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It is not a part of the plan of this book to present any extended bibliography, but there are certain reference books to which the student's attention should be called.
It should be helpful also to indicate briefly some of the more specific mannerisms of pseudo-classical poetry, in addition to the general tendencies named above on page 190. Almost all of them, it will be observed, result from the habit of generalizing instead of searching for the pictorial and the particular.
1. There
is a constant preference (to enlarge on what was briefly stated above)
for abstract expressions instead of concrete ones, such expressions
as 'immortal powers' or 'Heaven' for 'God.' These abstract expressions
are especially noticeable in the descriptions of emotion, which the
pseudo-classical writers often describe without really feeling it, in
such colorless words as 'joys, 'delights,' and 'ecstasies,' and which
they uniformly refer to the conventionalized 'heart, 'soul,' or 'bosom.'
Likewise in the case of personal features, instead of picturing a face
with blue eyes, rosy lips, and pretty color, these poets vaguely mention
'charms,' 'beauties,' 'glories,' 'enchantments,' and the like. These
three lines from 'The Rape of the Lock' are thoroughly characteristic:
The fair [the lady] each moment rises in her charms,
Repairs her smiles, awakens ev'ry grace,
And calls forth
all the, wonders of her face.
The tendency
reaches its extreme in the frequent use of abstract and often absurdly
pretentious expressions in place of the ordinary ones which to these
poets appeared too simple or vulgar. With them a field is generally
a 'verdant mead'; a lock of hair becomes 'The long-contended honours
of her head'; and a boot 'The shining leather that encased the limb.'
2. There is a constant use of generic or generalizing articles, pronouns, and adjectives, 'the,' 'a,' 'that,' 'every,' and 'each' as in some of the preceding and in the following examples: 'The wise man's passion and the vain man's boast.' 'Wind the shrill horn or spread the waving net.' 'To act a Lover's or a Roman's part.' 'That bleeding bosom.'
3. There is an excessive use of adjectives, often one to nearly every important noun, which creates monotony.
4. The vocabulary is largely conventionalized, with, certain favorite words usurping the place of a full and free variety, such words as 'conscious,' 'generous, 'soft,' and 'amorous.' The metaphors employed are largely conventionalized ones, like 'Now burns with glory, and then melts with love.'
5. The
poets imitate the Latin language to some extent; especially they often
prefer long words of Latin origin to short Saxon ones, and Latin names
to English--'Sol' for 'Sun, 'temple' for 'church,' 'Senate' for 'Parliament,'
and so on.]
SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784.
To the informal
position of dictator of English letters which had been held successively
by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, succeeded in the third quarter of the
eighteenth century a man very different from any of them, one of the
most forcefully individual of all authors, Samuel Johnson. It was his
fortune to uphold, largely by the strength of his personality, the pseudo-classical
ideals which Dryden and Addison had helped to form and whose complete
dominance had contributed to Pope's success, in the period when their
authority was being undermined by the progress of the rising Romantic
Movement.
Johnson was
born in 1709, the son of a bookseller in Lichfield. He inherited a constitution
of iron, great physical strength, and fearless self-assertiveness, but
also hypochondria (persistent melancholy), uncouthness of body and movement,
and scrofula, which disfigured his face and greatly injured his eyesight.
In his early life as well as later, spasmodic fits of abnormal mental
activity when he 'gorged' books, especially the classics, as he did
food, alternated with other fits of indolence. The total result, however,
was a very thorough knowledge of an extremely wide range of literature;
when he entered Oxford in 1728 the Master of his college assured him
that he was the best qualified applicant whom he had ever known. Johnson,
on his side, was not nearly so well pleased with the University; he
found the teachers incompetent, and his pride suffered intensely from
his poverty, so that he remained at Oxford little more than a year.
The death of his father in 1731 plunged him into a distressingly painful
struggle for existence, which lasted for thirty years. After failing
as a subordinate teacher in a boarding-school he became a hack-writer
in Birmingham, where, at the age of twenty-five, he made a marriage
with a widow, Mrs. Porter, an unattractive, rather absurd, but good-hearted
woman of forty-six. He set up a school of his own, where he had only
three pupils, and then in 1737 tramped with one of them, David Garrick,
later the famous actor, to London to try his fortune in another field.
When the two reached the city their combined funds amounted to sixpence.
Sir Robert Walpole, ruling the country with unscrupulous absolutism,
had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public life,
and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in
imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted
much attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one
of that undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub
Street writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly
depended on the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in
a garret or even walking the streets at night for lack of a lodging,
Johnson was sometimes unable to appear at a tavern because he had no
respectable clothes. It was ten years after the appearance of 'London'
that he began to emerge, through the publication of his 'Vanity of Human
Wishes,' a poem of the same kind as 'London' but more sincere and very
powerful. A little later Garrick, who had risen very much more rapidly
and was now manager of Drury Lane theater, gave him substantial help
by producing his early play 'Irene,' a representative pseudo-classical
tragedy of which it has been said that a person with a highly developed
sense of duty may be able to read it through.
