J. Churton Collins

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”