Volume 2 / Book 6 — CHAPTER I. FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON. (continued 2)

The titles of the two Books, “The Foundations and Essential Properties of Elocution,” and “The Discriminating Properties of Elocution,” must be taken with due regard to Campbell’s use of the last word.^[617] But they require hardly any other proviso or allowance. He first, with that mixture of boldness and straight-hitting which is his great merit, attacks the general principles of the use of Language, and proceeds to lay down nine Canons of Verbal Criticism, which are in the main so sound and so acute that they are not obsolete to the present day. There is more that is arbitrary elsewhere, and Campbell seems sometimes to retrograde over the line which separates Rhetoric and Composition. But it must be remembered that this line has never been very exactly drawn, and has, both in Scotland and in America, if not also in England, been often treated as almost non-existent up to the present day. In his subsequent distinction of five rhetorical Qualities of Style—Perspicuity, Vivacity, Elegance, Animation, and Music—Campbell may be thought to be not wholly happy. For the three middle qualities are practically one, and it is even questionable whether Music would not be best included with them in some general term, designating whatever is added by style proper to Perspicuity, or the sufficient but unadorned conveyance of meaning. As, however, is very common, if not universal, with him, his treatment is in advance of his nomenclature, for the rest of the book—nearly a full half of it—is in fact devoted to the two heads of Perspicuity and Vivacity, the latter tacitly subsuming all the three minor qualities. And there is new and good method in the treatment of Vivacity, as shown first by the choice of words, secondly by their number, and thirdly by their arrangement, while a section 473under the first head on “words considered as sounds” comes very near to the truth. That there should be a considerable section on Tropes was to be expected, and, as Campbell treats it, it is in no way objectionable. His iconoclasm as to logical Forms becomes much more in place, and much more effective, in regard to rhetorical Figures.

One, however, of the best features of the work has hardly yet been noticed; and that is the abundance of examples, and the thorough way in which they are discussed. To a reader turning the book over without much care it may seem inferior as a thesaurus to Kames, because the passages quoted are as a rule embedded in the text, and not given separately, in the fashion which makes of large parts of the Elements of Criticism a sort of anthology, a collection of beauties or deformities, as the case may be. But this is in accordance with the singularly businesslike character of Campbell’s work throughout. And if it also seem that he does not launch out enough in appreciation of books or authors as wholes, let it be remembered that English criticism was still in a rather rudimentary condition, and that the state of taste in academic circles was not very satisfactory. It would not, of course, be impossible to produce from him examples of those obsessions of the time which we have noticed in his two compatriots, as we shall notice them in the far greater Johnson. But he could not well escape these obsessions, and he suffers from them in a very mild form.

James Harris,^[618] author of Hermes (and of the house of Malmesbury, which was ennobled in the next generation), is perhaps the chief writer whom England, in the narrower sense, has to set against Blair, Kames, and Campbell in mid-eighteenth century. Harris. But he is disappointing. It would not be reasonable to quarrel with the Hermes itself for not being literary, because it does not pretend to be anything but grammatical; and the Philosophical Arrangements, though they do sometimes approach literature, may plead benefit of title for not doing so oftener. But the Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry, and the Philological Enquiries—in which Philology is expressly intimated to mean “love of letters” in the higher 474sense—hold out some prospects. The performance is but little. Readers of Boswell will remember that Johnson, though the author of Hermes was very polite to him, both personally and with the pen, used, to his henchman’s surprise and grief, to speak very roughly of Harris, applying to him on one occasion the famous and damning phrase, “a prig, and a bad prig,” and elsewhere hinting doubts as to his competency in Greek. That the reproach of priggishness was deserved (whether with the aggravation or not) nobody can read half-a-dozen pages of Harris without allowing,—his would-be complimentary observation on Fielding^[619] would determine by itself. But the principal note of Harris, as a critic, is not so much priggishness as confused superficiality. These qualities are less visible in the Dialogue (which is an extremely short, not contemptible, but also not unimportant, exercitation in the direction of Æsthetic proper) than in the Enquiries, which were written late in life, and which, no doubt, owe something of their extraordinary garrulity to “the irreparable outrage.”

This book begins, with almost the highest possible promise for us, in a Discussion of the Rise of Criticism, its various species, Philosophical, Historical, and Corrective, &c. The Philological Enquiries. It goes on hardly less promisingly, if the mere chapter-headings are taken, with discourses on Numbers, Composition, Quantity, Alliteration, &c.; the Drama, its Fable and its Manners, Diction, and, at the end of the second part, an impassioned defence of Rules. But the Third, which promises a discussion of “the taste and literature of the Middle Age,” raises the expectation almost to agony-point. Here is what we have been waiting for so long: here is the great gap going to be filled. At last a critic not merely takes a philosophic-historic view of criticism, but actually proposes to supplement it with an inquiry into those regions of literature on which his predecessors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the disappointment. Harris’s first part, though by no means ill-planned, is very insufficiently carried out, and the hope of goodness in the third is cruelly dashed beforehand by the 475sentence, “At length, after a long and barbarous period, when the shades of monkery began to retire,” &c. The writer’s mere enumeration of Renaissance critics is very haphazard, and his remarks, both on them and their successors, perfunctory in the extreme. He hardly dilates on anybody or anything except—following the tradition from Pope and Swift—on Bentley and his mania for correction and conjecture.