Meanwhile,
by an arrangement with leading booksellers, Johnson had entered on the
largest, and, as it proved, the decisive, work of his life, the preparation
of his 'Dictionary of the English Language.' The earliest mentionable
English dictionary had appeared as far back as 1604, 'containing 3000
hard words ... gathered for the benefit and help of ladies, gentle women,
or any other unskillful persons.' Others had followed; but none of them
was comprehensive or satisfactory. Johnson, planning a far more thorough
work, contracted to do it for L1575--scanty pay for himself and his
copyists, the more so that the task occupied more than twice as much
time as he had expected, over seven years. The result, then, of very
great labor, the 'Dictionary' appeared in 1755. It had distinct limitations.
The knowledge of Johnson's day was not adequate for tracing the history
and etymology of words, and Johnson himself on being asked the reason
for one of his numerous blunders could only reply, with his characteristic
blunt frankness, 'sheer ignorance.' Moreover, he allowed his strong
prejudices to intrude, even though he colored them with humor; for example
in defining 'oats' as 'a grain which in England is generally given to
horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' Jesting at himself, he
defined 'lexicographer' as 'a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.'
Nevertheless, the work, though not creative literature, was a great
and necessary one, and Johnson did it, on the whole, decidedly well.
The 'Dictionary,' in successive enlargements, ultimately, though not
until after Johnson's death, became the standard, and it gave him at
once the definite headship of English literary life. Of course, it should
be added, the English language has vastly expanded since his time, and
Johnson's first edition contained only a tithe of the 400,000 words
recorded in the latest edition of Webster (1910).
With the 'Dictionary'
is connected one of the best-known incidents in English literary history.
At the outset of the undertaking, Johnson exerted himself to secure
the patronage and financial aid of Lord Chesterfield, an elegant leader
of fashion and of fashionable literature. At the time Chesterfield,
not foreseeing the importance of the work, was coldly indifferent, but
shortly before the Dictionary appeared, being better informed, he attempted
to gain a share in the credit by commending it in a periodical. Johnson
responded with a letter which is a perfect masterpiece of bitter but
polished irony and which should be familiar to every student.
The hard labor
of the 'Dictionary' had been the only remedy for Johnson's profound
grief at the death of his wife, in 1752; and how intensively he could
apply himself at need he showed again some years later when to pay his
mother's funeral expenses. He wrote in the evenings of a single week
his 'Rasselas,' which in the guise of an Eastern tale is a series of
philosophical discussions of life.
Great as were
Johnson's labors during the eight years of preparation of the 'Dictionary'
they made only a part of his activity. For about two years he earned
a living income by carrying on the semi-weekly 'Rambler,' one of the
numerous imitations of 'The Spectator.' He was not so well qualified
as Addison or Steele for this work, but he repeated it some years later
in 'The Idler.'
It was not
until 1775 that Johnson received from Oxford the degree of LL.D., which
gave him the title of 'Dr.', now almost inseparable from his name. But
his long battle with poverty had ended on the accession of George III
in 1762, when the ministers, deciding to signalize the new reign by
encouraging men of letters, granted Johnson a pension of L300 for life.
In his Dictionary Johnson had contemptuously defined a pension thus:
'An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England, it
is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason
to his country.' This was embarrassing, but Johnson's friends rightly
persuaded him to accept the pension, which he, at least, had certainly
earned by services to society very far from treasonable. However, with
the removal of financial pressure his natural indolence, increased by
the strain of hardships and long-continued over-exertion, asserted itself
in spite of his self-reproaches and frequent vows of amendment. Henceforth
he wrote comparatively little but gave expression to his ideas in conversation,
where his genius always showed most brilliantly. At the tavern meetings
of 'The Club' (commonly referred to as 'The Literary Club'), of which
Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and others, were members,
he reigned unquestioned conversational monarch. Here or in other taverns
with fewer friends he spent most of his nights, talking and drinking
incredible quantities of tea, and going home in the small hours to lie
abed until noon.
