The Common Pursuit (16 page)

On the positive aspects of this critical attitude Mr Krutch is good. But when he comes to the question of what there may be in Shakespeare that Johnson fails to appreciate, or to appreciate adequately, Mr Krutch can only suppose that we must be thinking of Johnson's lack of interest in' "imagination" as a source of transcendental knowledge'.

What of the highest flight of fancy and imagination 2 What of all the things which seem to be outside anyone's possible experience ? What of the world sometimes described as the world of sheer beauty and transcendental truth?

Mr Krutch fumbles a good deal with these (as they seem to me) not very profitable questions, and concludes with satisfaction that 'Johnson's Shakespeare is, first of all, the people's Shakespeare rather than either the Shakespeare of learned critics or the Shake-

speare of the aesthete'. But he doesn't mention the major limitation that stares him in the face.

It is overt and unequivocal. Here are two passages from the Preface to Shakespeare:

He therefore indulged his natural disposition, and his disposition, as Rhymer has remarked, led him to comedy. In tragedy he often writes, with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comick scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comick; but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of passion which exigence forces out are for the most part striking and energetick; but whenever he solicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.

The critic who can in this way exalt the comedy above the tragedy exhibits a failure in the appreciation of Shakespeare that no one to-day, surely, would hold to be anything but major.

There is plenty in the Preface, as well as plenty elsewhere in Johnson, to make the force of the last-quoted passage quite plain. His limitation in the face of Shakespearean tragedy goes with a limitation in the face of Shakespearean poetry. He cannot appreciate the Shakespearean handling of language. Mr Krutch argues that, in the notorious commentary on the 'Come, thick night* speech from Macbeth, Johnson is merely discussing a convention-engendered disability that he doesn't share. But the evidence, and there is abundance of it, is all the other way. If Johnson can scarely contain his * risibility' when he hears of the * avengers of guilt peeping through a blanket', that is because he doesn't respond fully to Shakespeare's poetry. He cannot, because his training opposes; a state of affairs made plain by the paradoxical way in which he shows appreciation while giving the irresistible reasons for 'disgust':

In this passage is exerted all the force of poetry, that force which calls

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new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter; yet, perhaps, scarce any man now peruses it without some disturbance of his attention from the counteraction of the words to the ideas. . ..

This training was in the very positive tradition described above— a tradition focussed in a literary code. Mr Krutch, discussing Johnson's talk, says well: 'he seems seldom to have uttered a word to which his intellect had not assigned a purpose/ This might very well be applied to the Augustan use of language in general. Every word in a piece of Augustan verse has an air of being able to give the reasons why it has been chosen, and placed just there. The thoughts that the Augustan poet, like any other Augustan writer, sets himself to express are amply provided for by the ready-minted concepts of the common currency. What he has to do is to put them together with elegance and point according to the rules of grammar, syntax and versification. The exploratory-creative use of words upon experience, involving the creation of concepts in a free play for which the lines and configurations of the conventionally charted have no finality, is something he has no use for; it is completely alien to his habit. So that even when he is Johnson, whose perception so transcends his training, he cannot securely appreciate the Shakespearean creativeness. He will concede almost unwillingly that here we have 'all the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment and animates matter', but as conscious and responsible critic he knows what has to be said of the Shakespearean complexity:

It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow on it. (Preface to Shakespeare.)

Johnson, the supreme Augustan writer, is never entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express; the mode of creation suggested by 'comprising' anything in 'words such as occur* is one that the Augustan tradition cannot recognize. That so robustly individual a talent could find himself so at home in such a tradition, that it should so have fostered his extraordinary

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powers, tells us something about the civilization that produced it. Over a considerable period the distinguished minds of the age could accept as a final achievement the very positive conventional ordering of experience offered by that civilization in the name of Reason, Truth and Nature. The literary intellectual could feel that in his own grapplings with experience he had society, not merely as ideal tradition, but as a going concern, with him— could feel it in such a way that he didn't need to be conscious of it. Clearly, there was real achievement to justify the Augustan pretensions.

But it is die limitation that has to be insisted on at the moment. Johnson was representative in his inability to appreciate the more profoundly creative uses of language—for that was his case. There is more significance in his exaltation of the passage from The Mourning Bride than Mr Krutch recognizes. True, it is as 'description' (Mr Krutch's point) that Johnson exalts it above anything of Shakespeare's; but Mr Krutch (with Shakespeare to help him) ought to be able to see that 'description' can be done by poetic-creative methods, and that Congreve can only offer us the usual post-Dryden rhetoric, with neat illustrative parallels— thought-image, point-by-point—instead of concreteness and metaphorical life. The method is that of prose-statement, the only use of language Johnson understands. That is, he cannot appreciate the life-principle of drama as we have it in the poetic-creative use of language—the use by which the stuff of experience is presented to speak and act for itself.

This disability has its obvious correlative in Johnson's bondage (again representative) to moralistic fallacy and confusion. He complains of Shakespeare (in the Preface):

He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of moral duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their example to operate by chance.

Johnson cannot understand that works of art enact their moral

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valuations. It is not enough that Shakespeare, on the evidence of his works, 'thinks' (and feels), morally; for Johnson a moral judgment that isn't stated isn't there. Further, he demands that the whole play shall be conceived and composed as statement. The dramatist must start with a conscious and abstractly formulated moral and proceed to manipulate his puppets so as to demonstrate and enforce it.

