Dr. Johnson and His Circle Part 5

Life and manners are never out of his mind; but while they are the direct and avowed subject of _The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Ra.s.selas_, they only come, as it were, indirectly into the _Dictionary_, the _Shakespeare_ and the _Lives of the Poets_, where the ostensible business is the criticism of literature. Outside these categories are the political pamphlets, the interesting _Journey to the Western Islands_, {194} and a great quant.i.ty of miscellaneous literary hack-work. All of these have mind and character in them, or they would not be Johnson's; but they call for no special discussion. Nor do the _Prayers and Meditations_, which of course he did not publish himself.

It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them, all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to the battle in which he seemed to himself to be always defeated.

_The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Ra.s.selas_ fill four volumes out of the twelve in the 1823 library edition of Johnson. When Johnson decided to bring out a periodical paper he, of course, had the model of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_ before him. But he had in him less of the graces of life than Addison and Steele, and a far deeper sense of the gravity of its issues; with the result that _The Rambler_ and _The Idler_ are much heavier than their predecessors, not only in style but in substance. They deal much more avowedly with instruction. As we read them we wonder, not at the slow sale of the original papers, but at the editions which the author lived to see. We stand amazed to-day at the audacity of a journalist {195} who dares to offer, and at the patience or wisdom of a public which is content twice a week to read, not exciting events or entertaining personalities, but sober essays on the most ancient and apparently threadbare of topics. Here are Johnson's subjects for the ten _Ramblers_ which appeared between November 20 and December 22, 1750: the shortness of life, the value of good-humour, the folly of heirs who live on their expectations, peevishness, the impossibility of knowing mankind till one has experienced misfortune, the self-deceptions of conscience, the moral responsibilities of men of genius, the power of novelty, the justice of suspecting the suspicious, the pleasures of change and in particular that of winter following upon summer. None of these can be called exciting topics. Yet when there is a man of real power to discuss them, and men of sense to listen to him, they can make up a book which goes through many editions, is translated into foreign languages, and is called by a great critic a hundred and fifty years after its appearance, a "splendid repository of wisdom and truth." With the exception of the first word, Sir Walter Raleigh's daring praise may be accepted as strictly true. There is nothing splendid about _The Rambler_ or _The Idler_. The more s.h.i.+ning qualities {196} of literature, except occasional eloquence, are conspicuously wanting in them. There is no imagination, little of the fancy, wit and readiness of ill.u.s.tration so omnipresent in Johnson's talk, little power of drawing character, very little humour. He often puts his essay into the form of a story, but it remains an essay still. His strength is always in the reflections, never in the facts related or the persons described. The club of Ess.e.x gentlemen who fancied themselves to be satirized in _The Rambler_ were only an extreme instance of the common vanity which loves to fancy itself the subject of other people's thoughts. Johnson's portraits have not life enough to be caricatures; still less can posterity find in them the finer truth of human beings.

His was a profounder mind than Addison's; but he could not have drawn Sir Roger de Coverley. He had not "run about the world," as he said, for nothing, and he knew a great deal about men and women; but he could not create. _Ra.s.selas_, his only professed story, is a total failure as a story. It is a series of moral essays, and whoever reads it must read it for the same reasons as he reads _The Rambler_. The remark Johnson absurdly made of Richardson's masterpiece is exactly true of his own _Ra.s.selas_: "If you were to read it for the story {197} your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself."

In all these things, as elsewhere, his strength lies in shrewdness, in a common sense that has been through the fire of experience, in a real love of wisdom and truth. There is a story that Charlotte Bronte, when a girl of sixteen, broke out very angrily at some one who said she was always talking about clever men such as Johnson and Sheridan. "Now you don't know the meaning of clever," she said; "Sheridan might be clever--scamps often are, but Johnson hadn't a spark of 'cleverality'

in him." That remark gives the essence of _The Rambler_. Whoever wants "cleverality," whoever wants what Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton supply so brilliantly and abundantly to the present generation, had best leave Johnson alone. The signal merit of his writings is the exact opposite of "cleverality"; it is that he always means exactly what he says. He often talked for victory, but except, perhaps, in the political pamphlets he always wrote for truth.

Books like _The Rambler_ and _Ra.s.selas_ do not easily lend themselves to ill.u.s.tration; the effect they produce is a c.u.mulative effect.

Slowly, as we read paper after paper, the mind and character of Johnson take hold of us; what we began with impatience or {198} perhaps with contempt, we put down with respect and admiration. At the end we feel that we would gladly put our lives into the hands of this rough, wise, human, limited, lovable man. To get to that impression the books must be read; but one or two ill.u.s.trations may be given. There is nothing new to say about death, but the human heart will itself be dead when it is willing to give up saying again the old things that have been said on that subject from the beginning of the world. Who puts more of it into saying them than Johnson?