In the second part he gives himself more room, and is better worth reading, but the sense of disappointment continues. In fact, Harris is positively irritating. He lays it down, for instance, that “nothing excellent in a literary way happens merely by chance,” a thesis from the discussion of which much might come. But he simply goes off into a loose discussion of the effects and causes of literary pleasure, with a good many examples in which the excellence of his precept, “seek the cause,” is more apparent than the success of his own researches. The rest is extremely discursive, and seldom very satisfactory, being occupied in great part with such tenth-rate stuff as Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity. As for Harris’s defence of the Rules, he does not, in fact, defend them at all; but, as is so common with controversialists, frames an indictment, which no sensible antagonist would ever bring, in order to refute it. He says that “he never knew any genius cramped by rules, and had known great geniuses miserably err by neglecting them.” A single example of this last would have been worth the whole treatise. But Harris does not give it. Finally, “the Taste and Literature of the Middle Age” seem to him to be satisfactorily discussed by ridiculing the Judgment of God, talking at some length about Byzantine writers, giving a rather long account of Greek philosophy in its ancient stages, quoting freely from travellers to Athens and Constantinople, introducing “the Arabians,” with anecdotes of divers caliphs, saying something of the Schoolmen, a little about the Provençal poets, something (to do him justice) of the rise of accentual prosody,^[620] and a very, very little about Chaucer, Petrarch, Mandeville, Marco Polo, Sir John Fortescue, and—Sannazar! “And now having done with the 476Middle Age,” he concludes—having, that is to say, shown that, except a pot-pourri of mainly historical anecdote, he knew nothing whatever about it; or, if this seem harsh, that his knowledge was not of any kind that could possibly condition his judgment of literature favourably. In fact, no one shows that curious eighteenth-century confusion of mind, which we shall notice frequently in other countries, better than Harris. He is, as we have seen, a fervent devotee of the Rules—he believes^[621] that, before any examples of poetry, there was an abstract schedule of Epic, Tragedy, and everything else down to Epigram, which you cannot follow but to your good, and cannot neglect but to your peril. Yet, on the one hand, he feels the philosophic impulse, and on the other, the literary and historical curiosity, before which these rules were bound to vanish.

“Estimate” Brown: his History of Poetry.

A few allusions,^[622] in contemporaries of abiding fame, have kept half alive the name—though very few, save specialists, are likely to be otherwise than accidentally acquainted with the work—of John Brown of Newcastle, author of the once famous Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times,^[623] and afterwards, when he had gained reputation by this, of a Dissertation on the Rise of Poetry and Music,^[624] later still slightly altered, and re-christened History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry.^[625] The Estimate itself is one of those possibly half-unconscious pieces of quackery which from time to time put (in a manner which somehow or other tickles the longer ears among their contemporaries) the old cry that everything is rotten in the state of Denmark. There is not much in it that is directly literary; the chief point of the kind is an attack on the Universities: it may be noted that quacks generally do attack Universities. The Dissertation-History is a much less 477claptrap piece, but far more amusing to read. Brown is one of those rash but frank persons who attempt creation as well as criticism; and those who will may hear how

“Peace on Nature’s lap reposes [why not vice versa?]

Pleasure strews her guiltless roses,”

and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important. In the second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could, as appealing to a special public only. He believes in Ossian, then quite new. He thinks it contains “Pictures which no civilised modern could ever imbibe in their strength, nor consequently could ever throw out”—an image so excessively Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing a picture) that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown rejoices and wallows in the naturalistic generalisation of his century. He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it down that, at religious and other festivals, men danced and sang, that then organised professional effort supplemented unorganised, and so poets arose. Then comes about a sort of Established Choir, whence the various kinds are developed. And we have the Chinese—the inevitable Chinese—Fow-hi, and Chao-hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.

But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here ὁ μέγας.

There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s critical opinions were formed quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural bent and influence of environment which, as a rule, forms all such opinions. Johnson: his preparation for criticism. There has been a tendency to regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of considering everything as an open question, of being ready to reverse any opinion at a moment’s notice. As a matter of fact, we have record of not many men who have proceeded in this way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a single person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking, the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in it find, in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world, political, ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits 478their bent. The bent of their time may assist them in fastening on to this by attraction or repulsion—it really does not much matter which it is. In either case they will insensibly, from an early period, choose their line and shape their course accordingly. They will give a certain independence to it; they will rarely be found merely “swallowing formulas.” It is the other class which does this, with leave reserved to get rid of the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another set, which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the hero will be in the main Qualis ab incepto.

Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism being conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort of transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have shown; secondly, by the usual peculiarities of social circumstance and mental constitution; and lastly, by the state of England in his time—a state to discuss which were here impertinent, but which, it may be humbly suggested, will not be quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of the more ordinary views of the eighteenth century.

