The Common Pursuit (17 page)

light on the decline of the Augustan tradition. Johnson was representative, and the Pope whom he saw stood as a * Chinese Wall' between the eighteenth century and the seventeenth— though for Pope (see the opening of the Dundad IV) Milton was no Chinese Wall.

At the end of the chapter on the Lives, Mr Krutch discusses the kind of critic that Johnson was. Of the criticism he says: 'Its manner is objective, and its aim is not to present "the truth as I (and probably no one else) sees it," but to make statements which the reader will accept as true for himself and all normal men.' That is (I myself should say), it is essentially critical. But is it— Mr Krutch anticipates the question—pure ? In giving the answer, though his attitude seems to me sound, he fumbles. As so often, the term 'aesthetic' signals a lack of grip. Mr Krutch says quite rightly that Johnson 'did not think of his criticism as something that ought to be essentially different from that general criticism of life which he had made it his business to offer since he first began to write.' But take this account of Johnson's attitude (p. 449):

There are no unique literary values. No specialist conceptions, no special sensibilities, no special terms, even, are necessary. Anyone who has the equipment to judge men and manners and morals has the equipment to judge literature, for literature is merely a reflection of men and manners and morals. To say this is, of course, to say that for Johnson there is no realm, of the exclusively aesthetic.

I don't think that for any critic who understands his job there are any 'unique literary values' or any 'realm of the exclusively aesthetic'. But there ts, for a critic, a problem of relevance: it is, in fact, his ability to be relevant in his judgments and commentaries that makes him a critic, if he deserves the name. And the ability to be relevant, where works of literary art are concerned, is not a mere matter of good sense; it implies an understanding of the resources of language, the nature of conventions and the possibilities of organization such as can come only from much intensive literary experience accompanied by the habit of analysis. In this sense it certainly implies a specially developed sensibility. I know of nothing said by Johnson that leads me to suppose he would (unless in 'talking for victory') have disputed this.

It is because Mr Krutch is not sufficiently a critic in the sense

JOHNSON AND AUGUSTANISM 115

defined that his book gives lodgment for the criticisms I have passed on it. I feel it is a little ungrateful and ungracious in me to have insisted on them so. For, I repeat, it is a good book. Indeed, I think it will become (as it deserves to do) something of a classic —which is a reason for taking it seriously. I have found it an admirable challenge to stating my own sense of the living interest and importance of the subject.

And it will be proper, as well as pleasant, to end on a note of agreement with Mr Krutch. He thinks highly of Rasselas. 'To Johnson's contemporaries', he tells us, indicating its more obvious relation to Johnson's Augustanism, 'the book was a dazzling specimen of that "true wit" which consists in the perfect statement of something which "oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".' But, he rightly insists,

Johnson did something more than merely rephrase the commonplaces which have long served to demonstrate that all is vaniry. ... His pessimism, in other words, was not merely of that vulgar sort which is no more than a lament over the failure of worldly prosperity. It was, instead, the pessimism which is more properly called the tragic sense of life

It was a tragic sense of life that was, at the same time, both moral centrality and a profound commonsense: ' Vivite laeti is one of the great rules of health', he wrote to Mrs Thrale— Mrs Thrale who knew the tragic Johnson as Boswell did not. We can see why Jane Austen, whose 'civilization' is so different a thing from what the modish cult makes it, admired Rasselas to such effect that its influence is to be found, not only on the surface (where it is obvious enough), but in the very ethos of her work; so that Rasselas has more right to a place in the history of the English novel than Defoe and Sterne together. Further, in Rasselas we have something deeply English that relates Johnson and Jane Austen to Crabbe.

JOHNSON AS POET

THE addition of Johnson's poems to the Oxford English Texts is a matter for quiet satisfaction. Everyone, of course, knows that Johnson was a great Man of Letters, but it doesn't follow that the proposition, 'Johnson, after all, was a great English writer', is not one to which those who see its truth as evident are often provoked. In fact, it cannot even be said that the Johnson of general currency is BoswelTs Johnson; he is BoswelTs Johnson edited in the interests of middlebrow complacency; revised downwards to the level of a good-mixing that, unlike the sociality of the eighteenth-century Club, is hostile to serious intellectual standards. For though poor Boswell was quite unintelligent about literature, as he betrays whenever he expresses for our benefit those respectful disagreements with Johnson's judgments, he exhibits in his concern to stress Johnson's intellectual distinction (see, for instance, the recurrent transcriptions of opinions, argued at length, about points of law) a seriousness that has no place in the modern cult of the Great Clubman.

These are the days, indeed, in which you can stock up on Johnson—traits,- points, anecdotage, all the legend with its picturesque and humorous properties—without being bothered to read even Boswell. He and Mrs Thrale might seem to be readable enough, but those little works of mediation which come out from time to time are apparently offered as being more so, Johnson, like his prose, is paid the tribute of appreciative parody. The limitations of such appreciation are, of course, radical: just as those witty prose-parodies cultivate an obtuseness to the unique Johnsonian strength, so the exploitations of Johnson the personality provoke one to the comment that, after all, for Boswell Johnson represented challenging and exacting standards, intellectual and moral —standards far above the level ofrhomme sensuel moyen.

Johnson was a great prose-writer, and it has been well said that his poetry has the virtues of his prose. This last proposition can count on a general unenthusiastic concurrence. It is worth noting that in the Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, which has

over seven hundred pages and the anthologist of which is one of the editors of the Oxford Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (which forms a considerable proportion of the good poetry produced in the century by poets other than Pope, and, though a great poem, is not very long) is represented by four short extracts, occupying four pages in all. But we may take it that to include a poet in the Oxford Standard Texts is to recognize his substantial classical standing.