"When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favours unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish, for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

Where in this is the pompous pedant who is so commonly supposed to be the writer of Johnson's books? The English language has not often been more beautifully handled. It is true that, until one looks closely, the last words of the first sentence appear to be a piece of empty verbiage; but taken as a {199} whole the pa.s.sage moves with a grave music fitted to its sober truth. The art in it is as admirable as the emotion is sincere.

Or take a different ill.u.s.tration from a _Rambler_, in which he is discussing the well-known fact that the commonest cause of shyness is self-importance.

"Those who are oppressed by their own reputation will perhaps not be comforted by hearing that their cares are unnecessary. But the truth is that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see mult.i.tudes pa.s.sing before us of whom, perhaps, not one appears to deserve our notice or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we, likewise, are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten."

All good writers write of themselves; not, as vain people talk, of their triumphs, and grievances and diseases, but of what they have succeeded in grasping as their own out of all the floating wisdom of the world. In {200} a pa.s.sage like this one almost hears Johnson reflecting aloud as he walks back in his old age to his lonely rooms after an evening at "The Club" or the Mitre. It is the graver side of what he once said humorously to Boswell: "I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo without being missed here or observed there." But the autobiographical note is sometimes even plainer. Of whom could he be thinking so much as of himself when he wrote the 101st _Rambler_?

"Perhaps no kind of superiority is more flattering or alluring than that which is conferred by the powers of conversation, by extemporaneous sprightliness of fancy, copiousness of language, and fertility of sentiment. In other exertions of genius, the greater part of the praise is unknown and unenjoyed; the writer, indeed, spreads his reputation to a wider extent, but receives little pleasure or advantage from the diffusion of his name, and only obtains a kind of nominal sovereignty over regions which pay no tribute. The colloquial wit has always his own radiance reflected on himself, and enjoys all the pleasure which he bestows; he finds his power confessed by every one that approaches him, sees friends.h.i.+p kindling with rapture and attention swelling into praise."

In that shrewd observation lies the secret {201} of the comparative unproductiveness of his later years. Men like Dryden and Gibbon and Lecky are the men to get through immense literary labours: to a great talker like Johnson what can the praises of reviewers or of posterity be in comparison with the flas.h.i.+ng eyes, and attentive ears, the expectant silence and spontaneous applause, of the friends in whom he has an immediate mirror of his success?

It is impossible and unnecessary to multiply ill.u.s.trations. The only thing that need be added is that even in _Ra.s.selas_ and the essays, Johnson's slow-moving style is constantly relieved by those brief and pregnant generalizations of which he is one of the greatest masters in our language. They are so close to life as all men know it, that the careless reader, as we have already seen, is apt to take them for plat.i.tudes; but there is all the difference between the stale superficiality which coldly repeats what only its ears have heard, and these sayings of Johnson heated to new energy in the fires of conscience, thought and experience. "I have already enjoyed too much,"

says the Prince in _Ra.s.selas_; "give me something to desire." And then, a little later, as so often happens with the wise, comes the other side of the medal of truth: "Human life is everywhere {202} a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Or take such sentences as that embodying the favourite Johnsonian and Socratic distinction: "to man is permitted the contemplation of the skies, but the practice of virtue is commanded"; or, "we will not endeavour to fix the destiny of kingdoms: it is our business to consider what beings like us may perform"; or such sayings as, "the truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and antic.i.p.ation fill up almost all our moments"; "marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures"; "envy is almost the only vice which is practicable at all times and in every place"; "no place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library"; "I have always thought it the duty of an anonymous author to write as if he expected to be hereafter known"; or, last of all, to bring citation to an end, that characteristic saying about the omnipresence of the temptations of idleness: "to do nothing is in every man's power: we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties."

Johnson's princ.i.p.al work as a scholar and critic of literature is to be found in his Dictionary, the edition of Shakespeare, and the _Lives of the Poets_. It has the strength {203} and weakness which might be antic.i.p.ated by any intelligent person who had read Boswell and the _Ramblers_. It abounds in manliness, courage, and modesty: it never for an instant forgets that literature exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of literature: it has no esoteric or professional affectations, but says plain things in plain words such as all can understand. The literary critic can have no more valuable qualities than these. But they do not complete his equipment. The criticism of Johnson has many limitations. He was entirely without aesthetic capacity. Not only were music and the plastic arts nothing to him--as indeed they have been to many good judges of poetry--but he does not appear to have possessed any musical ear or much power of imagination.

