Doctor Johnson is a natural poet born into the age of prose, condemned to develop skills that were unnatural to him and to write, at great length, in the wrong medium. Edmund Wilson, the most Johnsonian of American writers, is harsh: “For all of Johnson’s vigorous intellect and his elaborate brilliance, he is a figure of secondary interest: it is not altogether that he is prejudiced and provincial but rather that his prejudices do not have behind them quite enough of the force of the creative mind.” Hazlitt’s view: “He has neither ease nor simplicity, and his efforts at playfulness, in part, remind one of the lines in Milton:—‘—The elephant / To make them sport wreath’d his proboscis lithe’... This want of relaxation and variety of manner has, I think, after the first effects of novelty and surprise were over, been prejudicial to the matter. It takes from the general power, not only to please, but to instruct.” He adds, “The structure of his sentences, which was his own invention, and which has been generally imitated since his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end of a verse; the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound; each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza.”
His age tended to distort natural impulse, driving it to madness in the case of Christopher Smart or to “specialism” in the cases of Swift, Gay and Pope. Such distortions were givens. Ford declares, “The language used by the eighteenth century—and Samuel Johnson—was a translation.” He itemizes stock phrases. “The eighteenth century retired from life that was coarse into a remoter region where individuals always became types and language more and more rarefied itself.” Writers came obsessively to use the definite article: “the poet,” not “a poet”; “the hill,” not “a hill”—until “we arrive, then, at Johnson, the most tragic of all our major literary figures, a great writer whose still living writings are always ignored, a great honest man who will remain forever a figure of half fun because of the leechlike adoration of the greatest and most ridiculous of all biographers.” This was the strange, respectful, attentive microscopist James Boswell, whose biographical subject was “a man who loved truth and the expression of truth with a passion that when he spoke resembled epilepsy and when he meditated was an agony. It does not need a Boswell to tell us that; the fact shines in every word he wrote, coming up through his Latinisms as swans emerge, slightly draped with weeds, from beneath the surface of a duck pond. His very intolerances are merely rougher truths; they render him the more human—and the more humane.” If he was released from bondage to a prescribed language and the values that determined it, it was through becoming a conversationalist and learning to deploy a rhetoric that was not constructed upon the page, a rhetoric for the ear. The development in his style from the latinizing of his amazing little novel Rasselas to the terse directness of Lives of the Poets is decisive. He brought his prose back toward the language of his considered speech.
Doctor Samuel Johnson: novelist, lexicographer, biographer, critic, editor, pamphleteer, conversationalist, moral and critical center of his age, point of reference and illumination for later ages, he represents with broad wisdom and authority of style the radically English intelligence, its power of generality and of discrimination. The poems, often neglected, are a fragment of his huge work. In them, as T. S. Eliot says, he has contrived “to be original with the minimum of alteration,” a feat “sometimes more distinguished than to be original with the maximum of alteration.”
Born in Lichfield in 1709, the son of a bookseller in the modern sense, he took an interest in his father’s wares. Educated at Lichfield Grammar School and later at Stourbridge Grammar School, when he was nineteen he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he felt acutely out of place because of his poverty and class. Friends clubbed together to buy him shoes. He left the university in 1731 without taking a degree. He did not enjoy his year as a schoolmaster or “usher,” being unable to keep order or to convey his learning or his dogged enthusiasms. He was a phlegmatic man who, if moved by need or passion, was capable of heroic labors and surprised even himself with his powers. He undertook as his first literary job a hack translation of Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (published 1735), useful to him when he composed Rasselas twenty-four years later, in the evenings of one week, to defray his mother’s funeral expenses and to pay her debts. His memory was orderly and encyclopedic, even if he tended to surround himself with disorder.
He married in 1735 and the next year opened a private school in Edial, Staffordshire, where he looked after a handful of pupils. They are said to have found their master fascinating and a little strange; they spied on him and Mrs. Johnson, a woman considerably older than himself, on whom the Doctor doted. Among his pupils was David Garrick, his theatrical protégé. With Garrick he went to London in 1737 and took root there. It was not—at the beginning—an easy transition, for success came slowly. In “London,” an imitation of Juvenal’s third satire, written the year after he arrived, he evoked an unregenerate, hostile environment: “This mournful truth is everywhere confess’d, / Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.” The poem is spoken by a man preparing to leave the city. Johnson may have been tempted to follow the voice but London was his destination.
