and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important. In the second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could, as appealing to a special public only. He believes in Ossian, then quite new. He thinks it contains “Pictures which no civilised modern could ever imbibe in their strength, nor consequently could ever throw out”—an image so excessively Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing a picture) that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown rejoices and wallows in the naturalistic generalisation of his century. He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it down that, at religious and other festivals, men danced and sang, that then organised professional effort supplemented unorganised, and so poets arose. Then comes about a sort of Established Choir, whence the various kinds are developed. And we have the Chinese—the inevitable Chinese—Fow-hi, and Chao-hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.
But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here ὁ μέγας.
There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s critical opinions were formed quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural bent and influence of environment which, as a rule, forms all such opinions. Johnson: his preparation for criticism. There has been a tendency to regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of considering everything as an open question, of being ready to reverse any opinion at a moment’s notice. As a matter of fact, we have record of not many men who have proceeded in this way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a single person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking, the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in it find, in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world, political, ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits their bent. The bent of their time may assist them in fastening on to this by attraction or repulsion—it really does not much matter which it is. In either case they will insensibly, from an early period, choose their line and shape their course accordingly. They will give a certain independence to it; they will rarely be found merely “swallowing formulas.” It is the other class which does this, with leave reserved to get rid of the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another set, which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the hero will be in the main Qualis ab incepto.
Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism being conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort of transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have shown; secondly, by the usual peculiarities of social circumstance and mental constitution; and lastly, by the state of England in his time—a state to discuss which were here impertinent, but which, it may be humbly suggested, will not be quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of the more ordinary views of the eighteenth century.
His view of literature was in part determined by these general influences, in part—perhaps chiefly—by special impinging currents. His mere birth-time had not very much to do with it—Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchelsea, who consciously or unconsciously worked against it, were older, in the lady’s case much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone, who consciously worked against it in different degrees, were not much younger.[[626]] The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by that natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other things explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not wholly in consequence of his near sight, was entirely insensible to the beauties of nature; he made fun of “prospects”; he held that “one blade of grass is like another” (which it most certainly is not, even in itself, let alone its surroundings); he liked human society in its most artificial form—that provided by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his ear was only less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for music, in the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is quite clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost mathematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he was widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek, still more widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.[[627]] Fourthly, he was, for a man so much given to reading—for one who ranged from Macrobius in youth to Parismus and Parismenus in age, and from Travels in Abyssinia to Prince Titi—not very widely read either in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of the modern languages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or nothing. Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and early manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other wholly, of a certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly, the critical school in which he had been brought up was strictly neo-classic. Seventhly, and to conclude, such rebels to convention as appeared in his time were chiefly men whom he regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt. Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of “the Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Walpole was a spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius; Gray a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical” mannerisms worse than any of Johnson’s own, and whose dilettante shyness and scanty production invited ridicule. Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did not love Cambridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had foibles enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons go far enough, or do not so go, Johnson’s general critical attitude never varies in the least.[[628]] It was, as has been said, probably formed quite early; it no doubt appeared in those but dimly known contributions to periodical literature which defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly known first twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise, as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in the case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great documents of The Rambler, Rasselas, the Shakespeare Preface, and the Lives, we see it in the two first rigid, peremptory, in the Preface, curiously and representatively uncertain, in the last conditioned by differences which allow it somewhat freer play, and at some times making a few concessions, but at others more pugnacious and arbitrary than before.
The critical element in The Rambler is necessarily large; but a great deal of it is general and out of our way.[[629]] The Rambler on Milton. Directly concerning us are the papers on the aspects (chiefly formal) of Milton’s poetry—especially versification—on which Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers on lesser subjects. The Miltonic examen begins at No. 86. Johnson is as uncompromising as the great Bysshe himself on the nature of English prosody. “The heroick measures of the English language may be properly considered as pure or mixed.” They are pure when “the accent rests on every second syllable through the whole line.” In other words, “purity” is refused to anything but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes further; this is not only “purity” and “the completest harmony possible,” but it ought to be “exactly kept in distichs” and in the last line of a (verse) paragraph.
Nevertheless, for variety’s sake, the “mixed” measure is allowed; “though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself,” it makes us appreciate the “harmonious” lines better. And we soon perceive that even this exceedingly grudging, and in strictness illogical, licence is limited merely to substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In
“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,
Both turned,”
the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “the accent is on two syllables together and both strong”; while he would seem to regard “And when,” in the line