Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/510

As a literary critic, Johnson is not highly rated at the present day. The main reason of this is that he is known chiefly as a critic of poetry; and the school of criticism which he represents tried poetry by rules which are no longer accepted. It is not to be expected that Johnson's reputation in this respect should now experience much change, and yet I venture to think that it deserves to stand somewhat higher. The great fault of his school was that they judged poetry too much by its moral value and its logical coherence, and too little by its qualities as a work of art. For instance, Johnson is exceedingly severe on Gray's odes; and in summing up against one of them, The Bard, he delivers himself as follows:—"I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political." But in the same essay he does justice to the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, because the sentiments are those to which, as he says, "every bosom returns an echo." "Had Gray written often thus," he adds, "it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him." For Milton he had the highest veneration; he has even described him as "that poet whose works may possibly be read when every other monument of British greatness shall be obliterated"; yet he grotesquely disparages Lycidas, because it wears the garb of classical allegory, and he even proceeds to this strange generalisation:—"Milton never learned the art of doing little things with grace." It would have been truer to say that Milton's short poems were seldom little. Then he wishes that Paradise