Here we have a clear view of the essential tendency of the Augustan tradition. Such a use of language, so unchallenged and unqualified in its assumption of omnicompetence (how it came to prevail with this completeness would be a large and complicated inquiry, taking in more than the English scene) must tend to turn forms and conventions from agents of life into debilitating conventionalities, such as forbid the development of the individual sensibility and set up an insulation against any vitalizing recourse to the concrete. But the perception of this should not prevent us from giving the strength of The Vanity of Human Wishes (or of the poem on Levet) its due. Nor should it lead us to overrate the poetic strength of Shelley's use of language. I bring it down to Shelley in order to keep the discussion within bounds. He is a poet of undoubted genius, and he may fairly be taken as representing the tendency of the reaction against the Augustan. His use of language might seem to be as far removed from the stating use as possible; it is often hard to find a para-phrasable content in his verse. Yet he is not, as a poet, the antithesis of Johnson in the sense that he practises what I have called the dramatic use of language. His use is at least as far removed from that as Johnson's is—if removed on the other side. His handling of emotion may not be 'statement'; but in order to describe it we need a parallel term. It is a matter of telling us; telling us,' I feel like this,' and telling us how we, the audience, are to fed. Intended intensities are indicated by explicit insistence and emphasis. While Johnson starts with an intellectual and moral purpose Shelley starts with an emotional purpose, a dead set at an emotional effect, and pursues it in an explicit mode that might very reasonably be called 'statement' in contrast with the Shakespearean mode, which is one of presenting something from which the emotional effect (or whatever else) derives. What Shelley does in The Cenci (Act V, Sc. iv) with that speech of Claudio's which

he unconsciously remembers from Measure for Measure (Act HI, Sc. i) is characteristic:

Beatrice (wildly): O

My God! Can it be possible I have

To die so suddenly ? So young to go

Under the obscure, cold, rotting wormy ground!

To be nailed down into a narrow place;

To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more.. ..

In spite of the reminiscence, this is as remote as possible from the Shakespearean original:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice. . ..

I leave the reader to look up, if he likes, the two speeches, and I won't develop the comparison (there are some relevant notes in the chapter on Shelley in my Revaluation). In the juxtaposition as I give it here it will be seen that there is nothing in Claudio's lines corresponding to the direct explicit emotionality of the O (so significantly placed) My God, though the Shakespearean passage has so much the stronger effect. If the whole Shelleyan speech is turned up (or the whole play) it will be found to be, in essence, wholly a matter of' O'. It might, in fact, be said that die criticism of the tradition adorned by Johnson is that it led to the conditions in which Shelley did this with his genius.

Johnson, of course, was not inclined to be indulgent to the 'romantic' consequences of Augustanism. As Mr Krutch says: 'No one of his contemporaries seemed more completely outside the energizing romantic movement, or more insensitive to the novel elements that were beginning to be evident in the work of Gray or even in that of his friend Goldsmith.' What Mr Krutch doesn't see is that in Johnson's lack of sympathy for the 'novel elements' (which aren't on the whole so very novel) we have his strength rather than his limitation. The formula for Johnson as critic is this: he is strong where an Augustan training is in place, and his limitations appear when the training begins to manifest

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itself as unjustifiable resistance. That 'unjustified', of course, will involve an appeal to one's own judgment. I myself judge that Johnson discriminates with something approaching infallibility between what is strong and what is weak in the eighteenth century. Where Milton is concerned he shows an interesting resistance, which Paradise Lost has no difficulty in overcoming. Milton has a subject and his use of language offers none of the difficulty of the Shakespearean; it is concerned with direct declamatory statement and observes a high decorum. (All the same, Johnson can say of the diction, unanswerably: 'The truth is, that, both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantic principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and condemned; for there the judgment operates freely.. . .*)

It is in his treatment of Pope that we come on a really striking and significant limitation in the critic. Mr Krutch quotes some acute comparative observations on Pope and Dryden that, for all their acuteness, leave us feeling that Johnson doesn't appreciate the full difference between the two—doesn't, that is, appreciate Pope's greatness. Mr Krutch himself, while he can jibe (not unjustifiably) at the modish in our time * who sometimes seem to pay lip service to Dryden less because they generally admire him than in order to emphasize the fact that they do not consider themselves romantics', cannot see that Pope is a poet of another and greater kind. Faced with the Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady he can say that Pope 'succeeds as well as Pope could be expected to succeed with such a subject', and makes it plain that in his view Johnson's failure of sympathy is a minor matter (measured by the loss involved) compared with his failure in respect ofLyddas. But the Unfortunate Lady is one of the most remarkable poems in the Oxford Book ('Yes, there's some true and tender sentiment there,' *Q' replied when, not without mischievous intention, I had congratulated him on having included that piece of Pope). In it appears unmistakably the genius that finds its fullest expression in that great poem, the fourth book of the Dunciad. That Johnson shouldn't be able to appreciate the genius that could transmute into Augustan poetry elements that so strikingly transcend the Augustanism of the Essay on Man, the Epistle to Arbuthnot or The Rape of the Lock throws a significant