Quarterly Review/Volume 208/Dr. Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets’
- Lives of the English Poets. By Samuel Johnson, Ll. D. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D. C. L. Three vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.
- Lives of the most Eminent English Poets, with critical observations on their works. By Samuel Johnson. Edited, with notes corrective and explanatory, by Peter Cunningham, F. S. A. Three vols. London: Murray, 1854.
- The Six Chief Lives from ‘Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.’ Edited, with a preface, by Matthew Arnold. London: Macmillan, 1878.
- Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Edited, with notes, by Mrs. Alexander Napier, and an introduction by J. W. Hales. Three vols. London: Bell, 1890.
- Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. With notes and introduction by Arthur Waugh. Six vols. London: Kegan Paul, 1896.
- The Lives of the most Eminent English Poets. By Samuel Johnson. Three vols. ‘English Classics,’ edited by W. E. Henley. London: Methuen, 1896.
- Johnsonian Miscellanies. Arranged and edited by G. Birkbeck Hill. Two vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897.
Exactly a hundred and twenty-six years have passed since Johnson gave the ‘Lives of the Poets’ in its completed form to the world. It was the most popular of his writings in his own generation, and it has been the most popular of his writings ever since. In spite of all that has intervened since its first appearance, the transformation of the poetry and criticism characteristic of the eighteenth century into the poetry and criticism characteristic of the nineteenth, the indifference with which most of the poets who are the subjects of its critiques are regarded by modern readers, the inevitable dissatisfaction with the aims, the principles, the methods of the older school of criticism, induced by familiarity with those of the schools succeeding it—in spite of all this, it is probable that no decade has passed without new impressions being called for; and that the work still retains its vitality and attractiveness is sufficiently shown by the title-pages transcribed at the head of this article. It requires no great sagacity to foresee that whatever, and however serious, may be the defects of a work which has stood such a test as this, its permanency is secured; for better or for worse it is classical.
And serious indeed are its defects. Some, originating as they do from mere carelessness and inadvertence, are easily remedied by what annotation can supply, and are of comparatively little moment; others, to borrow an expression from Milton, ‘springing from causes in Nature unremoveable,’ are of much graver import and have been as disastrous to Johnson’s critical reputation among those who know as they have been mischievous generally. He appears, like Aristotle, to have been abnormally deficient in imagination, in fancy, in all that is implied in aesthetic sensibility and sympathy. Other defects again may be referred to the fact that his standards and touchstones of taste and expression were derived solely from the Latin classics, and from those writers both in England and France who most nearly resembled them; and when, therefore, he was confronted with any work the measure and significance of which could not be estimated by such criteria, he acquitted himself as he acquitted himself in judging of ‘Lycidas’ and of Gray’s ‘Pindarics.’ But the most serious, and certainly the most offensive, of these defects are to be attributed mainly to faults of temper and faults of age—to prejudice, to arrogance, and to that obstinate indifference to everything but preconceived impressions so common when the mind retains its vigour but loses its plasticity.
All this must be conceded, and it is well that it should be emphasised. The many do not discriminate; with them a classic is a classic, and authority is authority; and deplorable indeed it is when what is erroneous and misleading proceeds from the same source, and has the same currency assured to it, as that which is sound. Bacon observes of studies that they teach not their own use; the same may be said of such a work as Johnson’s ‘Lives.’ With its slips and errors unconnected, and read without guidance, no unfitter book could be placed in any reader’s hands; properly edited, and with a proper commentary, no book more serviceable. When Matthew Arnold, directing attention to the critical interest and educational value of the ‘Lives,’ prepared for students and general readers a selection containing, among others the lives of Milton and Gray, but refrained from any commentary on the critiques of these poets, the boon he conferred was a very questionable one. Nor can it be said that any of the editions cited at the head of this article supplies what is required.
The first editor of the ‘Lives,’ in the proper sense of the term, was Peter Cunningham. He pointed out and corrected several errors of fact, indicated and supplied many omissions due to the haste with which Johnson worked, or to the lack of information not in his time accessible, and with laudable industry gathered together a great mass of illustrative material, anecdotal, historical, and critical. He also prefixed an interesting introduction. Of the editions which intervened between the appearance of Cunningham’s and that of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, the best was that of Mrs. Napier, with an introduction by Prof. Hales; but it added little of importance to what Cunningham had supplied.
All these editions, however, were superseded, for they were absorbed and supplemented by the elaborate work undertaken and brought to the point of completion by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, and recently published in three sumptuous volumes by the Clarendon Press. Dr. Hill, who unhappily died before his work had undergone its final revision, brought to his task the same qualities which enabled him to produce his monumental edition of Boswell’s ‘Johnson’—an acquaintance with Johnson, his contemporaries and his surroundings, never, perhaps, equalled; unwearied industry in research, directed by a conscientiousness, a very passion for accuracy, and thoroughness so intense and so scrupulous that it became almost morbid. All this, combined with his idolatrous reverence for his hero, made him an ideal editor of Boswell, and of the ‘Johnsoniana,’ for his business there was simply with facts and with the elucidation or illustration of them. But something more than this was required in editing such a work as the ‘Lives of the Poets;’ and that something more it was neither Dr. Hill’s desire nor intention to supply. We may regret the absence of any critical prolegomena and critical commentary, but Dr. Hill must be judged, not by what he has not done, but by what he has done; and in the way of elucidation he has done much.
A word of hearty praise—and it is a tribute we gladly pay—is due to Mr. Spencer Scott for the carefulness and competence with which he has fulfilled the pious duty of preparing and seeing these volumes through the press.