His view of literature was in part determined by these general influences, in part—perhaps chiefly—by special impinging currents. His mere birth-time had not very much to do with it—Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchelsea, who consciously or unconsciously worked against it, were older, in the lady’s case much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone, who consciously worked against it in different degrees, were not much younger.^[626] The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by that natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other things explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not wholly in consequence of his near sight, was entirely insensible to the beauties of nature; he made fun of “prospects”; he held that “one blade of grass is like another” (which it most certainly is not, even in itself, let alone its surroundings); he liked human society in its most artificial form—that provided by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his ear was only 479less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for music, in the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is quite clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost mathematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he was widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek, still more widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.^[627] Fourthly, he was, for a man so much given to reading—for one who ranged from Macrobius in youth to Parismus and Parismenus in age, and from Travels in Abyssinia to Prince Titi—not very widely read either in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of the modern languages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or nothing. Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and early manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other wholly, of a certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly, the critical school in which he had been brought up was strictly neo-classic. Seventhly, and to conclude, such rebels to convention as appeared in his time were chiefly men whom he regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt. Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of “the Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Walpole was a spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius; Gray a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical” mannerisms worse than any of Johnson’s own, and whose dilettante shyness and scanty production invited ridicule. Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did not love Cambridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had foibles enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons go far enough, or do not so go, Johnson’s general critical attitude never varies in the least.^[628] It was, as has been said, probably 480formed quite early; it no doubt appeared in those but dimly known contributions to periodical literature which defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly known first twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise, as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in the case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great documents of The Rambler, Rasselas, the Shakespeare Preface, and the Lives, we see it in the two first rigid, peremptory, in the Preface, curiously and representatively uncertain, in the last conditioned by differences which allow it somewhat freer play, and at some times making a few concessions, but at others more pugnacious and arbitrary than before.

The critical element in The Rambler is necessarily large; but a great deal of it is general and out of our way.^[629] The Rambler on Milton. Directly concerning us are the papers on the aspects (chiefly formal) of Milton’s poetry—especially versification—on which Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers on lesser subjects. The Miltonic examen begins at No. 86. Johnson is as uncompromising as the great Bysshe himself on the nature of English prosody. “The heroick measures of the English language may be properly considered as pure or mixed.” They are pure when “the accent rests on every second syllable through the whole line.” In other words, “purity” is refused to anything but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes further; this is not only “purity” and “the completest harmony possible,” but it ought to be “exactly kept in distichs” and in the last line of a (verse) paragraph.

Nevertheless, for variety’s sake, the “mixed” measure is allowed; “though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself,” it makes us appreciate the “harmonious” lines better. And we soon perceive that even this exceedingly 481grudging, and in strictness illogical, licence is limited merely to substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In

“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,

Both turned,”

the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “the accent is on two syllables together and both strong”; while he would seem to regard “And when,” in the line

“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,”

as a pyrrhic (“both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“deviation or inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first place, but elsewhere is “remarkably inharmonious,” as, for instance, in Cowley’s beautiful line,

“And the soft wings of peace cover him round.”

The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to “elision,” by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-syllabic possibility into consideration) such a case as

“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind.”

This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds some severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it. He even objects to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.

In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more plays the rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting one line with another, is never to make a full pause at less than three syllables from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all lines pause at the fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a whole paper to Milton’s accommodation of the sound to the sense, and winds up his Miltonic exercitations, after a very considerable interval, with a set critique (139) of Samson Agonistes, partly on its general character as an Aristotelian tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers show no animus against Milton. There are even expressions of admiration for him, which may be called enthusiastic. But they do show that the critic was not in range with his 482author. Almost every one of his axioms and postulates is questionable.

Of the remaining critical papers in the Rambler it is very important to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and the Impropriety of imitating Spenser.” On Spenser. Johnson’s acuteness was not at fault in distrusting, from his point of view, the consequences of such things as the Castle of Indolence or even the Schoolmistress; and he addresses a direct rebuke to “the men of learning and genius” who have introduced the fashion.^[630] In so far as his condemnation of “echoes” goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent parrhesia^[631] which, like many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But on Spenser himself the other idols—the idola specus rather than fori—blind him. In following his namesake in the condemnation of Spenser’s language he is, we may think, wrong; yet this at least is an arguable point. But in regard to the Spenserian stanza things are different. Johnson calls it “at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its uniformity, and to the attention by its length,” while he subsequently goes off into the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is here possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at once, but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate the riposte that, not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As for “unpleasing,” so much the worse for the ear which is not pleased by the most exquisite harmonic symphony in the long and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for monotony, it is just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the Italian parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty, but cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto, and the endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser’s rhyme-sound. 483It is no valid retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If a man, as some men have done, says that Spenser is pleasing and Dryden and Pope are not, then the retort is valid. When the position is taken that both rhythms are pleasing, both really poetical, but poetical in a different way, the defender of it may laugh at all assailants.

