Complete Works of Samuel Johnson

by Samuel Johnson

  CHAPTER V. JOHNSON’S WORKS

  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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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 h
e 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, wh
en 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, 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 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.