The history of Johnson’s work is not only interesting but explains many of its characteristics. In the spring of 1777 the Martins, a well known firm of publishers at Edinburgh, announced a collection of the works of British poets, the first of the kind which had ever been undertaken; but, on the appearance of the opening volumes of the series, every one was disappointed, type and paper alike being of inferior quality, and the texts most inaccurate. It was then the custom of some thirty of the chief London booksellers and publishers to dine together every month at the Shakespeare Tavern in Fleet Street. On one of these occasions the conversation turned on the project of the Martins and the very unsatisfactory way in which it was being carried out. It struck some of them that what had failed in Scotland might, under better management, succeed in England; and it was resolved to make the experiment. Other publishers were consulted; and finally upwards of forty firms combined in the scheme. As popularity had to be studied, the poets chosen for inclusion in the collection were not to be earlier than Milton. No pains were to be spared to make the series acceptable and attractive to general readers. The best engravers were to be employed for the execution of the portraits; and Dr. Johnson was to be invited to contribute short biographical and critical prefaces.
Accordingly, on Easter eve, 1777, three of the leading London publishers, Davies, Strahan, and Cadell waited on Johnson and asked him if he would undertake what they required; he was to name his own terms. He at once consented to their proposal, and suggested two hundred guineas as the fee. As men of business, they must have been amazed at his moderation. Had he, says Malone, asked a thousand or even fifteen hundred guineas they would no doubt readily have given it. Such indeed was the value of his name that they would certainly have been gainers had they closed with him on terms even higher than these. The truth probably is that Johnson was impatient to bring the business to an end and to get rid of the deputation, for it had interrupted him at an unseasonable time. Easter he always observed very scrupulously; and it was in the midst of his preparations for it that the old man had been approached. The deputation, gratefully expressing their thanks, withdrew, having concluded, perhaps, the best bargain ever made by the trade.
It is quite possible that Johnson may, for reasons of his own, have deliberately refrained from asking a larger fee; and certainly at this stage of the business his moderation is more explicable than it became afterwards. His indolence had long been growing upon him. Since the publication of his Shakespeare he had done practically nothing, and he was most unwilling to apply himself to anything involving trouble. Amusement, not labour, was what he probably anticipated when he acceded to the request made to him, for all that had been asked and all that he engaged to do was to prefix to the works of each poet a brief preface—in his own words, ‘an Advertisement like those which we find in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character.’ He had no further responsibility; he neither chose the poets who were included in the collection nor had he any concern with the recension of their texts or with annotation. And he was careful that this should be known. He was indeed most indignant when the volumes of the collection were labelled ‘Johnson’s Poets.’ ‘How,’ he angrily wrote, ‘are they “Johnson’s” when Johnson neither recommended nor revised them?’
However contracted the scope of his original design it was very soon enlarged. The work once begun, he warmed to it; and it was with something like enthusiasm that he proceeded. Nor is this surprising. Though he was in his sixty-ninth year, his mind was in its fullest vigour. His amazing memory had its teeming stores at instantaneous command. He had studied men and life with as much curiosity and interest as he had studied books. He was the first critic and, in pure literature, the first writer of his time. As a poet he was the most distinguished living disciple of the eighteenth century school, and he had produced one poem of superlative merit. He could therefore, in sitting in judgment on the poets reviewed by him, speak with an authority to which few critics could pretend. Where such qualifications and powers as these are combined in a fortunate possessor, it is scarcely in the nature of things that they should not assert themselves. Men are seldom slow to do what they know they can do better than others. Ambition was never at any time a strong passion in Johnson, and, at the stage of life at which he had now arrived, was probably dead. But what ambition could not prompt, a higher motive urged; and ‘an honest desire of giving useful pleasure’ is his modest expression for what he knew and felt was a duty.
It is interesting to follow the progress of the work. A few weeks after the agreement was made, he began to collect material. We find him writing to Boswell for any information he could give him about Thomson, and to Dr. Farmer at Cambridge to enquire whether there was anything likely to be of service to him in the Baker Manuscripts or elsewhere in the archives of the University, offering to come down to Cambridge if it would be of any avail. His correspondence with Nicholls shows what pains he at first took to obtain information. As soon as it was known that he was engaged on the work, his friends were eager to assist him. Boswell procured from Lord Hailes some anecdotes of Dryden and Thomson. Sir Lucas Pepys obtained for him, from the Duke of Newcastle, the invaluable loan of Spence’s anecdotes, then only existing in manuscript. Cradock lent him Milton’s ‘Euripides’ with Milton’s autograph notes. Percy got him Clifford’s remarks on Dryden. Joseph Warton communicated some particulars about Fenton, Collins, and Pitt. He was also greatly assisted by Steevens, his coadjutor in editing Shakespeare, and more particularly by Isaac Reed, whose knowledge of the literature of the period covered by the ‘Lives’ almost rivalled his own, and whose readiness and good nature in communicating what he knew and what he had collected were proverbial. In July 1777 Johnson was in Oxford and visited the Bodleian Library, where, in his own words, he ‘picked up some little information for my “Lives.”’ Between the latter part of October and the beginning of November he was at Lichfield, a guest apparently at Stow-hill, which no doubt accounts for the tradition still current in Lichfield and elsewhere that the ‘Lives’ were written there.
The first ‘Life’ finished was that of Cowley. ‘Waller’ followed immediately after; and both are masterpieces. He had treated these poets, he explained to Nicholls, at such great length because neither of them had had any critical examination before. He next proceeded to Denham and Butler, whose Lives were finished by July 1778, as we learn from one of his letters to Nicholls. He was now anxious to know the opinions of his friends on what he had written, and he requested Nicholls to have the Lives of Waller, Denham, and Butler bound in half-binding in a small volume that he might send it round to them. By August ‘Dryden’ was finished. In January 1779 he began ‘Milton,’ which was completed in six weeks. By March 16 the minor poets were ready for the press; and in the same month the first instalment of the work, containing twenty-two lives, was published, simultaneously with the works of the poets, in four small volumes. In May 1780 he writes to Mrs. Thrale, ‘My “Lives” creep on; I have done Addison, Prior, Howe, Granville, Sheffield, Collins, Pitt, and almost Fenton. I design to take Congreve next in hand.’ And Congreve he ‘despatched,’ as he informs Mrs. Thrale, ‘at the borough where I was attending the election,’ observing, ‘it is one of the best of the little “Lives;” but then,’ he gallantly added, ‘I had your conversation.’