It is not going too far to say that of the highest possibilities of poetry he had no conception. He imagines he has disposed of _Lycidas_ by exhibiting its "inherent improbability" in the eyes of a crude common sense: a triumph which is as easy and as futile as his refutation of Berkeley's metaphysics by striking his foot upon the ground. The truth is of course that in each case he is beating the air. The stamp upon the ground would have been a triumphant answer to a fool who should say that the senses cannot feel: it does not touch {204} Berkeley who says they cannot know. So the attack on _Lycidas_ might be fatal to a judge who put his judgment into the form of a pastoral; as the criticism of a poet it is in the main simply irrelevant. It is evident that what Johnson admires in Milton is the power of his mind and the elevation of his character, not at all his purely poetic gifts. He never betrays the slightest suspicion that in speaking of Milton he is speaking of one of the very greatest artists the world has ever known. He thought blank verse was verse only to the eye, and found the "numbers" of _Lycidas_ "unpleasing." He did not believe that anybody read _Paradise Lost_ for pleasure, and said so with his usual honesty. He saw nothing in _Samson Agonistes_ but the weakness of the plot; of the heights and depths of its poetry he perceived nothing. He preferred the comedies to the tragedies of Shakespeare: felt the poet in him much less than the omniscient observer of universal life: and indeed, if we may judge by what he says in the preface to the Dictionary, hardly thought of him as a master of poetic language at all. He had evidently no appreciation of the Greek dramatists. The thing that moves him in poetry is eloquence of expression and energy of thought: both good things but things that can exist outside poetry. The arguments {205} in which he states his objections to devotional poetry in the life of Waller show that he regarded poetry as an artful intellectual embroidery, not as the only fit utterance of an exalted mood.

To such a conception we can never return after all that has been done for us by Wordsworth and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to say nothing of some living critics like Mr. Yeats. No one who cares at all for poetry now could think of regretting an unwritten epic in the language Johnson uses about Dryden's: "it would doubtless have improved our numbers and enlarged our language; and might perhaps have contributed by pleasing instruction to rectify our opinions and purify our manners." It is not that such criticism is false but that it is beside the mark. An epic poem may do all these things, as a statesman may play golf or act as churchwarden: but when he dies it is not his golf or his churchwardens.h.i.+p that we feel the loss of. Put this remark of Johnson's by the side of such sayings as have now become the commonplaces of criticism. We need not go out to look for them. They are everywhere, in the mouths of all who speak of poetry. One opens Keats' letters at random and finds him saying, "Poetry should be great and un.o.btrusive, a thing that enters {206} into one's soul." One takes up the work of a living critic, Mr. Eccles, and one finds him saying, in his book on French poetry, that when we go to the very root of poetry one of the things we discern is the "mystical collaboration of a consecrated element of form in the travail of the spirit." Language of this sort is now almost the ordinary language of criticism. Blake and Wordsworth did not conquer the kingdom of criticism in a moment or a year: but when at last they did its whole tone and att.i.tude necessarily changed. Where Johnson, even while praising Milton's "skill in harmony" as "not less than his learning," discusses it merely as "skill," as a sort of artisans.h.i.+p, and misses all its subtler and rarer mysteries, we see in it an inspiration as much an art, life itself raised as it were to a higher denomination, a power of spirit--

"Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce."

It is the measure of the distance we have travelled away from Johnson that even plain people to-day, if they care for poetry at all, find much more in it than a piece of cunning craftsmans.h.i.+p. It is always that no doubt: but for us to-day it is also something far higher: a symbol of eternity. And more than a symbol, a sacrament: for it not only {207} suggests but reveals: it _is_ the truth which it signifies; itself a part, as all those who have ever profoundly felt its influence are a.s.sured, of the eternal order of things to which it points.

Plainly, then, some of the things which now seem to us to be of the very innermost essence of poetry are not things which can be weighed in any scales known to Johnson. Yet in spite of his limitations he is certainly one of the masters of English criticism. The great critic may be said to be one who leaves the subject-matter of his criticism more respected and better understood than he found it. Johnson's princ.i.p.al subjects were the English language, the plays of Shakespeare, and the poets from Cowley to his own day. There can be no question of the services he rendered to the English language. His Dictionary, as was inevitable, had many faults, especially of etymology: but its publication marks an epoch in the history of English. It was a kind of challenge to the world. Other nations had till then inclined to look upon our language and literature as barbarous: and we had not been very sure ourselves that we had any right to a place on the Parna.s.sus of the nations. Great men in Italy and France had thought those {208} languages worth the labours of a lifetime. In England before Johnson's Dictionary, nothing had been done to claim for English an equal place with Italian or French in the future of the literature and civilization of the world. What companies of learned men had taken generations to do for foreign countries had now been done for England in a few years by the industry, and abilities of a single scholar. Englishmen who took a pride in their language might now do so with understanding: foreigners who wished to learn English could now learn in the method and spirit of a scholar, no longer merely as travellers or tradesmen.

