His work on Shakespeare gave Johnson as good an opportunity as he ever enjoyed for exercising what he believed to be his chief literary talent. ‘There are two things,’ he once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion showing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the authour promised to himself and to the publick.’ The first of these things he did to admiration in his Proposals; the second he attempts in some parts of his Preface. It is plain that he had not been able to do as much as he had hoped by way of restoration and illustration, but it is no less plain that he took pleasure in the accomplished work. Macaulay’s statement that ‘it would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless, edition of any great classic,’ has nothing but emphasis to commend it. Its author was the inventor of that other tedious paradox, that Johnson’s mind was a strange composite of giant powers and low prejudices.[1] A wiser man than Macaulay, James Boswell, had already answered Macaulay’s condemnation, which is even better answered in Johnson’s own words: ‘I have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the whole work has appeared to me corrupt, which I have not endeavoured to restore; or obscure, which I have not
- ↑ ‘Perhaps the lightness of the matter may conduce to the vehemence of the agency; when the truth to be investigated is so near to inexistence, as to escape attention, its bulk is to be enlarged by rage and exclamation.’—Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare.