And now his interest in the work began to flag, though the important lives of Swift and Pope still remained to be written, and he became more and more indifferent as he drew nearer to his own time. His task was completed in March 1781; and in the same year the entire collection of poets was published. Johnson's ‘Lives’ filled ten volumes, and the poets themselves, with the indices, fifty-eight. In consideration of his having given them so much more than they had bargained for, the booksellers voluntarily added another hundred guineas to his fee; and, on the ‘Lives’ being published in a separate edition, he was presented with a hundred guineas more. This, considering what the booksellers made out of his work, was just, but certainly not liberal. Johnson, however, magnanimously thought otherwise, good-naturedly observing, ‘I have no reason to complain; the fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but that I have written too much.’
As soon as the work appeared, criticism began; and, as the public naturally held Johnson responsible, not only for the ‘Lives,’ but for the choice of poets as well, he was exposed to much annoyance. Some expressed surprise that Chaucer should not have been included; and many were of opinion—among them George III—that the collection and biographies should have opened, not with Cowley, but with Spenser. To this remark of the King, made presumably before the second part of the series had appeared, Nicholls drew Johnson's attention, and put great pressure on him ‘to gratify his sovereign’s wish.’ But all he could get from the old man was the evasive assurance that he would ‘readily have done so had he been able to obtain any new material.’ The exclusion of Churchill was currently attributed to Johnson’s well-known dislike of him, and the exclusion of Goldsmith—for whose life, however, he had collected memoranda, and which at one time he intended to write—to jealousy. Jealousy was most certainly not the motive, as his generous eulogy of Goldsmith prefixed to the Life of Parnell—to say nothing of his noble epitaph on him—conclusively shows. It is, however, difficult to acquit him of indifference, as arrangements could surely have been made with the bookseller, whose refusal to part with the copyright of ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was the alleged cause of the exclusion of his friend.
Just surprise and disgust were felt by discerning readers at the admission of such a rabble of poetasters as Sheffield, Halifax, Blackmore, Edmund Smith, Stepney, Duke, Yalden, Hughes, Granville, Broome, Pomfret, and Hammond. To modern readers the extraordinary lack of discrimination in choice will be the more remarkable when we remember that the period covered by the ‘Lives’ included Herrick, Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, Carew, Lovelace, and Marvell. Johnson’s reply to these objections was that he had had nothing to do with the choice of the poets. This was no doubt true in the letter, but it was scarcely ingenuous. He well knew that the booksellers would have been only too grateful to him for counsel, and that he had only to express an opinion for that opinion to become law. As it was, it had been at his suggestion that the ‘Creation’ of Blackmore and the poems of Watts, Yalden, and Pomfret were included, a choice conclusively showing that to no admission or exclusion on the part of the booksellers would he have been likely to raise objections.
The truth is, as Southey well observed, the poets before the Restoration were to Johnson what the world before the Flood was to historians. For Chaucer and his contemporaries he had no relish, and of their writings he probably knew little or nothing. His ignorance of the poetry and literature intervening between the end of the fourteenth century and the Elizabethan age, as well as his contempt for it, is shown by the fact that he seldom refers to it; that, when he does, the chances are that he is in error; and that he ridiculed Warton for exploring it. To the literature of the Elizabethan age he was equally indifferent, regarding it pretty much as Horace regarded the writings of Pacuvius, Nævius, and Ennius. How Spenser and Spenser’s contemporaries and immediate successors would have fared in his hands may be judged by his criticisms of Shakespeare’s poems. His consent to the proposal out of which his work developed was no doubt due to the fact that the poets whom he was to introduce were confined to the period with which he was so familiar. That sphere he naturally did not wish to see enlarged, for he was too old to pursue new researches, and too wise to imperil his reputation. For this he cannot be blamed, and he would have disarmed just censure had he candidly acknowledged the truth.
But the exceptions taken to the selection were nothing to the outcry raised against the biographies and critiques. Johnson himself said that he expected to be attacked, and he was not mistaken. Loud on all sides rose the cry. Some complained of the grudging and illiberal estimate of Swift; others were justly offended with the singularly captious and ungracious criticism of Prior; while Collins’ admirers—and he was just then beginning to be appreciated—were little less than incensed at the treatment he had received from his old friend. The contemptuous cursoriness with which ‘poor Lyttelton,’ as Johnson called him, had been dismissed set political and fashionable circles in a nutter, provoking Lord Hardwicke to say that he would himself have taken up the pen against the writer had he not reflected that the cudgel would have been a more appropriate weapon. But, as is not surprising, it was the ‘Milton’ and the ‘Gray’ which raised the loudest storm. Cowper spoke of the first as ‘belabouring that great poet’s character with the most industrious cruelty,’ adding, ‘I could thrash Johnson’s old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.’ Even Johnson’s admirers were distressed at the lengths to which political prejudice had carried him, and amazed at the recklessness with which, in his criticism of the minor poems, he had committed himself to paradoxes so derogatory to his taste and judgment. Not less emphatic were the protests against the treatment which Gray had received; and these found able and eloquent expression in an interesting little monograph by Robert Potter, the translator of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, entitled ‘An Inquiry into some passages in Dr Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets;” particularly his observations on Lyric Poetry and the “Odes” of Gray.’
