JOHNSON'S LIVES OF THE POETS.*

Da. JOHNSON is the great representative of English literature during the latter half of the eighteenth century. For many years he was a literary dictator, and few men ventured to question his judgment or his taste. Then came the inevitable reaction. His dogmatism and his inability to understand the higher beauties of poetry offended critics who had an ear for the divine harmonies of our master-poets, and sympathy enough to appreciate their subtlest fancies and finest imaginative efforts. The age that produced such singers as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, was not likely to remain on the narrow lines of criticism laid down by Johnson ; nor was it unnatural, under the circum- stances, that his judgments, although in many respects manly and sagacious, should have been neglected or despised. We can do

more justice to them in these days, can better recognise what is sound, can estimate more leniently, or even afford to smile at, what is false.

Mr. Matthew Arnold's exact and delicate taste in literature

gives weight to every sentence he utters upon the literary law- giver of the last century, and the preface to this selection of Johnson's Lives cannot fail to be read with the keenest interest. It is unfortunately very short, but it is very weighty, and suggests many points of discussion.

A few words may be said, first of all, about the contents of the volume. The " Lives " selected, and termed the "six chief," are of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and Gray, that of Gray being, by Mr. Arnold's admission, a biography of inferior value ; and in Macaulay's opinion, "the very worst, beyond all doubt," of the series. We think the "Life of Cowley" might have been added to the number with advantage, for it affords scope for some of Johnson's best criticism ; and perhaps also the "Life of Savage," although Savage was no poet, since it is not only highly interesting as a narrative, but also a remarkably fine specimen of the author's literary workmanship. The choice, however, is suf- ficiently wide to cover, as the editor points out, a space of more than a century and a half, and it contains a full and most instructive survey of our poetical literature during that period.

But is it such a survey as may be safely put in the hands of a young student without note or comment ? Mr. Arnold observes that as a point de repere, a fixed and thoroughly known centre of departure and return to the student of English literature, he knows of no such first-rate piece of literature for supplying in this way the wants of the literary student existing at all in any

other language, and he adds, truly enough, that a student cannot read these six lives "without gaining from them, consciously or unconsciously, an insight into the history of English literature and life." But he declines assisting the reader in his study, on the following grounds:—

" Johnson himself has admirably marked the real line of our educa- tion through letters. He says, in his Life of Pope Judgment is forced upon us by experience. He that reads many books must compare one opinion or one style with another ; and when he compares must neces- sarily distinguish, reject, and prefer.' Nothing could be better. The aim and end of education through letters is to get this experience. Our being told by another what its results will properly be found to be is not, even if we are told aright, at all the same thing as getting the experience for ourselves. The discipline, therefore, which puts us in the way of getting it cannot be called an inconsiderable or inefficacious one. We should take care not to imperil its acquisition by refusing to trust to it in its simplicity, by being eager to add, set right,

and annotate. It is much to secure the reading, by young English people, of the lives of the six chief poets of our nation, between the years 1650 and 1750, related by our foremost men of letters of the eighteenth century. It is much to secure their reading, under the stimulus of Johnson's interesting recital and forcible judgments, famous specimens of the authors whose lives are before them. Do not let us insist on also reviewing in detail and supple- menting Johnson's work for them,—on telling them what they ought really and definitely to think about the six authors, and about the exact place of each in English literature. Perhaps our pupils are not ripe for it ; perhaps, too, we have not Johnson's interest and Johnson's

* The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lires of the Poets; with Macaulay's Life of Johnson. Edited, with a Preface, by Matthew Arnold. London : Macmillan and Co. 1878. force ; we are not the power in letters for our century which he was for his. We may be pedantic, obscure, dull,—everything that bores, rather than everything that attracts ; and so Johnson and his Lives will repel and will not be received, because we insist on being received along with them."

