”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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 always is. There is perhaps a malicious touch here and the
re 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
CHAPTER VI. THE FRIENDS OF JOHNSON
Johnson thought human life in general, and his own in particular, an unhappy business. Boswell once urged, in reply to his melancholy, that in fact life was lived upon the supposition of happiness: houses are built, gardens laid out, places of amusement erected and filled with company, and these things would not be done if people did not expect to enjoy themselves. As so often happens in these arguments Boswell appears to us to be substantially right. But the only reply he drew from Johnson was, “Alas, sir, these are all only struggles for happiness.” And he went on to give a curious illustration of his rooted conviction that every man knew himself to be unhappy if he stopped to think about it. “When I first entered Ranelagh it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind such as I never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think: but that the thoughts of each individual there would be distressing when alone.” What he thought was true of all men was certainly true of himself. He hated and dreaded to be alone. It was the pain of solitude quite as much as the pleasure of society that drove him abroad, and induced him to make a business of keeping alive old friendships and procuring new, till he had formed as large and as interesting a circle of acquaintances as any English man of letters has ever had.
That fact is an important element in his fame. A great talker cannot exert his talent in solitude; he cannot properly exert it except in a society of intelligent men who can understand, appreciate, and in some degree contend with him. Johnson would not have been the wonderful
talker he was if he had lived like Richardson among gaping women and stupid toadies. He did the very opposite. He lived among men several of whom possessed powers of mind quite as great as his own, however different, while their achievements seem to posterity decidedly greater than his. Our impression of his overwhelming distinction as a talker is not derived only from our own judgment as we read Boswell’s record of it. It is derived almost as much from the fact that men so great as those he lived with acknowledged it with one accord. The primacy of Johnson was among them all an unquestioned article of faith. Hawkins, who knew him for so many years, says of him that “as Alexander and Caesar were born for conquest, so was Johnson for the office of a symposiarch, to preside in all conversations”; and he adds, “I never yet saw the man who would venture to contest his right.” But the greatest tribute came from the greatest of his friends. When Langton, walking home one evening with Burke after both had dined in Johnson’s company, regretted that Johnson had seized upon all the topics started by Burke, so that Burke himself had said little upon them, the reply of Burke is well known, “Oh, no; it is enough for me to have rung the bell to him.” Such words from such a man are final and unanswerable. And they are confirmed by every other member of his inner circle, and indeed by almost every person who knew him and has left any opinion on the subject. Not the least significant tribute is that of those — including men no less great than Gibbon and Fox — who had not the courage to ring that dangerous bell which so often was brought down upon the head of the ringer. The “wonder and astonishment” he inspired were universal; and among those who really knew him they were commonly mingled with love. But whether there were love or not there was generally some degree of awe, even of actual fear, as apparently in the case of Gibbon. The unquestioned ascendency he possessed and exercised over men and women not accustomed to be over-awed is plainly written all over Boswell’s story. The most celebrated of the scenes that prove or exhibit it is no doubt that of the signing of the “Round Robin” at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house in 1776, when a company which included, besides Reynolds himself, Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Colman, J. Warton, and Barnard, afterwards Bishop of Killaloe, were anxious to protest to Johnson against his proposed Latin Epitaph on Goldsmith; but not one dared to approach him about it or even to be the first to sign a letter to be sent to him. So a sailors’ Round Robin, drawn up by Burke, was adopted, and all the signatures ran round it in equal daring. But the same thing appears perhaps even more curiously in a remark of Boswell’s about a dinner at the house of Allan Ramsay. The company included Reynolds, Robertson the historian, Lord Binning and Boswell; and, Johnson being late in coming, they took to discussing him and his character. Soon, of course, he made his appearance; and then, says Boswell, “no sooner did he, of whom we had been thus talking so easily, arrive, than we were all as quiet as a school upon the entrance of the head-master.” The best parallel perhaps to Johnson’s position in his social world is that of the elder Pitt in Parliament. In each case the awe which was felt was much more than a mere vulgar fear of punishment; there was that in it, no doubt; but there was also a much rarer and finer thing; what we can only describe vaguely as a consciousness of the presence of greatness.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 628