Over Potter’s little essay it may be well to pause for a moment, because, in addition to its expressing the objections raised generally by Johnson’s contemporaries against the ‘Lives,’ it is one of the earliest manifestoes in criticism of the Romantic school, then slowly beginning to assert itself. Potter begins by acknowledging the merits of the work, ‘the many just observations, the solid sense and deep penetration which even enemies must admire,’ but goes on to regret that there are some passages which Johnson's warmest friends must wish unwritten or obliterated. ‘It is not without some degree of honest indignation that a person of candour observes this spirit of detraction diffused so universally through these volumes.’ He then goes on to say that the work reminded him ‘of the wicker Colossus of the Druids in whose chambers of tribulation an hecatomb of wretches was at once offered as victims to some grim idol supposed to be propitiated by such horrid sacrifices. Of the judgment and taste of the critic we have (he says) a sufficient specimen in the admission, at his special recommendation, of Pomfret, Yalden, Blackmore, and Watts into the collection.’ Speaking of the critiques—he is referring especially to those dealing with Milton’s minor poems, and with Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Gray—he goes on to say:
‘He wished, one would think, to persuade us that he had a general aversion to Nature: if he mentions love it is to ridicule it, if the country it is to sicken at it. Alas, he had no taste for a garden, grove, or a spring—apeluncæ vivique locus. The darkening dell and the nightingale had no charms for him.
The rest of the essay is devoted to a merciless dissection of Johnson’s criticism of Gray’s Odes.
Potter's essay appeared in 1783. In the same strain wrote Scott of Amwell, who, in his ‘Critical Essays on some of the Poems of several English Poets,’ took Johnson’s measure as a critic of lyric poetry and of the poetry of Nature as correctly as Potter had done. Meanwhile an elaborate account of the work, inspired no doubt by the booksellers, had appeared in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ for June and December 1779. Between October 1781 and March 1782 a series of more independent criticisms, written, as we learn from Miss Seward’s ‘Letters,’ by one Fitz-Thomas, appeared in successive numbers; and these, in 1789, were collected into a volume entitled ‘The Art of Criticism as exemplified in Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the most Eminent English Poets.”’ In these and in other communications, particularly in a letter signed ‘Scrutator,’ a formidable list of errors, but principally printer’s errors, were pointed out. Long after their publication, the Lives continued to be the talk everywhere. The bitterest of their assailants was Horace Walpole, who, making (he said) ‘a conscience of not buying them,’ pronounced Johnson to have ‘neither taste nor ear, nor criterion nor judgment, but his old woman’s prejudices.’ He could see nothing in the Life of Pope but ‘a most trumpery performance stuffed with crabbed phrases, vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.’ Miss Seward’s verdict was not more favourable, for we find her some years afterwards speaking of the difficulty of ‘stemming that overwhelming tide of injustice and malignity, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.’
Personal prejudice was no doubt largely responsible for the censures of Horace Walpole and Miss Seward; but no such prejudice could be suspected in Bishop Newton, who was proud of the genius of his fellow-townsman. In his autobiography he expresses himself as ‘hurt and offended at the malevolence that predominates in every part’ of Johnson’s work, observing that ‘his reputation was so high in the republic of letters that it wanted not to be raised on the ruins of others,’ and greatly regretting that the ‘Lives,’ instead of ‘raising a higher idea than was before entertained of their writer's understanding, have certainly given the world a worse opinion of his temper.’ ‘I respected him (the Bishop continues), not only for his genius and learning, but valued him much more for the more amiable part of his character, his humanity and charity, his morality and religion.’ Boswell very naïvely attributes these remarks to the disgust and peevishness of old age; and Johnson, who must not only have known that they were sincere, but probably recognised that, in a large measure, they were just, did himself little credit by contemptuously observing that Newton, who was then dead, would never have dared to publish them in his lifetime.
Such was the impression which this celebrated work made on those who witnessed its appearance. And, when we remember that even its assailants, or at least the majority of them, recognised, always tacitly and some times eloquently, its transcendent merits, we cannot but be surprised how little the estimate formed of it by Johnson’s contemporaries differs from the estimate formed of it now. Had it appeared twenty years earlier, we may fairly question whether any of its critical verdicts would have been disputed; but it appeared at a moment when poetry and criticism were beginning to assume new phases and were indeed on the eve of revolution. A reaction against the Classical School had set in, and had become progressively accentuated, not only in the new elements entering into poetry, but in the changes perceptible in the spirit and sympathies of criticism. It would be no exaggeration to say that in our poetry, between about 1745 and the appearance of Johnson’s work, may be discerned in adumbration or in embryo almost all the characteristics of the Romantic school as represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott.
And what is true of the poetry of that time is true of the criticism which was then beginning to find expression everywhere; sometimes aggressively, as in such works as Joseph Warton’s ‘Essay on Pope’ and his brother’s ‘Essay on Spenser’ and ‘History of English Poetry,’ the object of which was not only to call attention to the merits of our older poets, but to readjust the focus of comparative criticism. The result was that new standards and new criteria were applied to poetry. The cry was for simplicity and Nature; and, the further poetry receded from art, or from what was denominated art, the greater was the favour with which it was regarded. Hence the attention which now began to be paid to the Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan poets, and the great popularity of such works as Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ and Percy’s ‘Reliques.’ A reaction against the Classical School and its canons was, in the nature of things, inevitable; and from all such reactions extravagance is inseparable. But the results were salutary. It was high time for criticism to call to account the judgments which had never distinguished between rhetoric and poetry, which had exalted art and talent above Nature and enthusiasm, and which, ignoring in poetry its finer and nobler attributes, had placed at the head of our poets those who belonged essentially to the second rank.