The criticism of the English historians which immediately follows has an interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written just at the opening of the great age of the department with which it deals. On History and Letter-writing. Prejudices of different kinds would always have prevented Johnson from doing full justice to Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon; but, as it is, he deals with nobody later than Clarendon, and merely throws back to Raleigh and Knolles. Very much the same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary writing: for here also it was the lot of Johnson’s own contemporaries, in work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published, at the date of the Rambler, to remove the reproach of England. But the paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.

For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the combination of influences above referred to, might have taken high, if not the highest, degrees in a very different school of criticism. On Tragi-comedy. He puts the great rule Nec quarta loqui into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting some slight shortness of sight; for the very argument he uses will sweep with this a good many other rules to which he still adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly, “without scruple and without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic about the Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of tragic and comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most remarkable, for it is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic system, sounded by its last really great prophet. “It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear 484of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.”

“Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood, that have been in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they are barking and fleeing, infield and outfield, haugh and holme!” With this utterance, this single utterance, all the ruling doctrines of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century criticism receive notice to quit.^[632]

The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the Idler (60, 61) are excellent fun, and perhaps Johnson’s chief accomplishment in the direction of humour. “Dick Minim.” The growth of criticism in Dick, his gradual proficiency in all the critical commonplaces of his day (it is to be observed that Johnson, like all true humourists, does not spare himself, and makes one of Minim’s secrets de Polichinelle a censure of Spenser’s stanza), his addiction to Johnson’s pet aversion, “suiting the sound to the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done. Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece to consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But it neither contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine that we cannot find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.^[633]

The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in Rasselas (chap. x.) may be less amusing; but it is of course much more serious. Rasselas. There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives as much of Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character: while it is at least possible that his sentiments are determined in some degree by the menacing appearances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder that in almost all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the best”; that “early writers are in possession of nature and their successors of art”; that “no man was ever great by imitation”; that he must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he 485must do it on the principle of examining, “not the individual, but the species.” He is to remark “general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shapes in the verdure of the forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking features,” neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be “a being superior to time and place”; must know many languages and sciences; must by incessant practice of style “familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.”

Surely a high calling and election! yet with some questionable points in it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the tulip, if he must merely generalise and sweep; if he must consult the laziness and dulness of his readers by merely portraying prominent and striking features, characteristics alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness—then even Dryden will not do, for he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone must bear the bell. Lady Winchelsea’s horse in twilight, the best part of a century earlier; Tennyson’s ashbuds in the front of March, the best part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,” superfluous if not even bad. Habington’s picture of the pitiless northern sunshine on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats’s of the perilous seas through the magic casements, must be rejected, as too unfamiliar and individual. The poetic strangeness and height are barred en bloc. Convention, familiarity, generalisation—these are the keys to the poetical kingdom of heaven. The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!

The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth-century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the English critical position at this time. The Shakespeare Preface. Of the first there are many instances, though perhaps none in the Preface itself quite equal to the famous note on the character of Polonius, which has been generally and justly taken as showing what 486a triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet even here there is not a little which follows in the wake of Dryden’s great eulogy, and some scattered observations of the highest acuteness, more particularly two famous sentences which, though Johnson’s quotation is directed to a minor matter—Shakespeare’s learning—settle beforehand, with the prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory.^[634] The rest, however, is, if not exactly a zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utterance of two distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that merit of nature, of passion; but “his set speeches are commonly cold and weak.” “What he does best he soon ceases to do.” Johnson, here also, has no superstitious reverence for the Unities, and even speaks slightly of dramatic rules; nay, he suggests “the recall of the principles of the drama to a new examination,” the very examination which Lessing was to give it. But he apologises for the period when “The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume,” and hints a doubt whether much of our and his own praise of Shakespeare is not “given by custom and veneration.” “He has corrupted language by every mode of depravation,” yet Johnson echoes Dryden “when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too.” A singular triumph of “depraved language.” In short, throughout the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now some one with a certain bundle of principles or prejudices which Johnson chooses to adopt for the time.

It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial nature of poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat down to the Lives of the Poets,^[635] one of the most fortunate books in English literature. The Lives of the Poets. In very few cases have task and artist been so happily associated. For 487almost all his authors, he had biographical knowledge such as no other living man had, and the access to which has long been closed. If, now and then, his criticism was not in touch with his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a certain value even to the assertions that result—for we, do what we will, cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these subjects belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a school and system with which the critic was at once thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy. And, lastly, the form of the work, with its subdivision into a large number of practically independent and not individually burdensome sections, was well suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional indolence, and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally, and only occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has had quite such a chance: but he must indeed have a sublime confidence, both in the strength of his principles and in the competence of his talents, who thinks that, if he had the chance, he could do the task better than Johnson did his.

The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it could not be expected to be. Their general merits. Some was merely old work, dating from a much less mature period of the writer’s genius, and made to serve again. Some was on subjects so trivial that good nature, or simple indolence, or, if any one pleases, an artistic reluctance to break butterflies on so huge a wheel, made the criticisms almost as insignificant as the criticised. Here and there extra-literary prejudice—political-ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly moral, partly religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as in that of Swift—distorted the presentation. And it is quite possible that a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that Gray’s aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplishments, were fatal to the school of poetry to which the critic himself held.

