A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  We know Johnson very well as a person. He was the subject of a biography (itself a fine work of literature) written by his young friend and disciple, James Boswell (1740–95). From Boswell's pages an endearing and vivid portrait emerges. Consider, for example, Boswell's recollection of his first meeting with the great man, tucking into his dinner like a wild animal:

  His looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.

  The two men went on consume two bottles of port wine at their first meeting. Lifelong friendship proceeded from that merry point.

  Samuel Johnson was born in a small provincial town, Lichfield, the child of a bookseller (of rather advanced years for the trials of fatherhood). As a boy he suffered from a disease called scrofula, which destroyed much of his eyesight. But he could read phenomenally well, even though he had to lean so close to the light that he sometimes burned his hair on the candle he was reading by.

  Largely self-educated, Sam was reciting the New Testament at three and translating from the classics at six. At nine years old, he picked up a volume of Hamlet from his father's shelves while sitting in the family's basement kitchen. The words on the page induced a hallucinatory vision of Elsinore and ghosts. It terrified him. He threw down the book, and rushed into the street outside, ‘that he might see people about him’. His long love-affair with literature had begun. It would, thereafter, be the most important thing in his life.

  During his childhood his family teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. But an unexpected bequest allowed Samuel to go to Oxford University. The money, however, ran out and he was obliged to leave without a degree (his doctorate would come, fifty years later, as a mark of public esteem). On his return to Lichfield Samuel married an elderly widow with money. He was, in the circumstances, a good husband and his wife Tetty's wealth enabled him to set up a school. It attracted only three pupils. On his wife's death he took off with one of those pupils (later to be the famous actor, David Garrick) on what he liked to call the ‘best road’ in life – that leading to London. He went on to establish himself in the literary world, commonly known as ‘Grub Street’ after a street in the poor London district of Moorfields, inhabited by ‘maggot-like’ hacks who earned their living by their pen. Johnson too made his way without benefit of patrons (whom he despised) or private income. He was a professional writer, proudly independent. He paid his own way.

  Johnson wrote fine poetry, in a neo-classical manner; he was a great prose stylist; he wrote a novel, Rasselas, which was dashed off in a few days to earn the money to provide a decent funeral for his mother. (It's surprisingly good, given the sad circumstances.) Johnson's views on the human condition were always profoundly pessimistic. It was, he believed, a situation ‘in which much is to be endured, and little enjoyed’. His gloom is magnificently expressed in his long poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (the title says it all). But, despite his depressed view of things, he believed that life should be lived with courage, as he lived his.

  For all his many achievements, it is as a literary critic that Johnson is most revered. As a critic he brought two things to the understanding and appreciation of literature. One is ‘order’, the other ‘common sense’. His common sense is legendary. It is vividly depicted in a conversation which he had with Boswell, while walking, on the then fashionable view (put into circulation by the philosopher Bishop Berkeley) that matter does not exist and that everything in the universe is ‘merely ideal’. Imaginary. Boswell observed that, logically, the theory could not be refuted. Johnson responded by violently kicking a large stone which stood in their way and exclaiming, equally violently, ‘I refute it thus!’

  He adopted the same common-sense attitude in his literary judgements. He loved, said Johnson, to ‘concur with the common reader’. It is not the least attractive thing about him that he never talks down to us. It's also interesting to note that – an unusual thing among literary critics – he had great respect for young minds. In another conversation, Boswell asked what Johnson (the former schoolmaster) thought were the best subjects for children to learn first. Johnson's reply was that it did not matter: ‘Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both.’

  Johnson's most enduring achievement is the order and manageable shape he brought to the appreciation of literature. It took the form of two vast monumental works: his Dictionary and his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. Approached by a group of booksellers, he embarked on the research for his Dictionary in 1745 – still unaided by any patron, and single-handed. It would take him ten years to complete and would ruin what was left of his eyesight. On its completion he was awarded a government pension of £300 a year – appropriately, since the dictionary was a service to the English nation and people.

  When it was published the two-volume Dictionary was the size of a small coffee table. It is famous for the eccentricity and wit of many of its definitions (for example: ‘Patron. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’). But the underlying principle was more ambitious, something indicated by the full description given on the title page:

  A Dictionary of the English Language: In which the Words are deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers. To which are prefixed A History of the Language, and An English Grammar. By Samuel Johnson, A.M.

  Johnson did not merely offer ‘definitions’, he traced how the meanings of words evolved over time and how they contain within themselves all sorts of ambiguities and multiple meanings according to where, when and how they were used. He demonstrated this complexity with some 150,000 historical examples.