But the sympathies and canons of the new criticism were anathema to Johnson; temperament, associations, and education alike disqualifying him for comprehending them. To him Chaucer was little better than a Goth, Spenser obsolete, and Shakespeare an inspired barbarian. For him English poetry began with Waller and culminated in Pope. He thus belonged entirely to the old school, being probably its last completely typical representative, as he was certainly its most powerful living exponent. The work therefore, both in its merits and in its limitations, is of singular interest historically, summing up as it does, with aggressive emphasis, the criticism which, between the appearance of Dryden and the later years of Johnson’s life, had regulated taste and controlled critical opinion in England. Not a note in it indicates the smallest sympathy either with the new school of poetry or with the new school of criticism, but there is much in it which indicates that it was designed, and studiously designed, to be a protest against both. Thus, in the ‘Life of Pope,’ he exultingly asks, ‘If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ and in dealing with poets, notably Milton, Parnell, Collins, Dyer, and Gray, into whose work the qualities so highly prized by the Romanticists enter, he either passes over the poems marked by them, or, if he reviews them, ignores the qualities themselves, or, still more frequently, dismisses them with, a sneer. But nothing shows so forcibly that it was Johnson’s intention to vindicate and glorify the school in which he believed, and to which he himself belonged, as the elaborate panegyrics of its chief leaders, and the fact that his appreciation of the minor poets is regulated by their fidelity to, or their deviation from, its canons and traditions. Should any one doubt this, he would do well to compare the critique of Roscommon with the critique of Collins, or the critiques of Denham and Waller with those of Gray and Dyer.
But, if the chief defects and limitations of the ‘Lives’ have an historical interest, an interest of a very different kind attaches itself to the work as a whole. Within his sphere and at his best Johnson has no superior, or perhaps it would be more correct to say no equal, in our literature at least, as a critic. That sphere was, it must be admitted, a comparatively narrow one; and, even when within it, he was not always at his best. He describes himself as having written the ‘Lives’ in his ‘usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work and working with vigour and haste.’ Of this haste the indications are at first evident only when he is dealing with poets of little importance, but they become increasingly apparent as the work proceeds and he approaches the poets of his own time, many of whom are despatched with ill-disguised impatience and with very little ceremony. In the greater part and in all the important parts of his work, vigour is certainly more in evidence than haste. Sainte-Beuve tells us that, in a conversation he once had with Villemaine, who was decrying Johnson, he defended him by saying that, whatever might be Johnson’s limitations, he had at least two of the qualities essential to a great critic—sound judgment and the authority requisite to give weight to it. This puts Johnson exactly in his place. On everything submitted to him he brought to bear, when unprejudiced, sound judgment and robust good sense, combined with extraordinary natural acuteness.
A logical and positive intellect incessantly occupied in analysis and generalisation and enlarged and fertilised by multifarious reading and attentive observation of life, however little it may have contributed to develope the finer sensibilities and sympathies of the critic, not only furnished him with immense general stores of digested information, but with invaluable criteria. If his studies were bounded by his tastes and his inclinations, and these, early fixed, had become prematurely stereotyped, their efficacy and influence had been doubled by their very contraction; for what he had read he retained and assimilated, and on what he had made his own he exercised his judgment. Thus he applied himself to criticism with fixed principles, settled rules, and definite canons, not arbitrarily determined, but deduced from the studies to which taste and temperament inclined him—the Latin classics and their modern disciples chiefly—well weighed in the balance of his own judgment and having the sanction of common sense. Within these limits, and universally (it may be added) in what pertains, within the bounds of rhetoric, to the art of expression, his judgments are not merely sound but almost infallible. One gift Johnson possessed which the most perfect critic who ever lived might envy—his power of investing with distinction and impressiveness whatever he wished to convey or enforce.
But to turn to the Lives themselves. The first in order of composition was the Life of Savage, published as a separate work in 1744 and incorporated with the other Lives many years afterwards. It was written under pressure and with extraordinary rapidity, and is a bad specimen of Johnson’s first and worst style. The miserable story which is told could scarcely be told more impressively and pathetically; but half the story, as told by Johnson, is fiction. We are surprised that his editors should have allowed this biography to stand without directing attention to the monstrous myth to which Johnson in all innocence gave currency. So far back as 1858, Mr. Moy Thomas conclusively proved that Savage’s claim to be the son of the Countess of Macclesfield and Earl Rivers had not, as he himself well knew, a shred of evidence to support it, but that in urging it he had simply availed himself of an opportunity afforded by a half-forgotten scandal in the Countess’s early life to levy blackmail on her and on her family. A baser, crueller, and blacker-hearted scoundrel than the subject of Johnson’s pathetic narrative never existed. His untruthfulness and want of principle Johnson himself acknowledges; and how, with such facts before him as he must have had, he could have been deceived by him is a mystery. Yet so it was; and one of the most callous impostors who ever lived will continue to excite pity, and one of the kindest and most tender-hearted of women execration as a prodigy of cruelty and unnaturalness.
The Lives proper begin with the Life of Cowley. This Johnson always considered the best on account of the dissertation on the metaphysical poets. Of that dissertation he had reason to be proud. It is a master piece of analytical criticism. But the whole Life is written with great care and is in Johnson’s best style. Cowley has many sides; and Johnson does justice to all. It is, however, curious that he should apparently have found little attraction in poems which, to readers in our day, have much more interest than those singled out by him for special notice. Such would be the Ode on the use of Reason in divine matters. Surely the passage in which the relation of reason to faith is described is far more striking than any quoted by Johnson:
‘…Reason must assist too; for, in seas
So vast and dangerous as these,
Our course by stars above we cannot know
Without the compass too below.
Though Reason cannot through Faith’s mysteries see,
It sees that there and such they be:
Leads to Heaven’s door and there does humbly keep,
And there through chinks and key-holes peep.
Though it, like Moses, by a sad command
Must not come into th’ Holy Land,
Yet thither it infallibly does guide,
And from afar ’tis all descry’d.’
Johnson’s remarks on the importance of language and style as the dress of thought, and his criticism of Cowley’s negligence in this respect, are truly admirable. One paragraph may be quoted:
‘Truth indeed is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have an intrinsic and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual gold which defies destruction. But gold may be so concealed in baser matter that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in unrefined and plebeian words that none but philosophers can distinguish it; and both may be so buried in impurities as not to pay the cost of their extraction.’