This is admirably put, and one cannot but appreciate the writer's loyalty to a great man. But there is surely a fallacy in an argu- ment which strikes at all annotations, notes, and commentaries, in short, at every attempt to elucidate a text or to criti- cise a famous work of literature. No doubt the Dry-as-dust commentators have done woeful mischief in the world. They have darkened the works of men of genius instead of elucidating them, and it is quite possible that here in Eng- land, and especially with English classics published for school service, we are carrying the habit of explaining what does not require explanation to a ridiculous extent. But that the young student will profit by some help we have no doubt what- ever, and especially does such help seem to us needful in a perusal of the Lives of the Poets. Johnson was a great critic. He had a deep, if not an extensive, knowledge of English literature. No man knew better how to impart knowledge, no man had a keener zest for literary history ; but Johnson's judgments were partial, his poetical instincts defective, and .probably no critic of justly

high pretensions ever made greater blunders. The reverence due to a great name, and the natural inclination to lean upon authority,

may lead a young student to follow Johnson's teaching, and in following it to go wrong. Why should he not be told how far Johnson went astray in his depreciation of Lycidas, and of Milton's Sonnets, and of the Odes of Collins and of Gray ? Doubt- less a pupil may be told too much, but that scarcely seems a satis- factory reason for telling him nothing at all.

Mr. Arnold considers that the eighteenth century was pre- eminently the age of prose, and that the special task committed to Johnson and his age was the establishment of English prose. That, he says, was the great want and work of the hour, and therefore it was inevitable that other things should be sacrificed to it :—

" Our literature required a prose which conformed to the truo law of prose, and that it might acquire this the more surely, it compelled poetry, as in France, to conform itself to the law of prose likewise. The classic verse of French poetry was the Alexandrine, a measure favour- able to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. Gradually a measure favourable to those very same qualities—the ten- syllable couplet—established itself as the classic verse of England, until in the eighteenth century it had become the ruling form of our poetry. Poetry, or rather the use of verse, entered in a remarkable degree during that century into the whole of the daily life of the civilised classes, and the poetry of the century was a perpetual school of the qualities requi- site for a good prose,—the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance."

This, no doubt, is true, and the ten-syllable couplet, a noble verse in itself, unfortunately enabled a vast number of men to write rhymes who would never have essayed a more difficult metre. At the same time, it is worth remembering that much of our most effective eighteenth-century poetry was not written in this measure. Thomson's Seasons and Castle of Indolence, Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, the exquisite poetry of Gray, of Collins, and of Burns, the Task of Cowper, Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, and other works which attained no common popularity, owed nothing to the so-called classic verse of Eng- land. Johnson did his part in forming English prose, just as Swift and Addison and other writers of the century had done before him, but in his eagerness to show that the literary work of the etgliteenth century was to produce a prose style, "a style of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance," Mr. Arnold is perhaps inclined to forget that some of our earlier writers had proved far more decisively the capabilities of the English tongue. Our Bible and Prayer-book are models of English prose, although composed in a poetical age. Whatever lack of taste may be discernible in Taylor, whose English, according to Mr.

Arnold, is "cumbersome, unavailable, impossible," for the purposes of modern life, there are passages in that wonderful writer which, for precision and force, and for that balance upon

which Mr. Arnold sets SQ high a value, cannot well be surpassed. I The finest prose, to our thinking, is produced not in an age of prose, but in an age which calls forth all that is highest and noblest in human nature,—an age in which a great literature is the outcome of great deeds. Still, no doubt, a considerable tech- nical improvement was effected during the eighteenth century in the regularity of composition. The result was often monotonous, but ' sentences were constructed more easily and read with less difficulty ; I may we not also add, remembering the majestic periods of Hooker! and the wealthy diction of Bacon, with less enjoyment? The laws! Of prose differ from those of verse' and t is easy to conceive that in a poetical period this difference may be forgotten. But the poet is the master of language in all its forms, and his prose in generally the best, not because it is poetical, but because it pos- sesses a vital strength.

Mr. Arnold's interesting preface is fruitful in suggestions, but our space is exhausted. We may add that the value of the book is enhanced by the republication of Lord Macaulay's Life of John- son, contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica.