The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  ant Chaos it informs the prophetic vision of the close with that tremendously imaginative and moving grandeur. 1

  That close, of course, with its reminders of the century of Marvell and Donne, gives us a Pope who is more than Augustan. And in so doing it serves as an admonition against leaving an oversimplifying account of him uncorrected. Though it is his creative-ness—for all his satiric bent, he is an essentially creative spirit—that puts Pope in so different a relation to Augustan culture from Swift's, his creativeness is not merely a matter of his being able to realize an ideal Augustan order. The contrast with Swift comes out in another way. The respect in which the two writers (who were closely associated in the brewing of the Dundad) have most affinity is represented by the characteristic piece of Swift's prose which I quote at the foot of p. 79. Nowhere does the habit of mind and expression illustrated here come nearer, in Swift, to producing an effect in which the satisfaction of the creative impulse plainly predominates. Very often the negative and destructive functions of the play of images and analogies are much more insistent: the strangeness—'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together*—is intensely malevolent, and the surprise is brutally shocking. How essentially negative, in this sense, the passage just quoted is comes out when we set it by any of Pope's in which his kindred habit asserts itself. Take this, for instance:

  And now had Fame's posterior Trumpet blown, And all the Nations summon'd to the Throne. The young, the old, who feel her inward sway, One instinct seizes, and transports away. None need a guide, by sure Attraction led, And strong impulsive gravity of Head:

  1 Cf. Leslie Stephen (Pope, p. 132): 'There are some passages marked by Pope's usual dexterity, but the whole is awkwardly constructed, and has no very intelligible connexion with the first part. It was highly admired at the time, and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope*s highest achievement in his arc At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies from Johnson and Thackeray.'

  None want a place, for all their Centre found, Hung to die Goddess, and coher'd around. Not closer, orb in orb, conglob'd are seen The buzzing Bees about their dusky Queen.

  The formal attitude here is one of satiric antipathy, but plainly the positive satisfaction taken by the poet in creating this marvellously organized complexity of surprising tropes, felicitously odd images, and profoundly imaginative puns, determines the predominant feeling, which, in fact, might fairly be called genial. So again here in a simpler instance (the first that presents itself at a turn of the page):

  Ah, think not, Mistress! more true Dulness lies In Folly's Cap, than Wisdom's grave disguise. Like buoys, that never sink into the flood, On Learning's surface we but lie and nod. Thine is the genuine head of many a house. And much Divinity without a Nous. Nor could a BARROW work on ev'ry block, Nor has one ATTERBURY spoil'd the flock. See! still thy own, the heavy Canon roll, And Metaphysic smokes involve the Pole.

  And in general, the same predominance of creativeness, delighting in the rich strangeness of what it contemplates, is to be found whenever Pope devotes himself to 'expressing' or 'ridiculing' (as we are expected to say, considering him as a satirist) the varied absurdities of the human scene.

  A Nest, a Toad, a Fungus, or a Flow'r

  —here we have, typified in brief, the kind of effect he so obviously loves; and the line serves as a reminder that 'human scene' is too limiting in suggestion.

  The common Soul, of Heav'n's more frugal make, Serves but to keep fools pert, and knaves awake: A drowsy Watchman, that just gives a knock, And breaks our rest, to tell us what's a clock. Yet by some object ev'ry brain is stirr'd; The dull may waken to a Humming-bird;

  The most recluse, discreetly opened, find Congenial matter in the Cockle-kind; The mind, in Metaphysics at a loss, May wander in a wilderness of Moss; The head that turns at super-lunar things, Pois'd with a tail, may steer on Wilkins* wings.

  Pope's interest in the objects of absorbing contemplation which he ascribes to the * virtuosi' he is satirizing may not be precisely theirs, but it is unmistakably a positive interest. What fascinates him are effects of fantastic incongruity; effects that at the same time seem to evoke a more exciting reality than that of common sense. And in creating these effects he is undoubtedly registering certain insistent qualities of experience as it came, good Augustan though he was, to him.

  The relation between his interest in these qualities and his concern for Augustan order constitutes one of the most striking aspects of his genius. There is no hostility between them; they associate together harmoniously in a perfect creative alliance. What we find in the part, in the relation between vivid nightmare absurdity and the decorous Augustanism of the verse, we find in large in the totality of the poem. Worked pregnantly in between the Augustan sublimities of the opening and the close, we have, not an ordered development of a corresponding theme, argument or action, but a packed heterogeneity that corresponds in the large to

  A Nest, a Toad, a Fungus, or a Flow'r.

  Into this can go with perfectly congruous incongruity a satirically straightforward piece of Augustan * Sense':

  Then thus. 'Since Man from beast by Words is known,

  Words are Man's province, Words we teach alone.

  When Reason doubtful, like the Samian letter,

  Points him two ways, the narrower is the better.

  Plac'd at the door of Learning, youth to guide,

  We never suffer it to stand too wide.

  To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,

  As Fancy opens the quick springs of Sense,

  We ply the Memory, we load the brain,

  Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain.

