Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

It is the measure of the distance we have travelled away from Johnson that even plain people to-day, if they care for poetry at all, find much more in it than a piece of cunning craftsmanship. It is always that no doubt: but for us to-day it is also something far higher: a symbol of eternity. And more than a symbol, a sacrament: for it not only {207} suggests but reveals: it is the truth which it signifies; itself a part, as all those who have ever profoundly felt its influence are assured, of the eternal order of things to which it points.

Plainly, then, some of the things which now seem to us to be of the very innermost essence of poetry are not things which can be weighed in any scales known to Johnson. Yet in spite of his limitations he is certainly one of the masters of English criticism. The great critic may be said to be one who leaves the subject-matter of his criticism more respected and better understood than he found it. Johnson's principal subjects were the English language, the plays of Shakespeare, and the poets from Cowley to his own day. There can be no question of the services he rendered to the English language. His Dictionary, as was inevitable, had many faults, especially of etymology: but its publication marks an epoch in the history of English. It was a kind of challenge to the world. Other nations had till then inclined to look upon our language and literature as barbarous: and we had not been very sure ourselves that we had any right to a place on the Parnassus of the nations. Great men in Italy and France had thought those {208} languages worth the labours of a lifetime. In England before Johnson's Dictionary, nothing had been done to claim for English an equal place with Italian or French in the future of the literature and civilization of the world. What companies of learned men had taken generations to do for foreign countries had now been done for England in a few years by the industry, and abilities of a single scholar. Englishmen who took a pride in their language might now do so with understanding: foreigners who wished to learn English could now learn in the method and spirit of a scholar, no longer merely as travellers or tradesmen. The two folio volumes of the Dictionary were the visible evidence that English had taken its place in the literary polity of Europe. They were the fit precursors of the triumphant progress soon to be made by Burke and Scott and Byron. The other great service which Johnson rendered to our language by his Dictionary and its Preface could only have been rendered by a man so superior to the narrowness of scholarship as Johnson. No doubt as a single individual in a private position he was not exposed to such temptations to law-giving arrogance as the French Academicians. But nevertheless it is to his credit that he frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209} life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both his melancholy and his common sense taught him that "language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived." He knew that words coming from human mouths must follow the law of life: "when they are not gaining strength they are losing it." His business was not the vain folly of trying to bind the future in fetters: it was to record the present use and past history of words as accurately as he could ascertain them, and, by showing Englishmen what their heritage was and whence they had received it, to make them proud of its past and jealous of its future. The pedant wishes to apply a code of Median rigidity to correct the barbarous freedom of a language to which scholarship has never applied itself. Johnson gave our savages laws and made them citizens of a constitutional state: but, however venerable the laws and however little to be {210} changed without grave reason, he knew that, if the literary polity of England lived and grew, new needs would arise, old customs become obsolete, and the laws of language, like all others, would have to be changed to meet the new conditions. But the urgent business at that moment was to codify the floating and uncertain rules which a student of English found it difficult to collect and impossible to reconcile. Johnson might often be wrong: but after him there was at least an authority to appeal to: and that, as he himself felt, was a great step forward: for it is of more importance that the law should be known than that it should be right.

To have done all this, and to have explained what was done and what was attempted in language of such manliness, modesty and eloquence as that of the great Preface, is to have rendered one of the greatest services that can be rendered to the literature of a nation. "The chief glory of every people," says Johnson, "arises from its authors." That would be a bold thing to say to-day and was a bolder then, especially in so prosaic a place as the preface to a dictionary. But the world sees its truth more and more. And it is less out of place in a dictionary than appears at first sight. For that glory is not easily gained or recognized till both authors {211} and people realize that their language is the peer of the greatest in the world, a fit vehicle for the highest thoughts that can enter the mind of man. And towards that result in England only a few works of genius have contributed more than Johnson's Dictionary.

After the language itself comes the most priceless of its monuments. The services Johnson rendered to Shakespeare are only second to those he rendered to the language in which Shakespeare wrote. The Preface to his edition of Shakespeare is certainly the most masterly piece of his literary criticism: and it may still be doubted, after all that has been written about Shakespeare in the century and a half that separate it from our own day, whether the world can yet show any sixty pages about Shakespeare exhibiting so much truth and wisdom as these. All Johnson's gifts are seen at their best in it: the lucidity, the virile energy, the individuality of his style: the unique power of first placing himself on the level of the plain man and then lifting the plain man to his: the resolute insistence on life and reason, not learning or ingenuity, as the standard by which books are to be judged. No one ever was so free as Johnson from that pest of literature which a fine French critic, one of the subtlest of his countrymen, called "l'ingénieux sans bon {212} sens"; and he never showed himself so free of it as in his Shakespeare. The master of life who "whether life or nature be his subject, shows plainly that he has seen with his own eyes," inspired the great critic with more even than his usual measure of sanity: and perhaps the very best things in the Preface and the notes are the frequent summonings of ingenious sophistries to the bar of a merciless common sense. Let those who, with a good living writer, fancy his criticism merely a lifeless application of mechanical rules, read again the famous passage in the preface where he dismisses the claim of the unities of place and time to be necessary to the proper illusion of drama. Never did critic show himself freer of the easy slavery to traditional rules which afflicts or consoles sluggish minds. In Johnson's pages at any rate, there is "always an appeal open," as he says, "from criticism to nature." And, though all his prejudices, except those of the Anti-Gallican, must have carried him to the side of the unities, he goes straight to the truth of experience, obtains there a decisive answer, and records it in a few pages of masterly reasoning. The first breath of the facts, as known to every one who has visited a theatre, is brought to demolish the airy castles of pedantry: and it is shown that unity is required not for the sake of deceiving {213} the spectators, which is impossible, but for the sake of bringing order into chaos, art into nature, and the immensity of life within limits that can be compassed by the powers of the human mind. The unity of action, which assists the mind, is therefore vital: the unities of time and place, which are apparently meant to deceive it, are empty impostures. For "the truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage and the players only players": "the delight proceeds from our consciousness of fiction: if we thought murders and treasons real they would please no more."