But occasionally
even yet he aroused himself to effort. In 1765 appeared his long-promised
edition of Shakespeare. It displays in places much of the sound sense,
which is one of Johnson's most distinguishing merits, as in the terse
exposure of the fallacies of the pseudo-classic theory of the three
dramatic unities, and it made some interpretative contributions; but
as a whole, it was carelessly and slightly done. Johnson's last important
production, his most important really literary work, was a series of
'Lives of the English Poets' from the middle of the seventeenth century,
which he wrote for a publishers' collection of their works. The selection
of poets was badly made by the publishers, so that many of the lives
deal with very minor versifiers. Further, Johnson's indolence and prejudices
are here again evident; often when he did not know the facts, he did
not take the trouble to investigate; a thorough Tory himself he was
often unfair to men of Whig principles; and for poetry of the delicately
imaginative and romantic sort, his rather painfully practical mind had
little appreciation. Nevertheless, he was in many respects well fitted
for the work, and some of the lives, such as those of Dryden, Pope,
Addison and Swift, men in whom he took a real interest, are of high
merit.
Johnson's last
years were rendered gloomy, partly by the loss of friends, partly by
ill-health and a deepening of his lifelong tendency to morbid depression.
He had an almost insane shrinking from death and with it a pathetic
apprehension of future punishment. His melancholy was perhaps the greater
because of the manly courage and contempt for sentimentality, which
prevented him from complaining or discussing his distresses. His religious
faith, also, in spite of all intellectual doubts, was strong, and he
died calmly, in 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Johnson's picturesque
surface oddities have received undue attention, thanks largely to his
friend and biographer Boswell. Nearly everyone knows, for example, that
he superstitiously made a practice of entering doorways in a certain
manner and would rather turn back and come in again than fail in the
observance; that he was careless, even slovenly, in dress and person,
and once remarked frankly that he had no passion for clean linen; that
he ate voraciously, with a half-animal eagerness; that in the intervals
of talking he 'would make odd sounds, a half whistle, or a clucking
like a hen's, and when he ended an argument would blow out his breath
like a whale.' More important were his dogmatism of opinion, his intense
prejudices, and the often seemingly brutal dictatorial violence with
which he enforced them. Yet these things too were really on the surface.
It is true that his nature was extremely conservative; that after a
brief period of youthful free thinking he was fanatically loyal to the
national Church and to the king (though theoretically he was a Jacobite,
a supporter of the supplanted Stuarts as against the reigning House
of Hanover); and that in conversation he was likely to roar down or
scowl down all innovators and their defenders or silence them with such
observations as, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.' At worst it
was not quite certain that he would not knock them down physically.
Of women's preaching, he curtly observed that it was like a dog walking
on its hind legs: 'It is not done well, but you are surprised to find
it done at all.' English insular narrowness certainly never had franker
expression than in his exclamation: 'For anything I can see, all foreigners
are fools.' For the American colonists who had presumed to rebel against
their king his bitterness was sometimes almost frenzied; he characterized
them as 'rascals, robbers and pirates.' His special antipathy to Scotland
and its people led him to insult them repeatedly, though with some individual
Scots he was on very friendly terms. Yet after all, many of these prejudices
rested on important principles, which were among the most solid foundations
of Johnson's nature and largely explain his real greatness, namely on
sound commonsense, moral and intellectual independence, and hatred of
insincerity. There was really something to be said for his refusal to
listen to the Americans' demand for liberty while they themselves held
slaves. Living in a period of change, Johnson perceived that in many
cases innovations prove dangerous and that the progress of society largely
depends on the continuance of the established institutions in which
the wisdom of the past is summed up. Of course, in specific instances,
perhaps in the majority of them, Johnson was wrong; but that does not
alter the fact that he thought of himself as standing, and really did
stand, for order against a freedom, which is always more or less in
danger of leading to anarchy.
Johnson's personality,
too, cannot be fairly judged by its more grotesque expression. Beneath
the rough surface he was a man not only of very vigorous intellect and
great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm heart, unusual sympathy
and kindness, and the most unselfish, though eccentric, generosity.
Fine ladies were often fascinated by him, and he was no stranger to
good society. On himself, during his later years, he spent only a third
part of his pension, giving away the rest to a small army of beneficiaries.
Some of these persons, through no claim on him but their need, he had
rescued from abject distress and supported in his own house, where,
so far from being grateful, they quarreled among themselves, complained
of the dinner, or even brought their children to live with them. Johnson
himself was sometimes exasperated by their peevishness and even driven
to take refuge from his own home in that 'of his wealthy friends the
Thrales, where, indeed, he had a room of his own; but he never allowed
anyone else to criticize or speak harshly of them. In sum, no man was
ever loved or respected more deeply, or with better reason, by those
who really knew him, or more sincerely mourned when he died.
