illustration from Boswell that will fill them with interest and significance. The discipline that qualifies for literary success; the struggle to free oneself from servility to rich patrons, or from slavish thirst for popularity; a manly and independent front to the enemy in the fight of life; courage, especially in defeat, disappointment, infirmity, or bereavement; the futility of despair; the consolation of friends, or conversation, or books, or work, or resources within oneself; the transcendent consolation of faith-these are Johnson's themes, whether he speaks in the person of critic, moralist, humorist, story-teller, or impersonator.1

His greatest dignity, eloquence, and wit Johnson attains in his more abstract essays on the philosophy of life. At first they seem dry and hard to follow or remember the talk of a dull old man. But they should not be taken in too rapid succession; they should be read aloud, evenly and with feeling, for the sake of their broad undulation and cadence. Only thus can their music and their emotional power be appreciated. No one has fairly tested them unless he has read them as they were first written to be read-one at a timeand at intervals. Rasselas and The Rambler should lie on the library table, or drop easily into the pocket. In an odd moment, during a lull in the ordinary preoccupation of life, open the book by chance, and begin reading as the eye lights upon the page. Johnson's words, thus caught in passing, are nearly always instinct * with freshness and sagacious sense.*

1 In these and all considerations of Johnson's essays Rasselas should not be forgotten, as it is really a series of moral essays strung on a rather slender thread of narrative.

2 So Ruskin thought. In his charming autobiography (chap. 12) he tells how 'on our foreign journeys, it being of course desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes of Johnson-The Idler and The Rambler-did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable

V

Johnson lived in an age of biography and portraiture which culminated in the great Life of which he was the subject, and which he directly inspired, and in part created. For, besides being its subject, he seems to have known Boswell's intention of writing his life, to have furnished him abundant material on request, and to have read over many of his notes. Furthermore, he was a frequent prompter of Boswell's genius, in their discussions of the art and aim of biographical writing, and through his written opinions on that subject. If Johnson had a ruling literary passion, it was a passion for biography. The biographical part of literature, he says, 'is what I love most.' His reason almost goes without saying. 'I esteem biography as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.' 2 Only one biography of the first order can be written by one man. The execution requires such devotion, affection, self-sacrifice, and contemplation of the subject, that it could not be otherwise. Johnson had too independent and dominant a nature to make the necessary surrender. Yet he believed that his literary strength lay especially in biographical writing. As achievements in literature his Lives of the Poets may not be compared with such great single portraits as

1

compass. And accordingly, in spare hours, on wet days, the turns and returns of the reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and mind.' 'I hold it more than happy that, during those continental journeys in which the vivid excitement of the greater part of the day left me glad to give spare half-hours to the study of a thoughtful book, Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune, and he secured me, by his adamantine common sense, for ever, from being caught in the cobwebs of German metaphysics, or sloughed in the English drainage of them.' 2 Life 5. 79.

1 Life 1, 425,

Boswell's or Lockhart's. No doubt they are as enthusiastic; but Boswell's enthusiasm was an enthusiasm for Johnson, and Lockhart's an enthusiasm for Scott, whereas Johnson's is rather an enthusiasm for biography in general. While he wrote no one great biography, yet his biographical writings are informed with true greatness. He valued biography chiefly as a commentary on life; the autobiographical element in his Lives is large, and the shadow of his own struggle as a man of letters falls heavily across them. They vary greatly in length and formality; some are mere jottings of scant information; others, such as the Life of Addison, exhibit larger proportions and higher finish.

Johnson's intellectual habit throughout his life was critical and judicial, rather than creative or pictorial. He transcends his biographical subject more than he enters into it; and the real greatness in his biographies is his own, not that of the man whose life he is writing. As repositories of facts gleaned and saved from oral tradition, their value is high, but aside from this they will ever be read for Johnson's sturdy vigor felt in every word, and for the expert precision with which the author appraises and demonstrates the significance of each detail or anecdote.

VI

The formal writings of Johnson, whatever their dignity and excellence, lack the peculiar charm of his conversation; not so his letters and meditations. A century which excelled in biography naturally excelled in letter-writing. The letters of Swift, Pope, Gray, Cowper, and above all, Walpole, have become classics of epistolary art. Few would think of Johnson in this connection. To be sure, his letters are not, in the same sense as the others, literary'; they are written unconsciously, spontaneously, with little or no thought of

But

publication; his correspondent is not the public. herein lies their very excellence. Walpole may be read for his wit, his delicacy, his studied informality, his sophisticated and supercilious glance at a passing world. He writes the letter; Johnson writes letters, and writes them artlessly. Or if ever he employs art, his art is governed by his thought of the particular man or woman whom he addresses at the time, and as we read them we still feel like intruders for whose ears they were never intended.

The two determinants in Johnson's letters were his feeling for his correspondent, and his sense of the occasion for his writing. They, therefore, follow no fixed model or style, but vary widely through the entire range of his nature and activities. They are trifling, tender, newsy, gratulatory, or beseeching, as the case may be. They comfort the wretched, and raise up the fallen. Each letter is perfectly adapted to the recipient, whether the writer drops into small talk with Mrs. Thrale, or pets her wee daughter; whether he teaches the dignity of merit to the haughty Lord Chesterfield, or gently brings to his right mind the whimpering Boswell; whether, single-handed, he defies a combination of powerful booksellers, or pours out his soul to his dying mother.

In the solitary agony of his prayers and meditations we may contemplate him only in humble silence.

VII

Of the critical essays appended to most of the Lives of the Poets Boswell remarks that they contain such standards of criticism as, 'if digested and arranged in one system by some modern Aristotle or Longinus, might form a code on that subject such as no other nation can show.' Boswell's forte was not literary criticism; no man need imagine himself a modern Aristotle or Longinus before daring to undertake a synthesis of John

son's standards of judgment in literature. It is a common but unfair opinion that he had no standards of criticism, only prejudices, or at most certain narrow and hidebound opinions. He is usually considered the vociferous spokesman of conservative Eighteenth Century preferences in literature; but a review of his scattered utterances on the subject shows that his standards were consistent, and generally reasonable, if not allinclusive.

Special aversions in literature he had, as any man of acute perception and mental vigor must have. One of these was literary imitations-imitations of Pindar, of classical mythology, or mythology and folk-lore of any sort, imitations of pastorals, of the ballads, of Spenser or Milton. All these imitations as he saw them were imitations of externalities, not a perpetuation or revival of the deeper qualities of the originals. To him therefore they were affected and insincere. Of the real Homer, or the real Pindar, or Theocritus, or Spenser, or Milton, he thought as a sane man thinks. But affectation, whether in a small or a great poet, he would not tolerate. Affectation and true feeling do not go together, and the presence of the one argues a proportionate absence of the other. On these grounds he rejects the conceits of the 'metaphysical' school, and this is the basis of his much deplored condemnation of Lycidas. Johnson suspects Milton of caring more for the pastoral style of verse than for the death of Edward King.

Johnson is sometimes described as an absolute monarch in literature, whose edicts were authorized by the sacred constitution of Horace's Art of Poetry and Pope's Essay on Criticism. Yet his Essays and Lives reiterate again and again his suspicion of the petty prescriptionist who measures every work by a neat outfit of rules, but whose mind is too small to comprehend in any degree the nature of genius.