He worked on his tragedy Irene and began writing pieces, and later reporting parliamentary debates, for the Gentleman’s Magazine. His friendship with Richard Savage at this time bore fruit in the celebrated Life of Savage, finest of his indispensable Lives of the Poets (1779–81). In 1745 he published his plan for an edition of Shakespeare, and two years later his preliminary plan for the great Dictionary of the English Language. His poetic activity, always fitful, culminated in 1749 with “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” an imitation of Juvenal’s’ tenth satire, and his first signed work. In the same year Irene was produced and published, without much success.
Independent periodical work on the Rambler, of whose 208 issues he wrote more than 200, occupied him from 1750 to 1752, when his wife died. Despite this loss and his natural indolence, the projects he had initiated carried him along with their momentum and came to fruition, the Dictionary in 1755, the Shakespeare ten years later. He also contributed to the Idler. In 1762 he was awarded a royal pension.
The next year James Boswell descended like a benign Scottish parasite on his life, and thus began the biography—a monologue with commentary and digression—and much of the legend of Doctor Johnson. Boswell stands between readers and the Doctor. Johnson presided over the Literary Club from 1764, and in his circle were Sir Joshua Reynolds (who left a striking portrait of him), Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and many others. In the same year he met Mrs. Thrale, who tended him devotedly in his extended difficulties.
After his Shakespeare was published, his literary activities diminished. In the nineteen years before his death in 1784 he published political pamphlets, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), where Boswell had conducted him two years earlier, and Lives of the Poets, begun in 1777, which he struggled to complete for publication in 1779–81. He was awarded the degree of doctor in civil law at Oxford in 1781, exactly half a century after he had left the place with no degree at all.
An account of his evolving literary manner does not reflect the turbulence of mind that his prayers, letters and actions suggest. Literary work was not a place to explore subjective impulse and distress; it was where fact, critical discrimination and imaginative and moral insight were called for, a place of self-effacement and thus of relief. Pessimism and acerbity color much that he wrote and intensify the imaginative work. The comments on poets and on Shakespeare are those of a man matured by untold—but not all unrecorded—torments, who understood weakness and failure because he recognized the human paradoxes in himself. It’s hard to understand his hostility to Swift the man, for only Swift of his near contemporaries was his equal in imagination, integrity and inner turmoil.
Johnson’s severe Augustan perspective, when he came to appraise works, must have appeared a bit old-fashioned in its standards and expectations even in his own day. Donald Davie insists that “it is the mind which knows the power of its own potentially disruptive propensities that needs and demands to be disciplined.” This is true of Swift and Cowper and, in the twentieth century, of A. E. Housman and Yvor Winters, but especially so of Johnson with his heavier burdens and larger projects. He chooses poetic forms for this reason. His couplets, for “gravity, sheer weight,” are unprecedented; if not “personal” in a modern sense, they are fraught with personal consequence.
He condemns “the cant of those who judge by principle rather than perception.” Yet “principle” seems to turn him off Milton, and he misreads “Lycidas” for this reason. But perception, especially in his reading of Paradise Lost, overrides principle. Reason is strong; strong reason knows limits beyond which it cannot be trusted. Beyond those limits one must make do with feeling or faith. Johnson on Shakespeare confirms the power of perception, even in passages where Shakespeare most violates Johnson’s cherished principles.
Particularism is at the heart of Johnson’s conservatism. His Tory stance was a matter of orientation, not party affiliation: indeed he criticized parties with severity. He hated Whiggery, however, from his earliest years in London. In “London,” Thales cries out as he leaves the city:
Here let those reign, whom pensions can incite
To vote a patriot black, a courtier white;
Explain their country’s dear-bought rights away,
And plead for pirates in the light of day;
With slavish tenets taint our poison’d youth,
And lend a lie the confidence of truth.
Political skepticism guarantees that his declarations are disinterested.
His comprehensive knowledge of past literature gave him the means with which to measure the work of his day. His versions of Juvenal and Horace take for their ground the efforts of earlier translators and writers, but he follows Horace’s advice and, in rendering an “original,” gives it to his own age. He updates references where he can, evoking London rather than Rome. At the age of fifteen he had translated Horace’s “Eheu fugaces,” a suitable preliminary to “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:
Your shady groves, your pleasing wife,
And fruitful fields, my dearest friend,
You’ll leave together with your life,
Alone the cypress shall attend.