The Life of Waller, which, in order of composition, followed that of Cowley, is written with equal care and elaboration, and is one of the most finished of the series. Waller scarcely rises above mediocrity as a poet, but he is of importance in the history of the Critical School, and was, moreover, a most interesting man; and this is some justification for the prominence which Johnson has given him. To Waller’s adventures and witticisms ample justice, to his merits and services as a poet more than justice, is done. In none of the ‘Lives’ are there more brilliant passages. Thus he speaks of Waller’s unsuccessful poetical courtship of Sacharissa and subsequent marriage with a less brilliant mistress:
‘He doubtless praised some whom he would have been afraid to marry, and perhaps married one whom he would have been ashamed to praise. Many qualities contribute to domestic happiness upon which poetry has no colours to bestow; and many airs and sallies may delight imagination which he who flatters them can never approve. There are charms made only for distant admiration. No spectacle is nobler than a blaze.’
Such, too, are the remarks about Waller’s fickleness, and the summary of the general character of his poetry. But the most memorable passage is the justly famous digression on the relation of poetry to religion. It is, however, little more than a piece of splendid sophistry, with a certain amount of truth infused into it, and expressed with an eloquence so fervid that it resembles inspiration. Its best refutation was, as Mrs. Thrale told him, the very practical one of his own inability to restrain his tears whenever he heard the ‘Dies Iræ.’ As to Denham, we smile to hear him described as ‘one of the fathers of English poetry.’ Yet there is no mismeasurement in the rest of the critique on this poet; and the term applied to him, being evidently limited to his influence on the style and tone of the Critical School, is, in its strict application less absurd than it appears.
Next to the Life of Denham comes the Life of Milton. It was composed with great care, for Johnson knew that he was on his mettle, and in point of style as well in the power and acumen displayed occasionally and in particular passages is among the best of the ‘Lives.’ The first thing which strikes us in it is the aggressive and defiant spirit in which it was evidently written. It was plainly designed to shock and offend the admirers of Milton; indeed he frankly said to Malone ‘we have too many honeysuckle lives of Milton; mine shall be in another strain.’ He detested Milton’s politics, he disliked his character, and he had no relish for his poetry. But Johnson’s nature was too noble for malignity and too honest to palter with truth. He told the truth, but he told it with reserve and coldness when it was to Milton’s credit, and with all the emphasis he could command when it was not to his credit. On what was unpleasing and unamiable in that great man he lays undue stress; and, where he should have been indulgent he is querulous and exacting. He sneers, he objurgates, he censures where, if he pleased, he had a perfect right to do so, but where good-nature would have been silent. His worst offence in the biography is the countenance he gives to the story that Milton interpolated the prayer from Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ in ‘Icon Basilike,’ an abominable charge, of the truth of which he should have satisfied himself before recording and giving it currency. The sincerity of his portentous criticism of ‘Comus,’ of ‘Lycidas,’ of the Sonnets, and of ‘Samson Agonistes’ need not be suspected, though prejudice against their author and a paradoxical desire to astonish and disgust his admirers were no doubt largely responsible for its extravagance.
It may fairly be deduced from Johnson’s temper and critical utterances that ‘Paradise Lost’ really appealed to him almost as little as ‘Comus’ and ‘Samson Agonistes;’ but intellectually he recognised its greatness, and was well aware that to dispute its supremacy in modern epic poetry would have been as futile as to dispute the supremacy of the Iliad and Odyssey in ancient. He therefore prepared himself for a great effort when he came to deal with it. The moment we compare his critique with such critiques, say, as those of Hazlitt and Coleridge, we perceive all the difference between the criticism of insight and the criticism of the pedant and the rhetorician, between the criticism which pierces to what is essential and of the life, and the criticism which confines itself to accidents and is of the form. There is much in this famous critique which is absurd, much which is inconsistent, and much more to which just exception may be taken. It is indeed sufficient to say that Johnson pronounces or at least implies that Milton’s blank verse is verse only to the eye; that he compares his diction to a Babylonian dialect; that he sees no sublimity in the allegory of Sin and Death and would wish it away; and that he says of the poem as a whole that its perusal is rather a duty than a pleasure. The last remark, if consistent with the concluding sentence of the critique, namely, that ‘Paradise Lost’ is not the greatest of heroic poems only because it is not the first, can be consistent only in a sense derogatory to the taste and intelligence of its readers. Johnson is far more satisfactory in what is in this Life incidental, in his admirable remarks on the true aims of education, and on the reasons which may be urged for and against the freedom of the press. These are worth all his critiques of the poems put together.
In dealing with Butler, Johnson is at his very best. The comparison of ‘Hudibras’ with ‘Don Quixote,’ the analysis of what constitutes the originality and peculiar merits of the former, and the disquisition on the perishable and permanent elements in such works, are as interesting as they are illumining. Of the minor poets contemporary with Dryden, the least satisfactory are Otway and Rochester, and the best is Roscommon. That in the case of Rochester he should have confined himself to a few superficial remarks about his trifles and said nothing of his singularly powerful poem, ‘A Satire against Mankind,’ beyond coldly remarking that Rochester ‘can only claim what remains when all Boileau’s part is taken away,’ is not a little surprising, especially in the author of ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes.’ He might well have been arrested, as both Goethe and Tennyson were, by such a passage as
Which leaves the light of Nature, sense, behind;
Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes
Through Error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes.
•••••
Then Old Age and Experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.’
The remarks in the Life of Roscommon, on a proposal for a national Academy, one sentence of which may be quoted, are an excellent illustration of Johnson's good sense.
‘If an academician’s place were profitable it would be given by interest; if attendance were gratuitous it would be rarely paid, and no man would endure the least disgust. Unanimity is impossible, and debate would separate the assembly.’