But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing do the Lives still provide us! In that combination of biography 488and criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should be so late,^[636] they are all but the originals, and are still almost the standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the Vanity of Human Wishes, but in milder mood and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to us extraordinary and unintelligible praise on John Pomfret’s Choice,^[637] he is really praising a moral tract couched in verse not unpleasing in itself, and specially pleasing to his ear. When he speaks less favourably of Grongar Hill, he is speaking of a piece of nature-poetry, not arranged on his principle of neglecting the streak of the tulip, and availing itself of those Miltonic licences of prosody which he disapproved. But we shall never find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he recognises, he makes any mistake about its relative excellence: and we shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excellence which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as he approves. And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused brilliancy of critical expression, subject to the allowances and conditions just given, the Lives are hardly to be excelled in any language. It is not safe to neglect one of them, though no doubt there are some six or seven which, for this reason or that, take precedence of the rest.

The “Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson’s 489only considerable attempt at that very important part of criticism, the historical summary of the characteristics of a poetical period or school. The Cowley. And, though far from faultless, it is so important and so interesting in its kind that it ranks with his greatest Essays. Only that singular impatience of literary history, as such, which characterised the late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not infrequently marred his own critical work, can have prevented him from including, in his Johnsonian points de repère, the Essay which launched, and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition of the “Metaphysical” School—of the school represented earlier by Donne, and later by Cowley himself.

The phrase itself^[638] has been both too readily adopted and too indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning of “metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and partly misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a meaning defensible at least from the point of view of the framer, and very important in critical history. Johnson (it is too often forgotten) was a scholar; and he used “metaphysical” in its proper sense—of that which “comes after” the physical or natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole principle of his school of criticism—their whole critical contention—that they were “following nature.” The main objection to the poetry of what Dryden calls the “last Age”—what we call, loosely but conveniently, “Elizabethan” poetry—was that its ideas, and still more its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substituted afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would be delightful to the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals here—but it would not be to the question.

Political and religious prejudice accounts, as has been said, for much in the Milton. The Milton. But it will not fully account for the facts. The at first sight astonishing, and already often referred to, criticisms on the minor poems show a perfectly honest and genuine dislike to the form as well as to the matter, to the manner as well as to the man. If Johnson 490calls Lycidas “harsh,” it is because he simply does not hear its music; he can even call the songs in Comus “not very musical in their numbers.” When of the, no doubt unequal but often splendid, sonnets he can write, “of the best it can only be said that they are not bad,” he gives us the real value of his criticism immediately afterwards by laying it down that “the fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours.” And when he has earlier stated that “all that short compositions can commonly attain is sweetness and elegance,” we see in this the whole thing. Milton is condemned under statute (though the statute is hopelessly unconstitutional and unjust) on certain counts; on others his judge, though capable and perfectly honest, does not know the part of the code which justifies the accused. Johnson is listening for couplet-music or stanzas with regular recurrence of rhyme, for lines constituted entirely on a dissyllabic, or entirely on a trisyllabic, basis. He does not find these things: and he has no organ to judge what he does find.

With the lives of Dryden and Pope we are clear of all difficulties, and the critic is in his element. The poets whom he is criticising occupy the same platform as he does; they have in fact been themselves the architects of that platform. The Dryden and Pope. There is no fear of the initial incompatibilities which, when aggravated by accident, lead to the apparent enormities of the Milton Essay, and which, even when not so aggravated, condition the usefulness, though they may positively increase the interest, of the Cowley. But there is more than this. In no instance, perhaps, was Johnson so well in case to apply his biographical and critical treatment as in regard to Dryden and Pope. With the latter he had himself been contemporary; and when he first came to London the traditions even of the former were still fresh, while there were many still living (Southerne the chief of them) who had known glorious John well. Further, Johnson’s peculiar habits of living, his delight in conversation and society, his excellent memory, and his propensity to the study of human nature, as well as of letters, furnished him abundantly with opportunities. Yet, again, his sympathy with both, on general literary sides, was not unhappily mixed 491and tempered by a slight, but not uncharitable or Puritanic, disapproval of their moral characters, by regret at Dryden’s desertion of the Anglican Church, and at the half-Romanist half-freethinking attitude of Pope to religion.

The result of all this is a pair of the best critical Essays in the English language. Individual expressions will of course renew for us the sense of difference in the point of view. We shall not agree that Dryden “found English poetry brick and left it marble,” and we shall be only too apt to take up the challenge, “If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” even if we think the implied denial, to which the challenge was a reply, an absurdity. And we may find special interest as well as special difference in the condemnation even of these masters for attempting Pindarics, because Pindarics “want the essential constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence of settled numbers,” seeing in it a fresh instance of that Procrustean tyranny of suiting the form to the bed, not the bed to the form, which distinguishes all neo-classic criticism. But these points occur rarely. The criticism, as a whole, is not merely perfectly just on its own scheme, but requires very little allowance on others; nor, in the difficult and dangerous art of comparative censorship, will any example be found much surpassing Johnson’s parallel of the two poets.