It’s not literal translation, even here. In his Life of Shenstone he describes the nature and pleasure of “imitation” as a creative mode: “The adoption of a particular style, in light and short compositions, contributes much to the increase of pleasure: we are entertained at once with two imitations, of nature in the sentiments, of the original author in the style, and between them the mind is kept in perpetual employment.” The reader who knows no Juvenal, Horace or Latin will experience half, or less than half, the poem, but will still find something of weight. This product of Johnson’s teenage pen does not compare in accomplishment with Pope’s “On Solitude.”
When he was seventeen he wrote “Upon the Feast of St Simon and St Jude,” interesting chiefly for its skillful rather than spirited use of the stanza form Christopher Smart was to adopt in “A Song to David.” Despite early prosodic precocity, Johnson came to rely upon the heroic couplet for serious poems. Some of the ephemeral pieces do live. Although “An Ode on Friendship” expresses conventional sentiment in conventional quatrains, it has the authority of conviction. The “Epitaph on Sir Thomas Hamner” is civic verse of a high order. His “Prologue” composed for Garrick is a verse essay on the English stage with notable observations on Shakespeare, Jonson, the Restoration poets (“Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit”) and the effect of excessive rule and refinement: “From bard to bard, the frigid caution crept, / Till declamation roar’d, while passion slept.” He conjures the “vicissitudes of taste” from which he, arriving in London a mature man of twenty-eight, stood aloof. His sense of merit is one with his sense of cultural history: there can be no compromise with tradition. Modern excellence must measure itself against proven excellences of the past.
As a reader and critic, he appreciates sensually both overall form and realized subject matter. No critic before him so often uses the word “image.” Donald Davie has commented on the power of verbs in the best Augustan writing. Johnson’s verbs are strong. For him wit (the “constant presence of critical intelligence”) fuses idea and image to convey truth. He condemns Pope for reducing strength of thought to felicity of language. Wit is seeing what is not obvious but what is seen to be just in all its parts when first produced. He distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic forms. It is intrinsic form we perceive in the best works. In his Life of Cowley he writes, “Words being arbitrary must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought.” The dress must fit not only the thought but the dignity of the speaker or occasion. Decorum proves crucial in discrimination. The complex association of words with thought, image, speaker and prosody we call form, intrinsic form; it may include conventional external form like the sonnet, which we recognize, but we respond only if intrinsic form is correct.
Johnson looks for certain qualities in verse. First: generality of reference. Natural detail should suit thought, not distort or displace it. Like most of his contemporaries, he overuses the definite article. “The Vanity of Human Wishes” tries for universality but instead tends toward abstraction. He also seeks to instruct. A poem should detect order and suggest moral direction, even if it reminds the reader of a known truth rather than discovering a new one. He seeks to make a work pleasing, sensuous gratification deriving from sound, imagery and organization and the moral and intellectual pleasure of its rightness. Poetry is the “art of uniting pleasure with truth.” Genius is “a mind of large, general powers.”
T. S. Eliot regards “The Vanity of Human Wishes” as the most accomplished satire in the language. Some readers see it as a work—like Samson Agonistes—in which the extremity of the moral is intolerable and reduces the artistic achievement. And the epigrammatic completeness of many of the heroic couplets militates against its overall integration. Continuity of argument and imagery, however, ensure unity. The imagery in particular is worth attention. It can remain implicit in allusive verbs or adjectives. Theater, pageant (with fireworks) and performance recur. In line sixty-four he mentions “scene,” followed by “solemn toys” and “empty shows,” “robes and veils,” until we come to the word “farce,” which draws the allusions into coherence, connecting “stage” images in an emblem of vanity. In line seventy-four he uses the word “burning,” then “call,” but not until line seventy-six do we surmise fireworks. The suggested image remains unstated. The evaporation of the “call” connects with earlier images of mist, phantoms, the unreal masquerading as the solid. Johnson qualifies concrete nouns with abstract ajdectives. Such techniques coordinate and connect the couplets. Pope achieves much the same verbal alchemy, though often for rhetorical effect; Johnson uses it to integrate the elements of the poem.
Johnson owes Pope a big but not uncritical debt. The moral and intellectual concentration of Johnson’s couplets exceeds Pope’s. Johnson is the more serious: “His warrant for public utterance,” Leavis says, “is a deep moral seriousness, a weight—a human centrality—of theme. It is a generalising weight.” His abstractions concentrate meaning, do not gesture at it. In his generalizing imagery, half remains static and located, the other half is in motion or acts: “The steady Roman shook the world.” Connection between mutable and immutable (sometimes ironically reversed) or between the physically stable and the evanescent, releases the general truth. There is no other poet in English with Johnson’s specific gravity.