Notices of five all but worthless poetasters, Pomfret, Stepney, Walsh, Dorset, and John Philips—the last two feebly surviving, one through a sprightly lyric, and the other by an ingenious parody of Milton—bring us to Dryden. This, were it not deformed by the interpolation of coarse and stupid extracts from pamphlets long deservedly forgotten, and by the extravagant eulogy of the Ode on the Death of Anne Killigrew, would be read with unalloyed satisfaction and admiration. The biographical and critical portions are alike excellent. With the exception referred to it has no mismeasurements, and it has no paradoxes. The general estimate of Dryden and the particular estimates of his work as a didactic poet, a satirist, a dramatist, a translator, a critic, and prose-writer, are among the finalities of critical arbitration. Nor are these judgments affected by the absurdity, relatively speaking, of the concluding dictum that Dryden found English poetry brick and left it marble; for Johnson fortunately institutes no comparisons with preceding poets, nor does he attempt any definition of poetry. He assumes it to be what his touchstones and tests narrowed it into being; and the application of such tests justified his estimate both of Dryden’s achievement, and the effect of that achievement on the work of his successors.
It is not necessary to pursue this review in detail through the minor poets preceding and contemporary with the great trio, Swift, Addison, and Pope. As a rule Johnson does more than justice to their merits when such merits are within the grooves of the critical tradition, and much less than justice when any new notes are struck. Thus he describes Howe’s ‘Lucan’ as ‘one of the greatest productions of English poetry,’ Young’s ‘Universal Passion’ as ‘a very great performance;’ and he speaks of Blackmore’s ‘Creation’ as ‘transmitting him to posterity among the first favourites of the English muse.’ But for the charms and beauty of such poems as Parnell’s ‘Night-piece on Death’ and ‘Ode to Contentment’ he has no word of praise; and to Watts’ sublime Sapphics on the Last Day he does not even refer. The Life of Congreve, in which he gives an animated account of the controversy with Collier, is in his best vein; but, when he tells us that Congreve was the first to teach English writers that Pindar’s Odes were regular, he forgot Ben Jonson. Johnson has been ridiculed for his extravagant eulogy of the passage quoted by him from the ‘Mourning Bride;’ but how true after all, and how admirable is his commentary on the passage:
‘He who reads these lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty and enlarged with majesty.’
The critique of Prior must have been written iniquo tempore, in some mood of irritable caprice; nothing so inadequate, so captious, and so palpably unjust ever came from Johnson’s pen. To say that Prior’s ‘expression has every mark of laborious study, his words not coming till they were called, and then being put by constraint into their places where they did their duty, but did it sullenly,’ is to say what even the least successful of the pieces of one of the most perfect artists in epigram and in the lighter ode who have ever lived would instantly refute. Fenton is another poet to whom Johnson did not do justice. Genius might at least have been allowed to a poet who could write like this:
With blind Opinion for his guide,
And, rebel to her rightful sway,
Leave all her bounties unenjoy’d?
Fool! Time no change of motion knows;
With equal speed the torrent flows,
To sweep Fame, Power, and Wealth away.
The Fast is all by Death possess’d;
And frugal Fate, that guards the rest,
By giving, bids him live to-day.’
To Garth, Gray, Tickell, Ambrose Philips, Mallet, and Shenstone, Johnson assigns very exactly the places which belong to them, though we are surprised that, in dealing with Garth, he makes no reference to the fine lines on death in the canto of ‘The Dispensary,’ and in dealing with Tickell, says no word either about the eloquent elegy on Lord Cadogan or the charming ballad of ‘Colin and Lucy.’ His criticism of Akenside, in which he has some very sensible remarks about the encouragement which blank verse gives to diffuseness and luxuriance, is distinguished by the same good sense and acumen as are displayed in the incidental exposure of Shaftesbury’s sophism that ridicule is the test of truth.
Considering how little Johnson cared for Nature, it is a pleasing surprise to find him acquitting himself so creditably in dealing with Thomson. Beyond remarking that the first canto opens a scene of lazy luxury that fills the imagination, he says nothing, it is true, of Thomson’s finest poem, the ‘Castle of Indolence;’ but he speaks with something of enthusiasm of the ‘Seasons,’ observing that Thomson ‘looks round on Nature and on life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet.’ When he adds that the reader of the ‘Seasons’ ‘wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses,’ he very naïvely and amusingly betrays his own limitations. The critique of Young is discriminating and just, but superficial. Thus of his Satires he observes that ‘he plays only on the surface of life, he never penetrates the recesses of the mind; and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal, and his conceits please only when they surprise;’ of the ‘Night Thoughts,’ that they ‘exhibit a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour;’ of the ‘Last Day,’ that ‘it has an equability and propriety which he afterwards either never endeavoured or never attained.’ All quite true; but he does not so much as indicate the true sources of Young’s power, a power at times absolutely thrilling—an exquisite sensibility and grand imagination, fitfully revealing themselves in intensity and sublimity, but in an intensity which is never sustained, and a sublimity which exhibits itself only in flashes.
We now come to Johnson’s more important efforts. The Lives of Addison and Pope stand beside those of Cowley and Dryden, and constitute with them his master pieces in criticism. On the ‘Addison’ it would be difficult if not impossible for any critic to improve; it is almost without a flaw both as a biography and as a critique. The long extracts from Dennis’ coarse but acute strictures on ‘Cato’might have been spared, and the merit of Addison’s papers in the Whig ‘Examiner’ is extraordinarily overrated; but, for the rest, there is nothing that could be wished away and nothing that could be with advantage added. In brilliance, in power, and in varied attractiveness, but not in balance and measure, the Life of Pope is superior to that of Addison; it is the most elaborate of the Lives, and with the composition of it Johnson took great pains. A more delightful biography is not to be found, for it tells with a particularity which is never tiresome all that the most curious reader could desire to know about a celebrated man; it is surprising with what a wealth of anecdote, gathered from all sources, from those who knew Pope personally as well as from books, Johnson illustrates Pope’s character and habits. All this is enlivened and embellished by a running commentary now shrewd and pungent, now profoundly wise, as sparkling with epigram as a comedy of Congreve and as weighty with aphorism as an essay of Bacon. Among the passages which every reader would pause over would be the beautiful remarks about Pope’s filial piety, and the still more beautiful remarks about the ties which bound him to an ungrateful mistress; the exposure of the absurdity of cynicism real or affected; the profound truth of the observations on the supposed unreserve of men in friendship; and above all the explosion of the fallacy that assumes a ‘universal passion’ in human nature.