In the Milton and the Cowley we find Johnson dealing with schools of poetry which he regards as out of date and imperfect; in the Dryden and the Pope, with subjects which are not to him subjects of any general controversy, but which he can afford to treat almost entirely on their merits. The Collins and Gray. In the Collins and the Gray we find a new relation between poet and critic—the relation of decided, though not yet wholly declared, innovation on the part of the poets, and of conscious, though not yet quite wide-eyed and irreconcilable, hostility on the part of the critic. The expression of this is further differentiated by the fact that Johnson regarded Collins with the affection of a personal friend, and the generous sympathy of one who, with all his roughness, had a mind as nearly touched by mortal sorrows as that of any sentimentalist; while it is pretty clear, though we have no positive 492evidence for it, that he reciprocated the personal and political dislike which Gray certainly felt for him.

The result was, in the case of Collins, a criticism rather inadequate than unjust, and not seldom acute in its indication of faults, if somewhat blind to merits; in that of Gray, one which cannot be quite so favourably spoken of, though the censure which has been heaped upon it—notably by Lord Macaulay and Mr Arnold—seems to me very far to surpass its own injustice. Johnson’s general summing up—that Gray’s “mind had a large grasp; his curiosity^[639] was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all, but fastidious and hard to please”—is acute, just, and far from ungenerous. That on the Elegy—“The four stanzas beginning, ‘Yet even these bones,’ are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place. Yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him”—is a magnificent and monumental compliment, said as simply as “Good morning.” He is absolutely right when he says that in all Gray’s Odes “there is a kind of cumbrous splendour that we wish away,” for there never was such an abuser of “poetic diction” (to be a poet) as Gray was. Yet undoubtedly the Essay is not satisfactory; it has not merely, as the Collins has, blindness, but, what the Collins has not, that obvious denigration, that determination to pick holes, which always vitiates a critique, no matter what learning and genius be bestowed on it. And the probable reasons of this are interesting. It has been said that they were possibly personal in part. We know that Gray spoke rudely of Johnson; and there were many reasons why Johnson might rather despise Gray, though he certainly should not have called him “dull.”

On the whole, however, I have little doubt—and it is this which gives the essay its real interest for me—that one main reason of Johnson’s antipathy to Gray’s poetry was the same as that for which we like it. He suspected, if he did not fully perceive, the romantic snake in Gray’s classically waving grass. 493And he had on his own grounds good reason for suspecting it. Gray might use Greek and Latin tags almost extravagantly. But he sedulously eschewed the couplet; and, while preferring lyric, he chose lyrical forms which, though Johnson was too much of a scholar to dare to call them irregular, violated his own theories of the prompt and orderly recurrence of rhyme, and the duty of maintaining a length of line as even as possible. The sense of nature, the love of the despised “prospect,” was everywhere; even the forbidden “streak of the tulip” might be detected. And, lastly, Gray had too obvious leanings to classes of subject and literature which lay outside of the consecrated range—early English and French, Welsh, Norse, and the like. It is no real evidence of critical incapacity, but of something quite the reverse, that Johnson should have disliked Gray. He spied the great Romantic beard under the Pindaric and Horatian muffler—and he did not like it.

On the whole, it may be safely said that, however widely a man may differ from Johnson’s critical theory, he will, provided that he possesses some real tincture of the critical spirit himself, think more and more highly of the Lives of the Poets the more he reads them, and the more he compares them with the greater classics of critical literature. The critical greatness of the Lives and of Johnson. As a book, they have not missed their due meed of praise; as a critical book, one may think that they have. The peculiarity of their position as a body of direct critical appraisement of the poetical work of England for a long period should escape no one. But the discussion of them, which possesses, and is long likely to possess, prerogative authority as coming from one who was both himself a master of the craft and a master of English, admirable and delightful as it is and always will be, is not, critically speaking, quite satisfactory. Mr Arnold speaks of the Six Lives which he selected in very high terms: but he rather pooh-poohs the others, and, even in regard to the chosen Six, he puts upon himself—and in his amiable, but for all that exceedingly peremptory, way, insists in putting on his readers—a huge pair of blinkers. We are to regard the late seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century as an Age of Prose: and we are to regard Johnson, 494whether he was speaking of the poets of this age or of others, as the spokesman of an age of prose. Far be it from me to deny that there is an element of truth in this: but it is not the whole truth, and the critic must strive, though he may not boast, to “find the whole.”

The whole truth, as it seems to me, about Johnson is that he was very much more than the critic of an age of prose, though he was not (who has been? even Longinus? even Coleridge?)

