Walter Alexander Raleigh

“ He has almost become the tutelary genius of the English people. He embodies all that we most admire in ourselves. When we pretend to laugh at our national character, we call it John Bull; when we wish to glorify it, we call it Samuel Johnson. There have been greater writers among the English, but none of them would be so readily accepted as a public trustee. The supremacy of Shakespeare is not to be challenged, but Shakespeare is too great, too catholic, and, when all is said, too unintelligible, to stand for the typical Englishman. Moreover, Shakespeare is first of all a poet ”

“ The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises, and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but, few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.
Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds from the display of those parts of nature which attract, and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination: but religion must be shewn as it is ”

“ But Johnson was worth it; and it is Boswell’s high distinction that he knew that Johnson was worth it. The world is not so constructed that a fool, by sheer force of loquacity and indiscretion, can make a pompous old dogmatist into one of the great live figures of its history. What happened was something very different. A man of profound humanity and conquering intellect lived a private life in London, never seeking public fame or exalted company, content to amuse his leisure hours with the conversation of his friends. ”

“ The public, after all, is a shrewd critic of its worshippers and sectaries. When a man studies it and flatters it, it is pleased, but not deceived. It knows itself to be the patron of its most zealous suitors, and treats them with a certain proprietary kindness. No one ever dared to approach Johnson in this fashion; he never had a patron, he never went a yard out of his way to court public approbation, for twenty years he held on without complaint, until in the end he dominated and enslaved the opinion that he had not sought to conciliate. ”

“ It ought to be a comfort to men past middle life to find that Johnson, like Dryden, wrote his best prose in his latest years. Good poetry has been written by young, even by very young, men; the best prose is out of their reach. They are too full of ideas which have never borne the test of practice; their prose tends to rhapsody, or argument, or the abstract graces of the mathematics. In poetry they can give shape to vague hopes and desires; in the more matter-of-fact treatment which prose demands, if they strike the personal note, they fear to be foolish, and are foolish. ”

“ The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.
This is powerful argument, but perhaps it proves more than Johnson intended. If a subject can be too serious for poetry, then poetry, it would seem, must be confined to graceful fiction. If repentance is not at leisure for cadences and epithets, neither is love, nor any other passion. ”

“ No such searching ordeal has ever been applied to any human character with the same result. Everything that Johnson said in conversation during the later part of his life was liable to be recorded for posterity. A merely clever man, talking for reputation, would have crumpled under the test; Johnson has emerged from it unscathed. His truth and his humanity were a match for all they met; so that to lose a year of his commentary on life is to lose a year, not of talk, but of life itself. ”

“ Boswell was argumentative, like a Scottish philosopher, on death; Mrs. Thrale was flippant, like a fashionable lady, on poverty—hence the fierceness of Johnson’s replies.
It would be easy to show how each of the biographies of Johnson is limited and coloured by the predilections of the writer, and by the nature of his, or her, relationship to the great man. Johnson’s talk, even though it be faithfully recorded, loses most of its value when it is taken out of its setting. No one says all that he thinks in talk. He selects only what has some relation to the company and the circumstances. ”

“ Not every one can see a great event while it happens, or a great man while he lives. If Boswell had this power, it was because his mind, naturally quick and curious, was made almost preternaturally sensible by the overwhelming reverence and affection that he felt for Johnson. What a pity it is that neither Swift nor Goldsmith was worshipped as Johnson was worshipped, by a brother in the craft! ”

“ The contrast between himself and Swift may be best expressed in their own words: ‘I heartily hate and detest that animal called man,’ said Swift, ‘although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.’ Johnson’s attitude was the reverse of this. He used to say that the world was well constructed, but that the particular people disgraced the elegance and beauty of the general fabric. Yet it was he, not the hearty lover of ‘John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth,’ who had the deeper sense of the tie that binds man to man. ”

“ Indeed, Walton’s Lives are almost too perfect to serve as models. They are obituary poems; each of them has the unity and the melody of a song or a sonnet; they deal with no problems, but sing the praises of obscure beneficence and a mind that seeks its happiness in the shade. No English writer before Walton had so skilfully illustrated men’s natural disposition and manners from the most casual acts and circumstances. It is not in the crisis of great events that he paints his heroes, but in their most retired contemplations and the ordinary round of their daily life. ”

“ All these, in many ways, knew Johnson better than Boswell knew him. But Boswell has distanced them all, in spite of their advantages, not because he was a fool, as Macaulay thinks, but because he loved Johnson better than they did. The Life is a monument to an affection that was almost a passion. Savage was attentive to Johnson, and patronized him, and borrowed money of him; Mrs. Thrale grew tired, before the end, of the burden of his masterful ways; Goldsmith and Reynolds were companionable and friendly when they met him, and had many other things to think of when he was absent. ”

“ No one ever felt more keenly the death of a friend or relative. ‘The death of my mother,’ he wrote, ten years before it happened, ‘is one of the few calamities on which I think with terror.’ Yet he would not permit others to speak extravagantly of their losses; ‘for,’ said he, ‘we must either outlive our friends, you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no man that would hesitate about the choice.’
What is the virtue of even the most trivial stories concerning Johnson? Their power does not depend on anything exceptional in thought. ”

