“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,”
as a pyrrhic (“both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“deviation or inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first place, but elsewhere is “remarkably inharmonious,” as, for instance, in Cowley’s beautiful line,
“And the soft wings of peace cover him round.”
The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to “elision,” by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-syllabic possibility into consideration) such a case as
“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind.”
This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds some severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it. He even objects to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.
In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more plays the rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting one line with another, is never to make a full pause at less than three syllables from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all lines pause at the fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a whole paper to Milton’s accommodation of the sound to the sense, and winds up his Miltonic exercitations, after a very considerable interval, with a set critique (139) of Samson Agonistes, partly on its general character as an Aristotelian tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers show no animus against Milton. There are even expressions of admiration for him, which may be called enthusiastic. But they do show that the critic was not in range with his author. Almost every one of his axioms and postulates is questionable.
Of the remaining critical papers in the Rambler it is very important to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and the Impropriety of imitating Spenser.” On Spenser. Johnson’s acuteness was not at fault in distrusting, from his point of view, the consequences of such things as the Castle of Indolence or even the Schoolmistress; and he addresses a direct rebuke to “the men of learning and genius” who have introduced the fashion.[[630]] In so far as his condemnation of “echoes” goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent parrhesia[[631]] which, like many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But on Spenser himself the other idols—the idola specus rather than fori—blind him. In following his namesake in the condemnation of Spenser’s language he is, we may think, wrong; yet this at least is an arguable point. But in regard to the Spenserian stanza things are different. Johnson calls it “at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its uniformity, and to the attention by its length,” while he subsequently goes off into the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is here possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at once, but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate the riposte that, not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As for “unpleasing,” so much the worse for the ear which is not pleased by the most exquisite harmonic symphony in the long and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for monotony, it is just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the Italian parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty, but cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto, and the endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser’s rhyme-sound. It is no valid retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If a man, as some men have done, says that Spenser is pleasing and Dryden and Pope are not, then the retort is valid. When the position is taken that both rhythms are pleasing, both really poetical, but poetical in a different way, the defender of it may laugh at all assailants.
The criticism of the English historians which immediately follows has an interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written just at the opening of the great age of the department with which it deals. On History and Letter-writing. Prejudices of different kinds would always have prevented Johnson from doing full justice to Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon; but, as it is, he deals with nobody later than Clarendon, and merely throws back to Raleigh and Knolles. Very much the same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary writing: for here also it was the lot of Johnson’s own contemporaries, in work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published, at the date of the Rambler, to remove the reproach of England. But the paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.
For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the combination of influences above referred to, might have taken high, if not the highest, degrees in a very different school of criticism. On Tragi-comedy. He puts the great rule Nec quarta loqui into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting some slight shortness of sight; for the very argument he uses will sweep with this a good many other rules to which he still adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly, “without scruple and without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic about the Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of tragic and comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most remarkable, for it is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic system, sounded by its last really great prophet. “It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.”