“The King who ruled, as he thought fit,

The universal monarchy of wit”

as regards poetic criticism. He saw far beyond prose, as in those few words of the concluding and reconciling eulogy of Gray which have been quoted above. It is poetry and not prose which has the gift of putting new things so that the man who reads them ingenuously thinks that they are merely a neat statement of what he has always thought. And Johnson was far more than merely a critic of the eighteenth-century Neo-Classic theory, though he was this. A most noteworthy passage in the Rambler (No. 156), which I have purposely kept for comment in this place, though it is delivered on the wrong side, shows us, as the great critics always do show us, what a range of sight the writer had. In this he expresses a doubt whether we ought “to judge genius merely by the event,” and, applying this to Shakespeare, takes the odd, but for an eighteenth-century critic most tell-tale and interesting, line that if genius succeeds by means which are wrong according to rule, we may think higher of the genius but less highly of the work. It is hardly necessary to point out that this is, though in no way a discreditable, a transparent evasion of the difficulty which is pressing on the defenders of the Rules. “Show me,” one may without irreverence retort, “thy genius without thy works; and I will show thee my genius by my works.” If Shakespeare shows genius in neglecting the Rules, the inexorable voice of Logic, greater than Fortune, greater than all other things save Fate, will point out that the Rules are evidently not necessary, and, with something like the Lucretian Te sequar, will add, “Then for what are they necessary?” But Johnson’s power is only a little soured and 495not at all quenched by this. He has seen what others refused—perhaps were unable—to see, and what some flatly denied,—that a process of literary judgment “by the event” is possible, and that its verdicts, in some respects at any rate, cannot be challenged or reversed. These great critical aperçus, though sometimes delivered half unwillingly or on the wrong side, establish Johnson’s claim to a place not often to be given to critics; but they do not establish it more certainly than his surveys of his actual subjects. It was an unfortunate consequence of Mr Arnold’s generous impatience of all but “the chief and principal things,” and of his curious dislike to literary history as such, that he should have swept away the minor Lives. One may not care for Stepney or Yalden, Duke or King, much more, or at all more, than he did. But with a really great member of the craft his admissions and omissions, his paradoxes, his extravagances, his very mistakes pure and simple, are all critically edifying. How does he apply his own critical theory? is what we must ask: and, with Johnson, I think we shall never ask it in vain.

His idea of English poetry was the application to certain classes of subjects, not rigidly limited to, but mainly arranged by, the canons of the classical writers—of what seemed to him and his generation the supreme form of English language and metre, brought in by Mr Waller and perfected by Mr Pope, yet not so as to exclude from admiration the Allegro of Milton and the Elegy of Gray. We may trace his applications of this, if we have a real love of literature and a real sense of criticism, nearly as profitably and pleasantly in relation to John Pomfret as in relation to Alexander Pope. We may trace his failures (as we are pleased, quite rightly in a way, to call them), the failures arising from the inadequacy, not of his genius, but of his scheme, not less agreeably in relation to Dyer than in relation to Dryden. We are not less informed by his passing the Castle of Indolence almost sub silentio than we are by that at first sight astounding criticism of Lycidas. This Cæsar never does wrong but with just cause—to use the phrase which was too much for the equanimity or the intelligence of his great namesake Ben, 496in the work of one whom both admired yet could not quite stomach.

Now, this it is which makes the greatness of a critic. That Johnson might have been greater still at other times need not necessarily be denied; though it is at least open to doubt whether any other time would have suited his whole disposition better. But, as he is, he is great. The critics who deserve that name are not those who, like, for instance, Christopher North and Mr Ruskin, are at the mercy of different kinds of caprice—with whom you must be always on the qui vive to be certain what particular watchword they have adopted, what special side they are taking. It may even be doubted whether such a critic as Lamb, though infinitely delightful, is exactly “great” because of the singular gaps and arbitrariness of his likes and dislikes. Nay, Hazlitt, one of the greatest critics of the world on the whole, goes near to forfeit his right to the title by the occasional outbursts of almost insane prejudice that cloud his vision. Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his prejudice is not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly sound on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstractions, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgment; he has not judged literature in the exhausted receiver of mere art, and yet has never neglected the artistic criterion; he has kept in constant touch with life, and yet has never descended to mere gossip. We may freely disagree with his judgments, but we can never justly disable his judgment; and this is the real criterion of a great critic.

Johnson is so much the eighteenth-century orthodox critic in quintessence (though, as I have tried to show, in transcendence also) that he will dispense us from saying very much more about the rank and file, the ordinary or inferior examples, of the kind. Minor Criticism: Periodical and other. If we were able to devote this Book, or even this volume, to the subject of the present chapter, there would be no lack of material. Critical exercitations of a kind formed now, of course, a regular part of 497the work of literature, and a very large part of its hack-work. The Gentleman’s Magazine devoted much attention to the subject; and for a great part of the century two regular Reviews, the Critical and the Monthly,^[640] were recognised organs of literary censorship, and employed some really eminent hands, notably Smollett and Goldsmith. The periodicals which, now in single spies, now (about the middle of the century) in battalions, endeavoured to renew the success of the Tatler and Spectator, were critical by kind; and dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of separate critical publications, large and small, issued from the press.^[641] But, with the rarest exceptions, they must take the non-benefit of the warning which was laid down in the Preface to the First Volume. Something we must say of Goldsmith; then we may take two contrasted examples, Knox and Scott of Amwell, of the critic in Johnson’s last days who inclined undoubtingly to the classical, and of the critic of the same time who had qualms and stirrings of Romanticism, but was hardly yet a heretic. And then, reserving summary, we may close the record.

