“Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood, that have been in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they are barking and fleeing, infield and outfield, haugh and holme!” With this utterance, this single utterance, all the ruling doctrines of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century criticism receive notice to quit.[[632]]
The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the Idler (60, 61) are excellent fun, and perhaps Johnson’s chief accomplishment in the direction of humour. “Dick Minim.” The growth of criticism in Dick, his gradual proficiency in all the critical commonplaces of his day (it is to be observed that Johnson, like all true humourists, does not spare himself, and makes one of Minim’s secrets de Polichinelle a censure of Spenser’s stanza), his addiction to Johnson’s pet aversion, “suiting the sound to the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done. Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece to consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But it neither contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine that we cannot find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.[[633]]
The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in Rasselas (chap. x.) may be less amusing; but it is of course much more serious. Rasselas. There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives as much of Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character: while it is at least possible that his sentiments are determined in some degree by the menacing appearances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder that in almost all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the best”; that “early writers are in possession of nature and their successors of art”; that “no man was ever great by imitation”; that he must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he must do it on the principle of examining, “not the individual, but the species.” He is to remark “general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shapes in the verdure of the forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking features,” neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be “a being superior to time and place”; must know many languages and sciences; must by incessant practice of style “familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.”
Surely a high calling and election! yet with some questionable points in it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the tulip, if he must merely generalise and sweep; if he must consult the laziness and dulness of his readers by merely portraying prominent and striking features, characteristics alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness—then even Dryden will not do, for he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone must bear the bell. Lady Winchelsea’s horse in twilight, the best part of a century earlier; Tennyson’s ashbuds in the front of March, the best part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,” superfluous if not even bad. Habington’s picture of the pitiless northern sunshine on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats’s of the perilous seas through the magic casements, must be rejected, as too unfamiliar and individual. The poetic strangeness and height are barred en bloc. Convention, familiarity, generalisation—these are the keys to the poetical kingdom of heaven. The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!
The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth-century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the English critical position at this time. The Shakespeare Preface. Of the first there are many instances, though perhaps none in the Preface itself quite equal to the famous note on the character of Polonius, which has been generally and justly taken as showing what a triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet even here there is not a little which follows in the wake of Dryden’s great eulogy, and some scattered observations of the highest acuteness, more particularly two famous sentences which, though Johnson’s quotation is directed to a minor matter—Shakespeare’s learning—settle beforehand, with the prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory.[[634]] The rest, however, is, if not exactly a zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utterance of two distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that merit of nature, of passion; but “his set speeches are commonly cold and weak.” “What he does best he soon ceases to do.” Johnson, here also, has no superstitious reverence for the Unities, and even speaks slightly of dramatic rules; nay, he suggests “the recall of the principles of the drama to a new examination,” the very examination which Lessing was to give it. But he apologises for the period when “The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume,” and hints a doubt whether much of our and his own praise of Shakespeare is not “given by custom and veneration.” “He has corrupted language by every mode of depravation,” yet Johnson echoes Dryden “when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too.” A singular triumph of “depraved language.” In short, throughout the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now some one with a certain bundle of principles or prejudices which Johnson chooses to adopt for the time.
It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial nature of poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat down to the Lives of the Poets,[[635]] one of the most fortunate books in English literature. The Lives of the Poets. In very few cases have task and artist been so happily associated. For almost all his authors, he had biographical knowledge such as no other living man had, and the access to which has long been closed. If, now and then, his criticism was not in touch with his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a certain value even to the assertions that result—for we, do what we will, cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these subjects belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a school and system with which the critic was at once thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy. And, lastly, the form of the work, with its subdivision into a large number of practically independent and not individually burdensome sections, was well suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional indolence, and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally, and only occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has had quite such a chance: but he must indeed have a sublime confidence, both in the strength of his principles and in the competence of his talents, who thinks that, if he had the chance, he could do the task better than Johnson did his.
The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it could not be expected to be. Their general merits. Some was merely old work, dating from a much less mature period of the writer’s genius, and made to serve again. Some was on subjects so trivial that good nature, or simple indolence, or, if any one pleases, an artistic reluctance to break butterflies on so huge a wheel, made the criticisms almost as insignificant as the criticised. Here and there extra-literary prejudice—political-ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly moral, partly religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as in that of Swift—distorted the presentation. And it is quite possible that a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that Gray’s aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplishments, were fatal to the school of poetry to which the critic himself held.
But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing do the Lives still provide us! In that combination of biography and criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should be so late,[[636]] they are all but the originals, and are still almost the standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the Vanity of Human Wishes, but in milder mood and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to us extraordinary and unintelligible praise on John Pomfret’s Choice,[[637]] he is really praising a moral tract couched in verse not unpleasing in itself, and specially pleasing to his ear. When he speaks less favourably of Grongar Hill, he is speaking of a piece of nature-poetry, not arranged on his principle of neglecting the streak of the tulip, and availing itself of those Miltonic licences of prosody which he disapproved. But we shall never find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he recognises, he makes any mistake about its relative excellence: and we shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excellence which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as he approves. And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused brilliancy of critical expression, subject to the allowances and conditions just given, the Lives are hardly to be excelled in any language. It is not safe to neglect one of them, though no doubt there are some six or seven which, for this reason or that, take precedence of the rest.
The “Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson’s only considerable attempt at that very important part of criticism, the historical summary of the characteristics of a poetical period or school. The Cowley. And, though far from faultless, it is so important and so interesting in its kind that it ranks with his greatest Essays. Only that singular impatience of literary history, as such, which characterised the late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not infrequently marred his own critical work, can have prevented him from including, in his Johnsonian points de repère, the Essay which launched, and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition of the “Metaphysical” School—of the school represented earlier by Donne, and later by Cowley himself.
The phrase itself[[638]] has been both too readily adopted and too indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning of “metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and partly misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a meaning defensible at least from the point of view of the framer, and very important in critical history. Johnson (it is too often forgotten) was a scholar; and he used “metaphysical” in its proper sense—of that which “comes after” the physical or natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole principle of his school of criticism—their whole critical contention—that they were “following nature.” The main objection to the poetry of what Dryden calls the “last Age”—what we call, loosely but conveniently, “Elizabethan” poetry—was that its ideas, and still more its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substituted afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would be delightful to the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals here—but it would not be to the question.