This is one side of his genius; but another, and profounder, appears in the eloquent simplicity of such a passage as the following, against our fears of lessening ourselves in the eyes of others:
The most useful medicines are often unpleasing to the taste. Those who are oppressed by their own reputation will, perhaps, not be comforted by hearing that their cares are unnecessary. But the truth is that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted to himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom, perhaps, not one appears to deserve our notice, or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we likewise are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is, to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.
When we approach Johnson's poetry, the revolution of taste becomes a more acute consideration. It seems very nearly impossible to compare or contrast eighteenth-century poetry and that of the twentieth without wilfully tipping the scales in one direction or the other, judgment in this area being so much influenced by preference. But let us begin with titles. For a start, let us take, from a recent Pulitzer Prize-winner: "The Day's No Rounder Than Its Angles Are", and "Don't Look Now But Mary Is Everybody"; from another distinguished current volume, these: "The Trance", "Lost", "Meeting"; from another, "After This, Sea", "Lineman Calling", "Meaning Motion"; and from a fourth, "Terror", "Picnic Remembered", "Eidolon", and "Monologue at Midnight". Here are individual assertions, suggestive of individual ways of looking at things; here are headings that signalize particular events in the authors' experience,—moments' monuments. Beside them, Johnson's title, "The Vanity of Human Wishes", looks very dogged and downright.
Titles are not poems but they have a barometric function. The modern titles cited above are evocative of a world with which, for the past century and a half, we have been growing increasingly familiar. This air we are accustomed to breathe: it requires no unusual effort of adjustment from us. We readily understand that we are being invited to participate in a private experience and, by sharing it, to help in giving it as much universality as may be. It is by no means easy for readers of to-day to reverse the process, to start with the general and find in it their personal account. We are more likely to feel a resentment, or at least a prejudice, against the writer who solicits our attention to a topic without even the pretense of novelty.
Johnson's generation would have found it equally hard to see the matter from our point of view, or to allow that the authors of the poems named above were being less than impudent or at best flippant in thus brazenly obtruding their private experience, undisguised, before the reader. We ought, moreover, to realize that in this judgment they would have the suffrages of all previous generations, including the greatest writers, from classical times down to their own. It is we who are singular, not they. Quite apart from considerations of moral right or wrong, of artistic good or bad, it obviously, therefore, behooves us to try to cultivate a habit of mind free from initial bias against so large a proportion of recorded testimony.
Very early in The Rambler Johnson remarks characteristically that "men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." He believed this, and his generation believed it, because they thought that human nature changed little from age to age. The problems of conduct that confront the living individual have been faced countless times by his predecessors, and the accumulated experience of mankind has arrived at conclusions which in the main are just and therefore helpful to-day. The most important truths are those which have been known for a very long time. For that very reason they tend to be ignored or slighted unless they are restated in such a way as to arrest attention while they compel assent. Hence the best writing is that which most successfully resolves the paradox of combining the sharpest surprise with the widest recognition. Such an ideal is so difficult of attainment that, inevitably, many who subscribed to it succeeded only in unleavened platitude and others rejected it for the easier goal of novelty.
In this most difficult class The Vanity of Human Wishes has won a respectable place. It is freighted with a double cargo, the wisdom of two great civilizations, pagan and Christian. Although based upon Juvenal's tenth Satire, it is so free a paraphrase as to be an original poem. The English reader who sets it against Dryden's closer version will sense immediately its greater weight. It is informed with Johnson's own sombre and most deeply rooted emotional responses to the meaning of experience. These, although emanating from a devout practising Christian and certainly not inconsistent with Christianity, neither reflect the specific articles of Christian doctrine nor are lightened by the happiness of Christian faith: they are strongly infused with classical resignation.
The poem is difficult as well as weighty. At times its expression is so condensed that the meaning must be wrestled for. Statements so packed as, for example,
Fate wings with ev'ry wish th' afflictive dart,
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,
do not yield their full intention to the running reader. One line, indeed,—the eighth from the end (361)—has perhaps never been satisfactorily explained by any commentator. (The eighteenth paragraph of Johnson's first sermon might go far to clarify it.) But such difficulties are worth the effort they demand, because there is always a rational and unesoteric solution to be gained.