BOOKS OF THE DAY
Johnson: A Summing Up
Samuel Johnson. By Joseph Wood Krutch. (CasselL 21s.)
Mn. Kama-1's book was first published in New York, with well- deserved success, in 1944. Why, it may be asked, should anyone trouble to write a long book about Johnson, when Boswell is there for everyone to read ? Mr. Krutch is fully prepared to defend himself ; he has attempted "to give the general reader a running account of Johnson's life, character, and work as they appear in the light of contemporary knowledge," and he has accomplished what he set out to do. The main value of his book is that it places Johnson's own work in proper relation to his conversational fame. The Dictionary, Rasselas, the periodical essays are faithfully assessed, and Johnson's political and sociological views are analysed at some length. Very properly Mr. Krutch does not simply dismiss him as a High Tory: "It is obvious that a due acceptance of the great scheme of sub- ordination did not interfere with a proper estimate of any of his own rights . . . neither did his somewhat feudal conception of the social structure make him indifferent to social abuses."
Johnson was well ahead of his time in his protests against debtors' prisons and Negro slavery, and he would never "use conservatism
• as an excuse for inhumanity." Many of his favourite themes, familiar to all readers of Boswell, were first treated, as Mr. Krutch observes, in The Rambler or The Idler. To the latter Mr. Krutch does perhaps rather less than justice when he says that the only essay still quoted is the final paper, Horrour of the Last. This essay is far from being characteristic of The Idler as a whole, and it seems a pity that Johnson's "gift for good-humoured satire" is not illustrated by some paragraphs, say, from The Corruption of News-writers or The Auction-Hunter. One of the most informative chapters in the book is tat on Johnson's edition of Shakespeare. Professed students of the history of Shake4learean criticism are, of course, already competent to assess Johnson's position in the long succession of editors ; but Mr. Krutch has put the common reader deeply in his debt by placing Johnson's work against the background of eighteenth- century canons of criticism. Similarly, in his chapter on The Lives of the Poets, Mr. Krutch is at pains to explain what was at the .bottom of Johnson's criticism of Lycidas and of the metaphysical poets:
"Johnson seldom fails to be memorable, even when he is wrong . . . The pleasure which we get from reading him is often, at least, as much the pleasure of learning about Johnson as it is that of learning about Dryden, Pope, Milton and the rest."
Of Boswell Mr. Krutch presents not perhaps an enthusiastic, but an eminently fair, portrait. In particular, he rightly emphasises that Boswell's literary effort and ambition were not concentrated upon Johnson. The Boswell papers, he says, "owe their existence primarily not to the determination to gather material about Johnson, but rather to that passion for self-analysis, self-contradiction, self- contemplation and self-recording." The Life of Johnson was indeed a culminating, rather than an isolated, achievement. It should be added that the English edition of the book has been entirely re-set, and it is odd that the opportunity has not been taken to correct a few slips—e.g., Cave's Christian name becomes " Edmund" ; Boswell's Note-Book was edited not by the owner, R. B. Adam, but by R. W. C[haptnan] ; Johnson's enquiry "Who is Bach ? " was uttered not at Streatham, but at St. Martin's Street ; and the items in the bibliography should have English, rather than American imprints. But these are small blemishes in a book that
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