498Of Goldsmith as a critic little need be said, though his pen was not much less prolific in this than in other departments. But the angel is too often absent, and Poor Poll distressingly in evidence. Goldsmith. The Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe is simply “prodigious.” It is admirably written—Macaulay owes something to its style, which he only hardened and brazened. The author apes the fashionable philosophastering of the time, and throws in cheap sciolism like the prince of journalists that he was. It is almost always interesting; it is, where it touches life, not literature, sometimes excellently acute; but there is scarcely a critical dictum in it which is other than ridiculous. So in the Citizen of the World the Author’s Club is of course delightful; but why should a sneer at Drayton have been put in the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi? And the miscellaneous Essays, including the Bee, which contain so much of Goldsmith’s best work, are perhaps the best evidences of his nullity here. When one thinks how little it would cost anybody of Goldsmith’s genius (to find such an one I confess would cost more) to write a literary parallel to the magnificent Reverie, which would be even finer, it is enough to draw iron tears down the critic’s cheek. Goldsmith on Taste, Poetry, Metaphor, &c.,^[642] is still the Goldsmith of the Inquiry. His “Account of the Augustan Age,”^[643] though much better, and (unless I mistake) resorted to by some recent critics as a source of criticism different from that mostly prevalent in the nineteenth century, has all the limitations of its own period. And the Essay on Versification,^[644] though it contains expressions which, taken by themselves, might seem to show that Goldsmith had actually emancipated himself from the tyranny of the fixed number of syllables, contains others totally irreconcilable with these, supports English hexameters and sapphics,^[645] and as a whole forces on us once more the reluctant belief that he simply had no clear ideas, no accurate knowledge, on the subject.

499Vicesimus Knox^[646] is a useful figure in this critical Transition Period. Vicesimus Knox. A scholar and a schoolmaster, he had some of the advantages of the first state and some of the defects of the less gracious second, accentuated in both cases by the dying influences of a “classical” tradition which had not the slightest idea that it was moribund. He carries his admiration for Pope to such a point as to assure us somewhere that Pope was a man of exemplary piety and goodness, while Gay was “uncontaminated with the vices of the world,” which is really more than somewhat blind, and more than a little kind, even if we admit that it is wrong to call Pope a bad man, and that Gay had only tolerable vices. He thinks, in his Fourteenth Essay on the “Fluctuations of Taste,” that the Augustans “arrived at that standard of perfection which,” &c.; that the imitators of Ariosto, Spenser, and the smaller poems of Milton are “pleasingly uncouth” [compare Scott, infra, on the metrical renaissance of Dyer], depreciates Gray, and dismisses the Elegy as “a confused heap of splendid ideas”; is certain that Milton’s sonnets “bear no mark of his genius,” and in discussing the versions of “the sensible^[647] Sappho” decides that Catullus is much inferior to—Philips! “The Old English Poets [Essay Thirty-Nine] are deservedly forgotten.” Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve “seem to have thought that rhyme was poetry, and even this constituent they applied with extreme negligence”—the one charge which is unfair against even Occleve, and which, in reference to Chaucer, is proof of utter ignorance. Patriotism probably made him more favourable to Dunbar, Douglas, and Lyndsay, though he groans over the necessity of a glossary in their case also. In fact, Knox is but a Johnson without the genius. Let it, however, be counted to him for righteousness that he defended classical education, including verse-writing, against its enemies, who even then imagined vain things.

John Scott of Amwell, once praised by good wits, now much forgotten, was a very respectable critic and a poet of “glimmerings.” 500Scott of Amwell. In fact, I am not at all sure that he does not deserve to be promoted and postponed to the next volume, as a representative of the rising, not the falling, tide. His Essays on poetry^[648] exhibit in a most interesting way the “know-not-what-to-think-of-it” state of public opinion about the later years of Johnson. He defends Lycidas against the Dictator; yet he finds fault with the “daystar” for acting both as a person and an orb of radiance, and admits the “incorrectness” of the poem, without giving us a hint of the nature or authority of “correctness.” He boldly attacks the consecrated Cooper’s Hill, and sets the rival eminence of Grongar against it, pronouncing Dyer “a sublime but strangely neglected poet,” yet picking very niggling holes in this poet himself. He often anticipates, and oftener seems to be going to anticipate, Wordsworth, who no doubt owed him a good deal; yet he thinks Pope’s famous epigram on Wit “the most concise and just definition of Poetry.” In Grongar Hill itself he thinks the “admixture of metre [its second, certainly, if not its first great charm] rather displeasing to a nice ear”; and though he defends Gray against Knox, he is altogether yea-nay about Windsor Forest, and attacks Thomson’s personifications, without remembering that Gray is at least an equal sinner, and without giving the author of the Seasons, and still more of the Castle of Indolence, any just compensation for his enthusiasm of nature. In fact, Scott is a man walking in twilight, who actually sees the line of dawn, but dares not step out into it.

501