Johnson's importance
as a conservative was greatest in his professional capacity of literary
critic and bulwark of pseudo-classicism. In this case, except that a
restraining influence is always salutary to hold a new movement from
extremes, he was in opposition to the time-spirit; romanticism was destined
to a complete triumph because it was the expression of vital forces,
which were necessary for the rejuvenation of literature. Yet it is true
that romanticism carried with it much vague and insincere sentimentality,
and it was partly against this that Johnson protested. Perhaps the twentieth-century
mind is most dissatisfied with his lack of sympathy for the romantic
return to an intimate appreciation of external Nature. Johnson was not
blind to the charm of Nature and sometimes expresses it in his own writing;
but for the most part his interest, like that of his pseudo-classical
predecessors, was centered in the world of man. To him, as he flatly
declared, Fleet Street, in the midst of the hurry of London life, was
the most interesting place in the world.
In the substance
of his work Johnson is most conspicuously, and of set purpose, a moralist.
In all his writing, so far as the subject permitted, he aimed chiefly
at the inculcation of virtue and the formation of character. His uncompromising
resoluteness in this respect accounts for much of the dullness, which
it is useless to try to deny in his work. 'The Rambler' and 'The Idler'
altogether lack Addison's lightness of touch and of humor; for Johnson,
thoroughly Puritan at heart, and dealing generally with the issues of
personal conduct and responsibility, can never greatly relax his seriousness,
while Addison, a man of the world, is content if he can produce some
effect on society as a whole. Again, a present-day reader can only smile
when he finds Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare blaming the great
dramatist for omitting opportunities of instructing and delighting,
as if the best moral teachers were always explicit. But Johnson's moral
and religious earnestness is essentially admirable, the more so because
his deliberate view of the world was thoroughly pessimistic. His own
long and unhappy experience had convinced him that life is for the most
part a painful tribulation, to be endured with as much patience and
courage as possible, under the consciousness of the duty of doing our
best where God has put us and in the hope (though with Johnson not a
confident hope) that we shall find our reward in another world.
It has long
been a popular tradition, based largely on a superficial page of Macaulay,
that Johnson's style always represents the extreme of ponderous pedantry.
As usual, the tradition must be largely discounted. It is evident that
Johnson talked, on the whole, better than he wrote, that the present
stimulus of other active minds aroused him to a complete exertion of
his powers, but that in writing, his indolence often allowed him to
compose half sleepily, at a low pressure. In some of his works, especially
'The Rambler,' where, it has been jocosely suggested, he was exercising
the polysyllables that he wished to put into his 'Dictionary,' he does
employ a stilted Latinized vocabulary and a stilted style, with too
much use of abstract phrases for concrete ones, too many long sentences,
much inverted order, and over-elaborate balance. His style is always
in some respects monotonous, with little use, for instance, as critics
have pointed out, of any form of sentence but the direct declarative,
and with few really imaginative figures of speech. In much of his writing,
on the other hand, the most conspicuous things are power and strong
effective exposition. He often uses short sentences, whether or not
in contrast to his long ones, with full consciousness of their value;
when he will take the trouble, no one can express ideas with clearer
and more forceful brevity; and in a very large part of his work his
style carries the finely tonic qualities of his clear and vigorous mind.
JAMES BOSWELL AND HIS 'LIFE OF JOHNSON.'
It is an interesting
paradox that while Johnson's reputation as the chief English man of
letters of his age seems secure for all time, his works, for the most
part, do not belong to the field of pure literature, and, further, have
long ceased, almost altogether, to be read. His reputation is really
due to the interest of his personality, and that is known chiefly by
the most famous of all biographies, the life of him by James Boswell.
Boswell was
a Scotch gentleman, born in 1740, the son of a judge who was also laird
of the estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire, near the English border. James
Boswell studied law, but was never very serious in any regular activity.
Early in life he became possessed by an extreme boyish-romantic admiration
for Johnson's works and through them for their author and at last in
1763 (only twenty years before Johnson's death) secured an introduction
to him. Boswell took pains that acquaintance should soon ripen into
intimacy, though it was not until nine years later that he could be
much in Johnson's company. Indeed, it appears from Boswell's account
that they were personally together, all told, only during a total of
one hundred and eighty days at intermittent intervals, plus a hundred
more continuously when in 1773 they went on a tour to the Hebrides.
Boswell, however, made a point of recording in minute detail, sometimes
on the spot, all of Johnson's significant conversation to which he listened,
and of collecting with the greatest care his letters and all possible
information about him. He is the founder and still the most thorough
representative of the modern method of accurate biographical writing.
After Johnson's death he continued his researches, refusing to be hurried
or disturbed by several hasty lives of his subject brought out by other
persons, with the result that when his work appeared in 1791 it at once
assumed the position among biographies which it has ever since occupied.
Boswell lived only four years longer, sinking more and more under the
habit of drunkenness, which had marred the greater part of his life.