“ Of all great men, dead or alive, he is the best known to us; yet perhaps he was greater than we know.
The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary history. Boswell was a man of genius; the idle paradox which presents him in the likeness of a lucky dunce was never tenable by serious criticism, and has long since been rejected by all who bring thought to bear on the problems of literature. ”

“ Wishing to know what ideas had made Johnson popular, he turned over the pages of his Dictionary, his eight volumes of essays, his biographies, his numberless articles, his conversation so carefully collected, and he yawned. ‘His truths,’ says this critic, ‘are too true, we already know his precepts by heart. We learn from him that life is short, and we ought to improve the few moments granted us; that a mother ought not to bring up her son as a fop; that a man ought to repent of his faults and yet avoid superstition; that in everything we ought to be active and not hurried. ”

“ This is not a little thing to do; but it cannot be done continuously, and it has furnished the workaday critic with a vicious model. There is a taint of insincerity about romantic criticism, from which not even the great romantics are free. They are never in danger from the pitfalls that waylay the plodding critic; but they are always falling upward, as it were, into vacuity. They love to lose themselves in an O altitudo. From the most worthless material they will fashion a new hasty altar to the unknown God. When they are inspired by their divinity they say wonderful things ”

“ No doubt there is useful work to be done, here as elsewhere, by men who ply a dull mechanical trade and forswear imagination. But imaginative sympathy is, none the less, the soul of an antiquary, the impulse that urges him on to years of tedious labour, and the refreshment that keeps him alive in a desert of dust and tombs. ‘Methinks,’ says Aubrey, ‘I am carried on by a kind of Oestrum, for nobody else hereabout hardly cares for it, but rather makes a scorn of it. ”

“ The confessions of a young man are always too defiant or too exclusively self-conscious; he has his account yet to settle with the world, and does not know exactly how he stands. He is dealing with an unknown and powerful adversary, so that even while he aims at truth, the instinct of self-preservation overmasters him, and he achieves only diplomacy. The best prose is rightly called pedestrian; at every step it must find a foothold on the ground of experience, firm enough to support its weight. It is more various than poetry, and richer in implied meaning ”

“ The Dictionary of National Biography, under his control, became a gymnasium for authors, a gymnasium where no one was permitted to exercise his muscle until he had stripped himself of those garments which ordinary literary society expects authors to wear. It was Leslie Stephen’s aim to prove that this avoidance of superfluity is not the negation of criticism. He was nothing if not critical, but he endeavoured to identify his criticism with the facts, to make it the wall of the building, not a flying buttress. ”

“ It is true that Johnson thought often of death; but he did not think of it sentimentally. ‘When we were alone,’ says Boswell, under the year 1769, ‘I introduced the subject of death, and endeavoured to maintain that the fear of it might be got over.’ After some exchange of argument, Johnson answered, in a passion, ‘No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.... A man knows it must be so and submits. It will do him no good to whine.’ ‘I attempted,’ says Boswell, ‘to continue the conversation. ”

“ It would not be difficult to show that much new light has been thrown on parts of Shakespeare’s work by the more reverential treatment. Yet perhaps it has obscured as much as it has elucidated. So fixed a habit of appreciation is the death of individuality and taste. Discipleship is a necessary stage in the study of any great poet; it is not a necessary qualification of the mature critic. The acclamation of his following is not so honourable a tribute to a prize-fighter as the respect of his antagonist. In a certain sense Johnson was antagonistic to Shakespeare. ”

“ If we consider, therefore, the enormous learning of Anthony à Wood, in a kind for which the Oxford of his day had little sympathy, his love of a solitary and retired life, his liberty of speech, his quickness of observation, even when ‘he seemed to take notice of nothing and to know nothing,’ his independent pride and sarcastic severity of judgement, we shall find no reason to wonder that the fellows of Merton, solicitous chiefly, it may be, for the dignity and comfort of the high table, were not sorry to be rid of his company. ”

“ How could he despise those whom he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation his esteem of himself was superstructed? Why should he hate those to whose favour he owed his honour and his ease? Of things that terminate in human life the world is the proper judge: to despise its sentence, if it were possible, is not just; and if it were just is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper ”

“ The work in literary criticism that was done by him, and by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was unlike most of the criticism of the last age. Amid a crowd of treatises which directed attention chiefly to the manner of an author, it was a solid comfort to come across a critic who made it his business to grasp the matter, and who paid even a poet the compliment of supposing that he had something to say. There is no finer literary model than bare matter of fact ”

“ This magnanimous carelessness with regard to detail helped rather than hindered the breadth and justice of Johnson’s scheme. There are many modern biographies and histories, full of carefully authenticated fact, which afflict the reader with a weight of indigestion. The author has no right to his facts, no ownership in them. They have flitted through his mind on a calm five minutes’ passage from the notebook to the immortality of the printed page. But no man can hope to make much impression on a reader with facts which he has not thought it worth his own while to remember. ”

“ A distinguished psychologist has said that if the stupidest man on earth could be permitted for a moment to have a view of what is passing in the mind of a dog, he would be appalled at the total absence of fancy there. In the play of fancy Johnson excelled the stupid man as much as the stupid man excels the dog. If this power is, as some have thought it, the chief difference between man and beast, it seems natural enough that he who surpassed other men in humanity should have surpassed them also in playfulness of mind. ”