This contrast, as Stauffer remarks, renders Courtenay's praise more powerful.[14] More important, the play between scorn and praise reflects the ambivalence which colors contemporary accounts of Johnson. We are now accustomed to the notion of great art as the product of a flawed life. But in the eighteenth century, an age largely devoted to the idea of discreet biography which concealed or minimized the subject's weaknesses, a man like Johnson presented formidable problems to the biographer and his readers. Although Courtenay merely versified material which other writers had discussed in much more detail, his poem is important because it synthesizes the conflicting attitudes towards Johnson which prevailed immediately after his death. Courtenay, like many others, saw in Johnson a powerful mixture of great virtues and vices; and though he is not impartial, he effects, through his honesty, an admirable balance between Johnson's strengths and weaknesses. The final forty lines of the Review constitute one of the most balanced of all contemporary tributes to Johnson as a human being.
For the most part, the commendatory section of the poem is an unsystematic tracing of Johnson's moral and literary merits. Courtenay's rhapsodizing on the Dictionary, the Rambler, and the Lives of the Poets is conventional. Clearly, he admired the wide scope of Johnson's learning and his ability to communicate his knowledge of men and manners in his writings. But his admiration occasionally betrays him; for instance, in describing the "brilliant school" through which Johnson's influence was perpetuated, he overestimated the extent to which Reynolds, Malone, Burney, Jones, Goldsmith, Steevens, Hawkesworth, and Boswell were indebted to Johnson's writings.[15] Usually, however, he was on firmer ground. Courtenay was the only writer before Boswell to praise Johnson's Latin verse, a body of poetry virtually ignored by other contemporary biographers and memorialists.[16] Furthermore, he employs footnotes skillfully. Though they impede the progress of the poem, they do support poetic statement with factual evidence and explain and amplify certain points made in the verses.
The clearest evidence for the care which Courtenay took with the Review can be found upon examination of his revisions. He made few substantial changes in the second edition, but the third edition contains important revisions. Courtenay added ten lines and five footnotes in the final version, and lightened some of the scorn in the first portion by substituting weaker phrases for stronger ones. He also enclosed lines seven through twenty in quotation marks to make it appear that the sentiment expressed therein was not his own, but a judgment he had heard elsewhere.
But the most significant revisions are concerned with organization. By transferring segments of certain verse paragraphs to others, he achieves a more unified portrait of Johnson. By means of such revision, he forms his general evaluation of Johnson's writing into one unit and his comments on individual works into another, where before they had been awkwardly interwoven.
Courtenay's Review did not go unnoticed at the time, though for obvious reasons it was given less attention by the reviewers than the more notorious Johnsoniana. Extracts from the poem were printed in several magazines. The reviewers were almost unanimous in damning the poem's inelegance, unevenness, and lack of harmony, but reserved praise for the sentiments and candor.[17] Chesterfield's apologist in William Hayley's Two Dialogues; Containing a Comparative View of the Lives, Characters, and Writings of Philip, the Late Earl of Chesterfield, and Dr. Samuel Johnson (1787) protested that Courtenay was too kind to Johnson. The severest indictment of the Review came from the anonymous author of A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson, mentioned earlier, who charged Courtenay with poor taste and with belaboring the obvious by proving that Johnson was "not quite destitute of brains."[18]
The greatest champion of the Review was, of course, Boswell. The Life is sprinkled with quotations from the third edition, 118 lines in all, mostly from Courtenay's commendatory verses. In view of the many published attacks on Johnson, Boswell must have appreciated Courtenay's sentiments all the more. Doubtless Courtenay's warm praise of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides also found favor with Boswell.[19] Perhaps Boswell's final and least partial judgment of the Review was expressed in his letter to James Abercrombie of Philadelphia dated 11 June 1792. He sent Abercrombie a copy of the poem, commenting that "though I except to several passages, you will find some very good writing."[20]
Courtenay's Review, together with several other little known memorabilia concerning Johnson, stimulated one of the most energetic and splenetic literary controversies of the late eighteenth century. In addition, the Review and pieces like it aroused a considerable amount of useful, if vitriolic, discussion about the art of biography.
University of Iowa