  Confine the thought, to exercise the breath; And keep them in the pale of Words till death. Whate'er the talents, or howe'er designed, We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.

  Such a passage comes in so naturally and easily because of the pervasive rationality of the Augustan versification and idiom. And that Pope can use these as he does in evoking his fantastic incongruities shows that there is nothing repressive about the Order that commands his imagination. His sense of wonder has been richly and happily nourished, and can invest what offers itself as satiric fantasy with the enchantment of fairy-tale:

  Wide, and more wide, it spread o'er all the realm; Ev'n Palinurus nodded at the Helm....

  His ability to unite Augustan with seventeenth-century Wit has profound concomitants.

  JOHNSON AND AUGUSTANISM

  MR KRUTCH'S book, 1 1 must confess, surprised me very agreeably. It is not only inoffensive; it is positively good. I had better add at once that I write in England and as an Englishman. In this country, to those seriously interested in literature, the cult of Johnson is an exasperation and a challenge. It is a branch of good-mixing, and its essential raison-d'&re is anti-highbrow; it is to further the middlebrow's game of insinuating the values of good-mixing into realms where they have no place—except as a fifth-column, doing their hostile work from within. Johnson, one finds oneself having again and again to insist, was not only the Great Clubman 2 ; he was a great writer and a great highbrow—or would have been, if the word, and the conditions that have produced it, had existed; that is, he assumed a serious interest in things of the mind, and, for all his appeal to 'the common reader', was constantly engaged in the business of bringing home to his public and his associates, whose cult of him was a tribute to the force with which he did it, that there were standards in these things above the ordinary level of the ordinary man. But when the University of Oxford conferred a doctorate honoris causa on P. G. Wodehouse, it was exemplifying the ethos of our modern Johnson club. And there is too good reason for expecting that a new book on Johnson by one of the academic custodians of the 'humanities' will exhibit the kind of literary accomplis
hment that goes with an admiration for the prose of (say) Miss Dorothy Sayers, the brilliance of Mr C. S. Lewis, and the art of Lytton Strachey.

  Mr Krutch, however, shows no interest in that kind of accomplishment. And while he doesn't sport the style that adorns vacuity or anti-highbrow animus, neither has he written one of

  1 Samuel Johnson. By Joseph Wood Krutch.

  2 'It may well be that like Johnson he [Charles Whibley] will live rather through the influence which he exerted on those who were privileged to know him than through the written word/—From the blurb in The Radio Times, January 22,1950, for a talk in the Third Programme on Whibley.

  those depressing * contributions to knowledge* which are so patently uninformed by any firsthand perception of why the subject should be worth study. In fact, an Englishman must see in him something very much to the credit of American academic letters. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine a don or a literary person on this side of the Atlantic producing a book with the virtues of Mr Krutch's. It is a new general book on Johnson that justifies itself. Mr Krutch has brought together, with unobtrusive but admirable skill, all the sources. He has related them so as to form the most coherent and complete exhibition of Johnson possible (and as part of the process has given us penetrating studies of Boswell and Mrs Thrale). His commentaries, which are never forced and always seem to issue naturally from the presented data, exemplify in a quietly acute way the peculiarly appropriate virtue of good sense; there is no obtrusion of 'psychology' and no psychoanalytic knowingness. It is as if the facts were so arranged as to expose their significance, so that when Mr Krutch renders this in statement, what he says is obviously just. It is a kind of obviousness that an expositor should aim at, but its achievement implies uncommon devotion and disinterestedness.

  Inevitably, most of what he says about Johnson doesn't strike the reader as particularly new. But, said in that way—emerging as it does from the relevant facts in their significant order—it brings an increase in real knowledge. And, without going in for paradoxes, Mr Krutch does firm and sensitive justice to the complexity of the facts. There is, at the centre of the subject, the peculiar nature of Johnson's Toryism and his piety. Their relation to his scepticism is well brought out. It is 'clear beyond any question', says Mr Krutch (having shown it to be so), 'that his orthodoxy was not the result of any bigoted conviction concerning the unique Tightness of the Anglican Church, but quite simply a part of his general tendency to favour social unity and social conformity'. And the strength of this tendency was correlated with the strength of his scepticism: he was, in this respect, not unlike Swift.

  Johnson accepted the miracles of the Bible because he could not refuse to do so without plunging himself into an abyss of intolerable

  doubt on the brink of which he always shuddered back; but even in works of pure imagination the supernatural was likely to trouble him, and what he said of the vein of 'stubborn rationality' that kept him from the Roman Catholic Church may give warrant for the guess that he would have been more comfortable if even Anglicanism had put less strain upon it.