  Take an example from the very ‘best’ writer of all, and the text that so struck the nine-year-old Samuel. In Hamlet, as the drowned Ophelia is being buried, Gertrude throws something into the open grave, with the comment ‘Sweets to the sweet. Farewell!’ But what is she throwing? Chocolates? Biscuits? Sugar cubes? No, fresh flowers. For the Elizabethans, the adjective ‘sweet’ primarily indicated what one could smell with the nose, not what one could taste with the tongue, which is how we generally use it now. This earlier usage, among others, is the kind of thing recorded by Johnson. The major point Johnson makes in the Dictionary is that language – particularly the language writers use – cannot be set in stone. It is a living, organic, ever-changing thing.

  Johnson's other magnum opus (great work) is his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, published in 1779–81. Again, the title page is illuminating:

  The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, with Critical

  Observations on their Works by Samuel Johnson.

  The point he makes with his selection of fifty-two ‘most eminent poets’ is that an appreciation of literature requires a separation of the worthwhile from the less than worthwhile. There are, in the vaults of Britain's and America's great national libraries, many millions of books which classify as ‘Literature’. How, in the limited time available to us in a human lifetime, should we choose what is worth reading? Critical assistance can supply a ‘curriculum’ (what is prescribed for us to read at school) and a ‘canon’ – the best of the best.

  But does this mean that we should always agree with literary critics – submit, meekly, to their authority? Certainly not. Imagine a classroom of thirty students tackling an algebra equation. However difficult the sum there will be one correct answer. Imagine, however, an English lesson being asked ‘What is Hamlet, the play, about?’ There should be a whole range of different answers, from ‘The best way to appoint a king’ to ‘In what circumstances is suicide a proper decision?’ It would be a disaster if every member of the class simply parrotted what someon
e else had said or thought.

  There is a complicated line from taking literary criticism on board, weighing it, and then going on to form your own opinions. Johnson understood that. Literary works, he once said, must be batted about like shuttlecocks in a game of badminton. The last thing one wants is consensus. We can even disagree with Johnson himself. He revered Shakespeare and edited the plays (editing is one of the most useful things a literary critic can do). Johnson believed that Shakespeare was a genius. It was Johnson's admiration, expressed everywhere in his edition of and commentary on Shakespeare, which established him as the greatest of the nation's writers. But he also believed that the author of Hamlet often lacked sophistication and polish – he was sometimes ‘untutored’, even primitive. He lacked something that Johnson and his contemporaries valued above all things: ‘decorum’. Shakespeare's work was the result of the uncultivated age in which he lived. Most of us would strongly disagree. That is a privilege that Johnson, the most generous and open-minded of literary critics, allows us. He gives us the tools to make up our own minds.

  CHAPTER 15

  Romantic Revolutionaries

  Literary lives do not generally make interesting films. There is nothing dramatic in scribbling – which is what most writers do most of the working day. John Keats (1795–1821) is an exception. His short life was the subject of a fine film in 2010, Bright Star. The title was taken from one of Keats's sonnets – ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art’ – addressed in 1819 to the woman he loved, Fanny Brawne. In it the poet longs to be

  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

  To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,

  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

  Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

  And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

  Sad to say, he would never be so happily ‘pillow'd’. Fanny's mother considered her too young to marry (Keats was twenty-five, Fanny nineteen). She was a class or two higher than John and would have to marry ‘below herself’ if she took the plunge. He was poor – the son of a stable-hand, a failed medical student, not yet famous, and, most worryingly, a poet with ‘radical’ friends of dangerous political opinions. Fanny's widowed mother urged caution. It was further advisable since John was ‘consumptive’ – he had symptoms of tuberculosis. His brother Tom had recently died of the disease and his mother before that. Keats went to Rome with hopes of repairing his lungs, but – as predicted in the poem – ‘swooned to death’ in the eternal city, ever faithful to the woman he loved. Why did Keats weave his love for Fanny around a ‘bright star’ (Polaris)? He was alluding to the ‘star-crossed lovers’, Romeo and Juliet. He had somehow anticipated a similarly tragic end to his own love.

  I've summarised Keats's life because it's a wonderfully romantic story, and makes a romantic film. It can still move us. But when we call Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge or Shelley ‘Romantic’ poets (the capital ‘R’ is important here), we think of something other than their love lives (most of which were tangled to the point of chaos). We allude to a school of poetry that has very distinctive properties and which represents an evolutionary moment in Western literature.

  At its simplest, ‘Romantic’ is simply a convenient date-range for literature written, roughly, between 1789 and 1832. It's common, for example, to find Jane Austen lumped together with other writers of the Romantic Period despite the fact that, in terms of what she wrote, the author of Pride and Prejudice is on a different literary planet from, say, Shelley, who deserted a pregnant wife (who later committed suicide) to elope with the sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley who would, a couple of years later, write Frankenstein.