However, whole to see Johnson the poetic classic paid all the honours of exhaustive scholarship must give satisfaction, the satisfaction, as noted above, is quiet. For a perusal of the four hundred pages of this handsome and scrupulously edited volume (a necessary acquisition for all the libraries) yields nothing to add to the familiar small body of his verse that deserves currency. The Vanity of Human Wishes, the inferior London, the Drury Lane Prologue, A Short Song of Congratulation ('Long-expected one and twenty'), and the stanzas on the death of Levet—what other poem (though no doubt a whole list of odds and ends could be collected) is there to add to this list ?

A large proportion of the volume consists of Latin verse, the presence of which serves to provoke reflections on the difference between Johnson's Latinizing and Milton's. For though (to speak with Johnsonian largeness) no one ever again will read Johnson's Latin, yet that his English would not have been what it is but for his cultivation of Latin is indisputable. He, like Ben Jonson, aims at Latin qualities and effects, yet contrives to be in his own way, as Ben Jonson is in his, natively and robustly English. They have in common this general difference from Milton, and the particular nature and conditions of this difference in each case might, by a university director of literary studies, be proposed to a student as a profitable matter of inquiry.

Over a hundred pages of the volume are occupied by Irene. As one re-reads it one's mind goes back to the characteristic definition: 'A dramatick exhibition is a book recited with concomitants that increase or diminish the effect'. Partly, of course, this is to be taken as expressing (what one sympathizes with) a literary bias—a bias, wholly respectable in an age when elevated drama, by Shakespeare or by Home, was an opportunity for Garrick, and declamatory histrionic virtuosity was the highest the

theatre had to offer. The assumption that a work of art in words is to be judged as literature seems in any case reasonable, and in not being, where dramatic literature was in question, alive to the complications attendant on the qualifying adjective Johnson, in that age, was not alone. Yet, as one re-reads Irene —so patently conceived as a book to be recited, and so patently leaving to the 'concomitants' the impossible task of making it a theatre-piece— one realizes that 'literary bias' misses what is most interesting in Johnson's case. That he has no sense of the theatre, and worse, cannot present or conceive his themes dramatically—these points are obvious. The point one finds oneself making is a matter of noting afresh certain familiar characteristics of his literary habit: his essential bent is undramatic in a sense of the adjective that goes deeper than the interest of the 'dramatic critic'. His good poetry is as radically undramatic as good poetry can be, and the failure in dramatic conception so patent in Irene is intimately related to the essential qualities of The Vanity of Human Wishes. This is great poetry, though unlike anything that this description readily suggests to modern taste; it is a poetry of statement, exposition and reflection: nothing could be remoter from the Shakespearean use of language—*In this passage is exerted all the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter'—than the Johnsonian. Johnson— and in this he is representative of his age—has neither the gift nor the aim of capturing in words, and presenting to speak for themselves, significant particularities of sensation, perception and feeling, the significance coming out in complex total effects, which are also left to speak for themselves; he starts with general ideas and general propositions, and enforces them by discussion, comment and illustration. It is by reason of these characteristics that his verse, like that which he found most congenial, may fairly be said to have the virtues of good prose. And it seems reasonable to associate with his radically undramatic habit ('dramatic incapacity' it might be called, if we remember that the positive result of a positive training will have its negative aspect) Johnson's concern for poetic justice, and his inability to appreciate the ways in which works of art act their moral judgments, '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'.

The conditions that enable Johnson to give his moral declamation the weight of lived experience and transform his eighteenth-century generalitiesinto that extraordinary kind of concreteness 1 —

Delusive Fortune hears th' incessant call They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.

When first the college rolls receive his name The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame, Through all his veins the fever of renown Burns from the strong contagion of the gown; O'er Bodley's dome his future labours spread, And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head.

Such bribes the rapid Greek o'er Asia whirl'd, For such the steady Romans shook the world

—these conditions fail him whenhe attempts drama. His characters declaim eloquent commonplaces—he cannot make them do any-else, but the dramatic ambition has robbed them of the strength and substance; the great moralist, reduced to a show of speaking through his persona, is less than

Submissive and prepar'd for each event, Now let us wait the last award of Heaven, Secure of Happiness from Flight or Conquest, Nor fear the Fair and Learn'd can want Protection. The mighty Tuscan courts the banish'd Arts To kind Italia's hospitable Shades; There shall soft Leisure wing th* excursive Soul, And Peace propitious smile on fond Desire; There shall despotic Eloquence resume Her ancient Empire o'er the yielding Heart; There Poetry shall tune her sacred Voice, And wake from Ignorance the Western World.

Irene is all like that. And there too we haw the measure of Johnson's blank verse. He is clearly determined that his verse shall not be changed into the 'periods of a declaimed, and that it shall not be said that the audience cannot easily perceive * where the

1 1 have discussed it in some detail in Revaluation.

lines end or begin' (see his remarks on blank-verse in the Life of Milton), In couplets, of course, he couldn't have written so dismally. With the absence of rhyme and of the movement of the couplet goes the absence of wit. And without the wit he is without the Johnsonian weight.

TRAGEDY AND THE ' MEDIUM'

A NOTE ON MR SANTAYANA'S 'TRAGIC PHILOSOPHY'