by F. R. Leavis
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
JOHNSON AND AUGUSTANISM in
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
JOHNSON AND AUGUSTANISM 113
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
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
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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 stud
ies, 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'.