  Why take 1789 as a starting point? Because Romanticism coincided with a world historical event: the French Revolution. Romanticism was the first literary movement to have, at its core, ‘ideology’ – the set of beliefs by which people, and peoples, live their lives. There had always been literature which was political: John Dryden's poems on ‘affairs of state’, for example, or Jonathan Swift's sniping at the Whigs in Gulliver's Travels. Shakespeare's Coriolanus can be read as a political play. Politics is concerned with running the state (it originates in the Ancient Greek word for ‘city’). Ideology aims to change the world. Romanticism has that impulse at its heart.

  What's meant by ‘ideological’, as opposed to ‘political’, can be neatly demonstrated by the deaths in war of two great poets, Sir Philip Sidney and Lord Byron. Sidney died in 1586 of wounds incurred fighting the Spanish in Holland. While dying he is famously supposed to have passed the water bottle offered him to another wounded man with the words, ‘Thy need is greater than mine’. The act has become legendary. He was thirty-two years old. What was Sir Philip dying for so gallantly and so young? ‘Queen and Country,’ he would have responded. ‘England.’

  Lord Byron (1788–1824) died at Missolonghi in Greece, having volunteered to fight for the Greeks in their war of independence against their Turkish occupiers. He was thirty-six years old. What was Byron dying for? A ‘cause’. That cause was ‘liberty’. He was not giving up his life in the service of his country – which in Byron's view was woefully unliberated. Liberty was what the Americans were fighting for when they made their Declaration of Independence in 1776, it was what the Parisian masses had risen up against the Bastille for in 1789, it was what the Greeks were fighting for in 1824. And that is what Byron gave his life for.

  Byron did not, like Sidney, ‘die for England’. The poet was an exile from a country that found his doctrines of sexual liberty, as celebrated in his longest and finest poem, Don Juan, wholly scandalous. In Byron's analysis Juan is not the sexual predator of legend (and of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni) but a sexually liberated man – as Byron believed himself to be. A hero in Greece (there is no city that does not have a street named after him and a statue), England would have a ‘Byron problem’ for over a century. It was not until 1969 that the authorities saw fit to lay a stone to his memory in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. The poet himself, one fancies, would rather have liked the swinging sixties.

  Put at its simplest, Sidney's sacrifice was patriotically motivated, Byron's sacrifice was ideologically motivated. When we read him and other Romantics we must tune in to the ideological positions (the ‘cause’) they are adopting, advocating, probing, opposing or questioning. Where, as the current idiom puts it, is their work coming from?

  The leading Scottish Romantics, for example, were Robert Burns (1759–96) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). One of Burns' s best-known poems is ‘To a Mouse’. It opens:

  Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,

  O, what panic's in thy breastie!

  Burns, a farmer, had cut into a field-mouse's nest with his plough. Looking down on the life he has wrecked he reflects:

  I'm truly sorry Man's dominion

  Has broken Nature's social union …

  The ‘beastie’ is not just a little rodent, but, like Burns himself, a fellow victim of ‘social’ injustice – ‘me, thy poor, earth-born companion /An' fellow-mortal!’ And Burns's use of Lowland Scottish dialect makes the added point that the language of the people, not the ‘King's English’, represents the heart of the Scottish nation.

  Walter Scott's first and most influential novel is Waverley (1814). At its centre is the 1745 uprising in which an army of Highland rebels, under the ‘Young Pretender’, Charles Edward Stuart, swept down victoriously through Scotland into the north of England, intent on reclaiming the British throne. If they had succeeded, they would have wholly changed the history of the United Kingdom. Scott himself was staunchly Unionist, believing in the partnership of Scotland and England, and he had mixed feelings about ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. He was, the novelist said, in his head a Hanoverian (a supporter of the English king, George II) and in his heart a Jacobite (a supporter of the Scottish Pretender). But what is significant in Waverley is that Scott portrayed ‘the '45’ as less a war of failed conquest – between two
powers of more or less equal standing – than a failed revolution. Or, put another way, a clash of ideologies.

  The most powerful revolutionary statement among the British Romantics is Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) with the long argumentative preface later added by Wordsworth. In it he proclaims:

  The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men.

  The contents were called ‘ballads’ in honour of those poems that are passed down orally by communities, not individual writers. The traditional ballad represents a kind of literary togetherness – although Wordsworth would have used the word ‘radicalism’ (in the literal sense of going back to roots) or, if pushed, the French slogan ‘fraternity’.