The critical portion of the Life is equally masterly, equally informing and attractive. And indeed this critique has uncommon interest, for it is not merely an estimate of Pope and of Pope’s work particularly, but a vindication, through that estimate, of the claims of the Critical School to a high rank in poetry generally. Johnson is, it must be owned, far more successful in establishing Pope’s title to be considered a poet, and a great poet, on his own merits and judged by the standard and touchstones applicable to his work, than in establishing his title to a high place among poets whose achievement must be tested by touchstones applicable to such poets as Homer. Johnson, indeed, solves his critical knot in true Gordian fashion, bringing his otherwise perfectly just and most masterly vindication of Pope to a very lame and impotent conclusion. ‘If the writer of the Iliad were to class his successors, he would assign a very high place to his translator without requiring any other evidence of his genius.’ And yet there are no mismeasurements in his appreciation of particular poems, and in his general estimate of Pope no exaggeration. When he contends that Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each other, all the qualities that constituted genius—invention as displayed in the ‘Rape of the Lock’ and in the ‘Essay on Criticism,’ imagination as in ‘Eloisa,’ ‘Windsor Forest,’ and the Moral Essays, and judgment as in evidence everywhere—who would dispute it?
It would have been well for Johnson’s reputation had his scheme not included Collins and Gray. For his judgment of Collins, his innate insensibility to all that constitutes the power and charm of the Odes was no doubt alone responsible; and it is merely an example of an infirmity which never fails to become conspicuous whenever he treats of poetry into which the finer elements enter. To a critic who could say of painting that it could represent but could not inform, who saw in Fleet Street the finest prospect in the world, and who never referred to our old ballad literature except to laugh at it, such poems as the Odes to Fear, to Evening, and on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, could hardly be expected to appeal.
But something more than deficiency in aesthetic fusibility enters into the critique of Gray, as it had entered into the critique of Milton. For Gray and Gray’s circle he could never, in conversation, restrain his dislike and contempt, to both of which he was in the habit of giving very intemperate expression. Gray, he regarded as an affected and effeminate coxcomb, Mason as a prig, and Walpole as a fashionable fribble. When he wrote this Life, Gray had been dead ten years; but Gray’s friends and admirers, Mason and Walpole, were alive. Of deliberate injustice Johnson was at all times incapable; and, since the grave had closed over Gray, softening what it seldom fails to soften in the living, and Mason’s Life of him had appeared, Johnson would have been forced, had he not been willing, to allow that Gray was no ordinary man. But of Gray’s poetry his estimate remained unchanged; and that estimate he took care to express with all the emphasis he could command; partly in self-defence, to justify opinions formed originally, no doubt, in the heat of prejudice, but to which his critical reputation was committed; and partly to annoy and irritate Gray’s admirers, particularly Walpole and Mason. He was more successful in his last object than in his first. A more comprehensive and deplorable exhibition of his infirmities as a critic he could scarcely have given.
Making every allowance for Johnson’s ignorance of Pindar and of the Greek poets, and even for all that is indicated in his pronouncement that no man could have fancied he read ‘Lycidas’ with pleasure had he not known the author, it is astonishing that he could have been capable of such portents of critical opacity and obliquity as his critiques of the ‘Bard’ and the ‘Progress of Poetry.’ To the Installation Ode, with its exquisite occasional beauties and its majestic evolution, he does not even refer. A few peddling and carping objections to its figures and epithets, and the remark that it suggests nothing to its author which every reader does not equally think and feel, are all that the Ode on the Prospect of Eton College elicits from him. He is so inconsistent as to praise the Elegy for what he blames in the Ode, remarking in commendation that it ‘abounds with images that find a mirror in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.’ Of Gray’s essential and peculiar excellences—the noble evolution and mingled picturesqueness and sublimity of the two great odes; all those qualities which, in the Ode to Adversity and in the Eton ode, place him at the head of our ethical lyric poetry; his high seriousness, his fine ear and wonderful music, his exquisite sense of style and his consummate mastery of it—of all this Johnson appears to be utterly insensible.
But with all its limitations and defects, the ‘Lives of the Poets’ is a great work. There is no mistaking its note, it is the note of a classic. Its style, distinguished and original, is in the happiest accordance with what it expresses and is a model of its kind. In every page we instinctively feel that a master, sure of himself and morally as well as intellectually justified in such confidence, is addressing us. Serious deductions have no doubt to be made for infirmities of various kinds and originating from various causes, but they are more than compensated; and what compensates them has added importantly and permanently to the common stock of intellectual wealth. The work has almost as much value and certainly as much interest for the student of life as for the student of books. From the comments and observations on human nature and the world of men scattered throughout the biographical portions may be culled an anthology of wit and wisdom which need fear comparison with no similar anthology in the world. It is rare indeed to read two consecutive pages without being arrested by some shrewd or wise reflection, some moral truth generalised in felicitous aphorism, or some epigram, sarcastic or serious, as pointed and pungent as the best in Tacitus or La Rochefoucauld. Few books exist which possess so many attractions or in which so much that instructs and informs, and so much that amuses are mingled. As a contribution to criticism, the least that can be said for it is that, on the poetry and polite literature characteristic of the eighteenth century, and on the writings of the early fathers of that literature, it is an indispensable and imperishable commentary; that, even where it is misleading and unsound, it is yet instructive; and that there is no book in our language which, to a critical education, would contribute so much which is furthering and so much which is illumining.