The two folio volumes of the Dictionary were the visible evidence that English had taken its place in the literary polity of Europe. They were the fit precursors of the triumphant progress soon to be made by Burke and Scott and Byron. The other great service which Johnson rendered to our language by his Dictionary and its Preface could only have been rendered by a man so superior to the narrowness of scholars.h.i.+p as Johnson. No doubt as a single individual in a private position he was not exposed to such temptations to law-giving arrogance as the French Academicians. But nevertheless it is to his credit that he frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209} life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both his melancholy and his common sense taught him that "language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived." He knew that words coming from human mouths must follow the law of life: "when they are not gaining strength they are losing it."

His business was not the vain folly of trying to bind the future in fetters: it was to record the present use and past history of words as accurately as he could ascertain them, and, by showing Englishmen what their heritage was and whence they had received it, to make them proud of its past and jealous of its future. The pedant wishes to apply a code of Median rigidity to correct the barbarous freedom of a language to which scholars.h.i.+p has never applied itself. Johnson gave our savages laws and made them citizens of a const.i.tutional state: but, however venerable the laws and however little to be {210} changed without grave reason, he knew that, if the literary polity of England lived and grew, new needs would arise, old customs become obsolete, and the laws of language, like all others, would have to be changed to meet the new conditions. But the urgent business at that moment was to codify the floating and uncertain rules which a student of English found it difficult to collect and impossible to reconcile. Johnson might often be wrong: but after him there was at least an authority to appeal to: and that, as he himself felt, was a great step forward: for it is of more importance that the law should be known than that it should be right.

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'ingenieux 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 pa.s.sage 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 compa.s.sed by the powers of the human mind. The unity of action, which a.s.sists 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 pa.s.sage 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 pa.s.sing 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sage. 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 pa.s.sion 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 amus.e.m.e.nt: 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 b.u.t.ton'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-a.s.surance of its att.i.tude 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 surpa.s.sed, 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 antic.i.p.ator of his own Boswell.

To the critical discussions he gave less s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sociation, of pa.s.sionate feeling, not perhaps for its nominal subject, but for the brief life of human friends.h.i.+p, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 a.s.sociation upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and n.o.blest emotions fail of their effect if expressed in words ordinarily connected with trivial, vulgar, or ign.o.ble 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.

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 ill.u.s.tration of his rooted conviction that every man knew himself to be unhappy if he stopped to {231} 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 mult.i.tude 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 {232} 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 {233} 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 {234} 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.

It is worth while to look a little more closely at the composition of this society in which Johnson reigned as unquestioned king. The most remarkable thing of all about it is that its inner and most intimate circle included four men of genius. Johnson had few or no closer friends than Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and Boswell. Of these the first two were acknowledged as the greatest {235} painter and the greatest orator then living in England or perhaps in Europe; the third, when he died, had some claim to be the truest poet; and, what is more remarkable, the lapse of over a hundred years has found little or nothing to detract from the fame each won from his contemporaries. Of Boswell it is enough to repeat that, while he could not compare with these men in life or action or general powers of mind, and therefore enjoyed no contemporary fame, he left a book behind him at his death which every succeeding generation has increasingly recognized as possessing that uniqueness of achievement which is another phrase for genius. Four such men alone would make a society such as few men have lived in. But Johnson's society is as remarkable for the variety and quant.i.ty, as for the quality, of its distinction. No one can look through the invaluable index of Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition of Boswell without being struck by this. If one were to make a list of all the people whom Johnson saw frequently or occasionally in the course of his life it would include an astonis.h.i.+ng number of interesting names. Part of the fascination of Boswell's book lies in that. It is first and foremost the portrait of a man, and everything is kept in subordination to that. But it is also the picture of a whole {236} age and country.

Sir Leslie Stephen remarked that nearly every distinguished man of letters of that time came into contact with Johnson. He mentions Hume and Gray as the only exceptions. There may be others, as for instance Sterne, to be added. But it remains true that Johnson was in exceptionally close personal touch with the whole literary world of his day. And Boswell has known how to make use of all that to give interest and variety to his book. Nor was Johnson ever, as we have seen, a mere narrow man of letters. He had a universal curiosity about life and men. He could talk to every one, and every one found his talk interesting, consequently Boswell's record of his acquaintance is by no means a mere series of literary portraits. The society is of all the sorts of men and women that intelligent men can care to meet, the talk on almost all the subjects which such people can care to discuss.