Lives of the English Poets / From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's Lives

by Henry Francis Cary

His swelling style is readily counterfeited. Our common advertisements have amply revenged themselves for his ridicule of their large promises in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations."

The result of his labour is awkward stateliness and irksome uniformity. In his dread of incongruous idioms he writes almost without any idiom at all.

He has sometimes been considered as having innovated on our tongue by introducing big words into it from the Latin: but he commonly does no more than revive terms which had been employed by our old writers and afterwards fallen into disuse; nor does he, like them, employ even these terms in senses which scholars only would be likely to understand.

At the time of writing the Dictionary, he had a notion that our language "for almost a century had been departing from its original Teutonic character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it by making our ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the additions of later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idiom." But a little reflection will shew us the vanity of this attempt. Since the age of Chaucer, at least, that is for more than 400 years, our language has been increased by continual transfusions from the French. To these have been added, from time to time, similar accessions from other languages, both ancient and modern. Thus a copiousness and a flexibility, which in the instance of the Greek seem to have arisen out of that subtilty of intellect which gave birth to endless subdivision and distinction, have been in some measure compensated in our own by the influxes which it has received from the languages of many other people; and have been yet further improved by that liberty which it is to be hoped we shall always retain, each man, of speaking his thoughts after his own guise, without too much regard to any set mode or fashion.

He had before said, in this same preface, that "our knowledge of the northern literature is so scanty, that of words undoubtedly Teutonic the original is not always to be found in any ancient language; and I have therefore," he adds, "inserted Dutch or German substitutes, which I consider not as radical, but parallel; not as the parents, but sisters of the English." And in his history of the English language, speaking of our Saxon ancestors, to whom we must, I suppose, go for that Teutonic original which he so strongly recommends, he observes that, "their speech having been always cursory and extemporaneous, must have been artless and unconnected, without any modes of transition or involution of clauses, which abruptness and inconnection may be found even in their later writings." Of the additions which have been made to this our original poverty, who shall say what ought to be rejected, and what retained? who shall say what deficiencies are real, and what imaginary? what the genius of our tongue may admit of, and what it must refuse? and in a word, what that native idiom is, a coalition with which is to be thus studiously consulted?

Throughout his Lives of the Poets, he constantly betrays a want of relish for the more abstracted graces of the art. When strong sense and reasoning were to be judged of, these he was able to appreciate justly. When the passions or characters were described, he could to a certain extent decide whether they were described truly or no. But as far as poetry has relation to the kindred arts of music and painting, to both of which he was confessedly insensible, it could not be expected that he should have much perception of its excellences. Of statuary, he said that its value was owing to its difficulty; and that a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that nearly resembles a man. What shall be thought of his assertion, that before the time of Dryden there was no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts, and "that words too familiar or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet?" It might with more show of reason be affirmed, that in proportion as our writers have adopted such a system as he speaks of, and have rejected words for no other cause than that they were either too familiar or too remote, we have been receding from the proper language of poetry. One of the chief ornaments, or more properly speaking, the constituents of poetical language, is the use of metaphors; and metaphors never find their way to the mind more readily, or affect it more powerfully, than when they are clothed in familiar words. Even a naked sentiment will lose none of its force from being conveyed in the most homely terms which our mother tongue can afford. They are the sounds which we have been used to from our infancy, which have been early connected with our hopes and fears, and still continue to meet us in our own homes and by our firesides, that will most certainly awaken those feelings with which the poet is chiefly concerned. As for the terms which Johnson calls remote, if I understand him rightly, they too may be employed occasionally, either when the attention is to be roused by something unusual, or for the sake of harmony; or it may be for no other reason than because the poet chooses thus to diversify his diction, so as to give a stronger relief to that which is familiar and common, by the juxtaposition of its contrary. Of this there can be no doubt, that, whoever lays down such arbitrary rules as Johnson has here prescribed, will find himself mocked at every turn by the power of genius, which meets with nothing in art or nature that it cannot convert to its own use, and which delights to produce the greatest effects by means apparently the most inadequate.

He particularly valued himself on the Life of Cowley, for the sake of those observations which he had introduced into it on the metaphysical poets. Here he has mistaken the character of Marino, whom he supposes to be at the head of them. Marino abounds in puerile conceits; but they are not far-fetched, like those of Donne and Cowley; they generally lie on the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a poetical Heraclitus. But Johnson had caught the cant of the age, in which it was usual to designate almost any thing absurd or extravagant by the name of metaphysical.

It is difficult to suppose that he had read some of the works on which he passes a summary sentence. The comedy of Love's Riddle, which he says, "adds little to the wonders of Cowley's minority," deserved to be commended at least for the style, which is a specimen of pure and unaffected English. Of Congreve's novel, he tells us, that he had rather praise it than read it. Judging from the letters of Congreve, his only writings in prose which it has been my good fortune to meet with, and which, as I remember, contain some admirable remarks on the distinction between wit and humour, I should conclude that one part of his character as a writer has yet to make its way to the public notice. I have heard it observed by a lady, that Johnson, in his Life of Milton, is like a dog incensed and terrified at the presence of some superior creature, at whom he snarls, then runs away, and then returns to snarl again. If the comparison be a just one, it may be added, in extenuation of Johnson's malignity, that he is at least a dog who thinks himself to be attacking the inveterate foe of his master; for Milton's hostility to a kingly government was the crime which he could not forgive.

The mention of Milton, and of his politics, brings to my mind two sayings of Johnson's that were related to me by Mr. Price, of Lichfield. After passing an evening together at Mr. Seward's, the father of the poetess, where, in the course of conversation, the words "Me miserable!" in Paradise Lost, had been commended as highly pathetic, they had walked some way along the street in silence, which the good man was not likely first to break, when Johnson suddenly stopped, and turning round to him, exclaimed, "Sir! don't you think that 'Me miserable' is miserable stuff?" On another occasion he thus whimsically described the different manner in which he felt himself disposed towards a Whig and a Tory. "If," said he, "I saw a Whig and a Tory drowning, I would first save the Tory; and when I saw that he was safe, not till then, I would go and help the Whig; but the dog should duck first; the dog should duck;" laughing with pleasure at the thoughts of the Whig's ducking.

The principal charm of the Lives of the Poets is in the store of information which they contain. He had been, as he says somewhere of his own father, "no careless observer of the passages of the times." In the course of a long life, he had heard, and read, and seen much; and this he communicates with such force and vivacity, and illustrates by observations so pertinent and striking, that we recur again and again to his pages as we would to so many portraits traced by the hand of a great master, in spite of our belief that the originals were often misrepresented, that some were flattered, and the defects of others still more overcharged. In his very errors as a critic there is often shewn more ability than in the right judgments of most other. When he is most wrong, he gives us some good reason for his being so. He is often mistaken, but never trivial and insipid. It is more safe to trust to him when he commends than when he dispraises; when he enlarges the boundaries of criticism which his predecessors had contracted, than when he sets up new fences of his own. The higher station we can take, the more those petty limits will disappear, which confine excellence to particular forms and systems. The critic who condemns that which the generality of mankind, or even the few of those more refined in their taste, have long agreed in admiring, may naturally conclude the fault to be in himself; that there is in his mind or his organs some want of capacity for the reception of a certain species of pleasure. When Johnson rejected pastoral comedy, as being representative of scenes adapted chiefly "to please barbarians and children," he might have suspected that his own eye-sight, rather than pastoral comedy, was to blame. When he characterized blank verse, "as verse only to the eye," he might reasonably have questioned the powers of his own hearing. But this, and more than this, we may forgive him, for his successful vindication of Shakspeare from the faults objected to him by the French critics.