s most famous question is “What do I know?” What he knew was himself. Though he played a part as a mediator in the French civil wars of religion, Montaigne longed only to read and write in solitude. He said that, in the experience he had of himself, there might be enough to make him wise, if only he were a faithful scholar. Above all else, he teaches us not to despise our own being. If we could enjoy our being fully, then we would become virtually gods.
No one could be more different from Montaigne than Samuel Johnson. In his curious romance Rasselas, Johnson has his philosopher Imlac enunciate a great sentence that is the reversal of everything that Montaigne represented: “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.”
Dr. Johnson endlessly struggled against his own profound melancholia. He feared his own cognitive and imaginative powers, since both were vast. His sense of guilt transcends any Christian sense of Original Sin. It is personal. Perhaps it will always be beyond our understanding. I myself believe that Johnson should have been a great poet, if his reverence for Alexander Pope had not stifled his own enormous potential. The imagination takes its revenge. Johnson, unlike Montaigne, could never be content in solitude. For Montaigne, reading and writing were the earthly paradise. For Johnson, they are failed defenses against the abyss.
William Collins,
“Ode on the Poetical Character”
WILLIAM COLLINS (1721–59) departed at thirty-seven. From 1754 on, Collins was confined for extreme melancholia, perhaps brought on by the public failure of his major work, Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (1747). There are magnificent poems in that volume: “Ode to Fear,” “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “Ode to Evening,” and “The Passions. An Ode for Music.”
Collins was a close friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who commemorates the lost poet in his “Life of Collins” in Lives of the Poets:
Such was the fate of Collins, with whom I once delighted to converse, and whom I yet remember with tenderness.
Johnson’s affection and esteem did not extend to the major odes by Collins:
To what I have formerly said of his writings may be added, that his diction was often harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudiciously selected. He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival; and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry. His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants. As men are often esteemed who
cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure.
Though Johnson liked and admired Thomas Warton, his reaction to Warton’s Poems (1777) is a charming throwaway:
Wheresoe’er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new;
Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong;
Phrase that Time has flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray:
Trick’d in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet.
Though the stimulus comes from Thomas Warton, there is a memory of the long-departed William Collins. The return to Milton in Collins and in Thomas Gray made Johnson uneasy. He had inherited from Pope a distrust of the Sublime. For me the classical statement on this is that of Martin Price, my friend and colleague for forty years:
Pope and Swift see the sublime as always inviting a fall. It “may branch upwards towards Heaven, but the Root is in the Earth. Too intense a Contemplation is not the Business of Flesh and Blood; it must by the necessary Course of Things, in a little Time, let go its Hold, and fall into Matter.”
I seem now always to be in the elegy season. I sit here on a June day, exhausted as my long, slow recovery continues, and meditate upon all my dead friends. My beloved student Thomas Weiskel died at twenty-nine, in a vain attempt to save his two-year-old daughter, when the ice gave way beneath them. His book, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (1976), was edited for publication by Leslie Brisman, and I contributed a foreword on both the man and his work. In The Romantic Sublime, Weiskel gives a brilliant reading of Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character,” which he sees as the supreme representation of how difficult it was to become a poet in the mid-eighteenth century.