But this is simply one specially famous passage in an essay which is full of matter from the first page to the last. It says little, of course, of the sublime poetry of Shakespeare, and it cannot anticipate that criticism of the imagination which Goethe and Coleridge have taught us to expect from every writer about Shakespeare. The day for that was not yet: and as Johnson, himself among the first to suggest the historical and comparative point of view in criticism, says in this very preface, "every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived and with his own particular opportunities." {214} He had a different task, and he performed it so admirably that what he says can never be out of date. It had not then become superfluous to insist on the greatness of Shakespeare: if it has since become so no small share of that result may be ascribed to Johnson. We forget that, because, as he said of Dryden, it is the fate of a critic who convinces to be lost in the prevalence of his own discovery. Never certainly has the central praise of Shakespeare, as the master of truth and universality, been better set forth than by Johnson. Our ears are delighted, our powers of admiration quickened, our reasons convinced, as we read the succession of luminous and eloquent paragraphs in which he tries Shakespeare by the tests of time, of nature, of universality, and finds him supreme in all. Nor did Johnson ever write anything richer in characteristic and memorable sentences, fit to be quoted and thought over by themselves. "Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature." "Shakespeare always makes nature predominant over accident. . . . His story requires Romans but he thinks only on men"; "there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work"; "nature (i. e. genius, what a man inherits at birth) {215} gives no man knowledge"; "upon the whole all pleasure consists in variety"; "love has no great influence upon the sum of life." It is startling to find Johnson anticipating Mr. Bernard Shaw, and more startling still to be told in a study of the author of Romeo and Juliet that love "has little operation in the drama of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world." But when we put ourselves in Johnson's position and compare Shakespeare with the reigning dramatists of France and England, we shall see that it is in fact not the least striking thing about Shakespeare that he has so many plays in which the love interest scarcely appears.

The service Johnson rendered to the study of Shakespeare is, however, by no means confined to these general considerations. No man did more, perhaps, to call criticism back from paths that led to nowhere, or to suggest directions in which discoveries might be made. The most marked contrast between him and earlier critics is his caution about altering the received text. He first stemmed the tide of rash emendation, and the ebb which began with him has continued ever since. The case for moderation in this respect has never been better stated than in his words: "It has been my settled principle that the reading of {216} the ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity or mere improvement of the sense. For though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to the judgment of the first publishers, yet they who had the copy before their eyes were more likely to read it right than we who read it only by imagination." And in several other matters he in passing dropped a seed which has ripened in other minds to the great increase of our knowledge. "Shakespeare," he says, "has more allusions than other poets to the traditions and superstition of the vulgar, which must therefore be traced before he can be understood." Few critical seeds have had a larger growth than this: and the same may be said of the pregnant hint about the frequent necessity of looking for Shakespeare's meaning "among the sports of the field." He neither overestimated the importance nor under-estimated the difficulties of the critic of Shakespeare. With his usual sense of the true scale of things he treats the quarrels of commentators with contempt: "it is not easy to discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small importance: they involve neither property nor liberty"; and in another place {217} he characteristically bids his angry colleagues to join with him in remembering amidst their triumphs over the "nonsensical" opinions of dead rivals that "we likewise are men: that debemur morti, and, as Swift observed to Burnet, we shall soon be among the dead ourselves." He knows too that "notes are necessary evils" and advises the young reader to begin by ignoring them and letting Shakespeare have his way alone. But at the same time he puts aside with just indignation Pope's supercilious talk about the "dull duty of an editor"; and after giving an admirable summary of what that dull duty is, declares that one part of it alone, the business of conjectural criticism, "demands more than humanity possesses." Yet it is that part of his functions, the part which appeals most to vanity, that he exercised with the most sparing caution. He saw that it was not in emendation but in interpretation that the critic could now be most useful. For this last task the sanity of his mind, though sometimes leaning too much to prose, gave him peculiar qualifications. No one can have used any of the Variorum Shakespeares without being struck again and again by the masterly way in which Johnson penetrates through the thicket of obscurities raised by Shakespeare's involved language and his {218} critics' fanciful explanations, and brings back for us in plain words the undoubted meaning of many a difficult passage. He is a master of that rare art, the prose paraphrase of poetry. The perfect lucidity of his notes makes them always a pleasure to read: and writers of notes are not usually masters of language. Take such a note as that on the words of Laertes about Ophelia's madness—

"Nature is fine in love: and, where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves."

Johnson interprets: "love is the passion by which nature is most exalted and refined; and as substances, refined and subtilized, easily obey any impulse, or follow any attraction, some part of nature, so purified and refined, flies off after the attracting object, after the thing it loves;—

"As into air the purer spirits flow,
And separate from their kindred dregs below,
So flew her soul."

Nor can a mistake or two in details detract from the value of the splendid paraphrase of "To be or not to be," or the admirable note on the character of Polonius. Shakespeare has had subtler and more poetical critics than Johnson: but no one has equalled the insight, {219} sobriety, lucidity and finality which Johnson shows in his own field.