  'Mr Johnson's incredulity/ says Mrs Thrale, 'amounted almost to disease'—she is reporting Hogarth to the effect: 'that man is not contented with believing the Bible, but he fairly resolves, I think, to believe nothing but the Bible/ Where ghosts are in question, it is an admirably critical mind that Mr Krutch shows us: 'Johnson was genuinely skeptical—which is to say, neither credulous, on the one hand nor, on the other, unwilling to consider the possibility that anything not disproved might be true/ And it is wholly characteristic of Johnson to have written: 'Prodigies are always seen in proportion as they are expected/

  As for his Toryism, how far it was from being the mere' sturdy' John Bullishness, endearingly prejudiced, overbearing and robust, which it tends to become in the current legend, Mr Krutch's book makes it impossible not to recognize. The theme involves so much of Johnson that to sketch Mr Krutch's treatment of it would be to summarize a large part of the book. But one point may be made that engages a great deal: Johnson had no bent towards hard authoritarianism or cynical 'realism 5 . It is in his polemic against the Americans that he appears most repugnantly as the Tory, but it should be noted that the gusto with which he indulges his worst side here is significantly correlated with his indignant hatred of slavery:

  But perhaps the best proof that when Johnson derided the idea of liberty he was thinking only of that sort of which the deprivation produces merely 'metaphysical distresses' is to be found in his attitude towards Negro slavery. Boswell was the 'friend of Paoli' and hence a champion of liberty—but chiefly, it appears, of the sort whose effects are exclusively 'metaphysical'. To him Negro slavery was an institution so marvellously humane and just that it should be contemplated with delighted wonder. To the Tory Johnson, on the other hand, it was an abomination concerning which he could not speak without rage. Near the very beginning of his career and at a time when the Quakers were still slave dealers, he spoke of'the natural right of the negroes to liberty

  and independence'. A little later he described Jamaica as 'a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves'; and still later he could write: 'I do not much wish well to discoveries, for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery*. In 1777 he dictated for Boswell a brief in favour of a Negro suing in Scotland to regain his freedom, and at Oxford, once, this defender of 'subordination* and scorner of liberty gave as his toast 'Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies'.

  This is the Johnson who could say: 'Let the authority of the English government perish, rather than be maintained by iniquity/

  One of the good things Mr Krutch does is to bring out Johnson's extravagant and disqualifying abnormality, and his deep sense of it, and tie part played by this sense in some of his most notorious characteristics. There is, for instance, his so-called 'dogmatism', which colours the general notion of his Toryism. I myself, when I hear this dogmatism spoken of, recall his own distinction: 'what I have here not dogmatically but deliberately written.. .' (Preface to Shakespeare). But it is plain that the weight of utterance that is of the essence of his style, and the inescapable mark of his genius, tends to be confused—for the most part admiringly, no doubt— with the crushing powers he commanded when 'talking for victory', and that people are partly thinking of this trait when they call him 'dogmatic'. Here is a relevant observation from Mr Krutch:

  Perhaps it has never been sufficiently remarked that one reason for his domineering manner, for his insistence on winning almost every argument by fair means or foul, is his realization that he must dominate any group of which he did not expect to become quickly the butt. In many respects he was made to be laughed at.

  Concerning another notorious trait Mr Krutch remarks: 'He was almost desperately sociable because he could never become part of any society.' The same considerations are brought to bear on that extraordinary household he collected and made himself responsible for.

  For Johnson, of course, the supreme social activity was the art of con versation; he couldn't do without the social milieu that enabled him to extend himself in talk. Mr Krutch is good on Johnson as a talker; the chapter, 'Folding his Legs', is one of the best in the book. Yet when we come to this subject we come in

  JOHNSON AND AUGUSTANISM 101

  sight of Mr Krutch's limitations, and qualifying criticism begins. For die consideration of Johnson's strength as a taUcer cannot properly be separated from that of his strength as a writer, and to Johnson's greatness as a writer Mr Krutch is not adequate. His inadequacy is most unquestionable as it appears in his treatment of the poems. I think he is right in suggesting that Mr T. S. Eliot, at any rate in effect, overrates London when he fails to stress its inferiority to The Vanity of Human Wishes. But that is surely a venial lapse (a matter of presentment rather than of judgment, I imagine) compared with a failure to see that The Vanity of Human Wishes is great poetry. And Mr Krutch does unmistakably fail; the superi
ority he sees amounts to little. He is not impressed; he is not (it would seem) even interested.

  If you can't appreciate Johnson's verse you will fail in appreciation of his prose; and you will not be able to follow-through the considerations involved in the appreciation of his talk. 'I could not help remarking', notes Fanny Burney, 'how very like Dr Johnson is to his writing; and how much the same thing it was to hear him or to read him; but that nobody could tell that without coming to Streatham, for his language was generally imagined to be laboured and studied, instead of the mere common flow of his thoughts/ About the extraordinary vigour and discipline exhibited by this 'mere common flow' Mr Krutch says a great deal that is to the point. He quotes Boswell:

  What the deepest source of these powers was is well described by Boswell in his final summing up: 'As he was general and unconfined in his studies, he cannot be considered as master of any one particular science; but he had accumulated a vast and various collection of learning and knowledge, which was so arranged in his mind, as to be ever in readiness to be brought forth. But his superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using the mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forceful manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident and actual wisdom.'

  And yet, endorsing this, Mr Krutch can say on another page that 'Johnson did not merely write abstractly; he thought abstractly'. To call Johnson's style 'abstract* is misleading if you don't go D*