The Common Pursuit (15 page)

If you can't appreciate Johnson's verse you will fail in appreciation of his prose; and you will not be able to follow-through the considerations involved in the appreciation of his talk. 'I could not help remarking', notes Fanny Burney, 'how very like Dr Johnson is to his writing; and how much the same thing it was to hear him or to read him; but that nobody could tell that without coming to Streatham, for his language was generally imagined to be laboured and studied, instead of the mere common flow of his thoughts/ About the extraordinary vigour and discipline exhibited by this 'mere common flow' Mr Krutch says a great deal that is to the point. He quotes Boswell:

What the deepest source of these powers was is well described by Boswell in his final summing up: 'As he was general and unconfined in his studies, he cannot be considered as master of any one particular science; but he had accumulated a vast and various collection of learning and knowledge, which was so arranged in his mind, as to be ever in readiness to be brought forth. But his superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using the mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forceful manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident and actual wisdom.'

And yet, endorsing this, Mr Krutch can say on another page that 'Johnson did not merely write abstractly; he thought abstractly'. To call Johnson's style 'abstract* is misleading if you don't go D*

on at once to explain that abstractness here doesn't exclude con-creteness, or (since these words, at any rate as used by literary critics, are not very determinate in force) to insist that the style is remarkable for body. It is a generalizing style; its extraordinary weight is a generalizing weight; and the literary critic should be occupied with analysing this, and with explaining how Johnson's generalities come to be so different in effect from ordinary abstractness.

Yet should thy Soul indulge the gen'rous heat, Till captive Science yields her last retreat; Should Reason guide thee with her brightest ray, And pour on misty Doubt resistless day; Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor Praise relax, nor Difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain, And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should Beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart; Should no Disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee.

There is an achieved substance answering to the suggestion of that phrase, 'the doom of man*. Johnson's abstractions and generalities are not mere empty explicitnesses substituting for the concrete; they focus a wide range of profoundly representative experience —experience felt by the reader as movingly present. I won't offer an analysis of the passage and its working; some of the main points are fairly obvious. What need to be discussed here are certain conditions of that remarkable power Johnson commands of using so abstract and conventional an idiom with such vitality.

Mr Krutch deals pretty well with them as they come up in the consideration ofjohnson's talk. If he was a great virtuoso, it was in a recognized art, one much cultivated and highly esteemed. 'John-son and his friends sat down for a talk as deliberately as another group would sit down to play chamber music or cards.' They went in for 'conscious virtuosity without the triviality which so often accompanies conversation deliberately practised as an art'. 'Certain traditions were pretty scrupulously observed, and they

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determined a form of conversation* that was 'always about something, and though no where has the epigram beenmore appreciated, the kind of epigram most admired was the kind that owes its distinction to the fact that it says something more quickly, more adroitly, and more conclusively than it has ever been said before, not the kind that is sheer empty virtuosity . . .' Discussion proceeded on the ' assumption that, in so far as a subject was discussible at all, it was best discussed in terms of what is generally called (without further definition) "common sense" and that any intelligent and well-educated gentleman, no matter what his special aptitudes might be, was as competent as any other to settle questions philosophical, theological or even scientific'. The assumption could be so effective for an art of conversation because what it involved was remarkably positive and determinate as well as comprehensive:' we may define " common sense " as the acceptance of certain current assumptions, traditions and standards of value which are never called in question because to question any of them might be to necessitate a revision of government, society and private conduct more thoroughgoing than anyone liked to contemplate.'

That is, Johnson's art had behind it something far more determinate than 'common sense' suggests to us. And these 'assumptions, traditions and standards of value' had an operative currency as idiom—the period idiom to which they gave its strongly positive character; they informed the linguistic conventions and habits of expression that seemed to the age natural and inevitable. Further—what Mr Krutch doesn't note, or doesn't sufficiently note—they were current as literary convention. Their nature, significance and control of thought and judgment are most apparent in the verse of the age. For most eighteenth-century verse, and all verse of the Augustan tradition, has a social movement—a movement that suggests company deportment, social gesture and a code of manners: it is polite. Literary form is intimately associated with Good Form.

To put it in this way is to recall the worst potentialities of Polite Letters—the superficialities and complacencies conjured up by that significant phrase. The positive, concentrated, and confident civilization we see registered in The Tatler and The Spectator is impressive, but no profound analysis is necessary to elicit from

those bland pages the weaknesses of a culture that makes the Gentleman qua Gentleman its criterion, as Queen Anne Augustan-ism does ('die Man writes much like a Gentleman, and goes to Heaven with a very good Mien'). Yet Pope's name is enough to bring home to us that to write in Augustan idiom and convention is not necessarily to be superficial, and that a code of manners can engage something profound. If Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Man, he also wrote the fourth book of the Dunciad. And if Johnson could find the Augustan tradition so inevitable and right, that is triumphant proof that a writer could embrace it without condemning himself to remain on the social surface. For Johnson did, of course, embrace it. He found it so congenial that he was able, quite naturally, to adapt its idiom and convention to the needs of his own sensibility and time. As a literary tradition of convention and technique it became for him something in the nature of a morality of literary practice. And on tone, movement and diction his seriousness imposed its weight. The politeness became a kind of high public decorum, and Good Form deepened into that conception of a profound unquestionable order in human things which is represented by the characteristic phrase: 'he that thinks reasonably must think morally'.

But Johnson's conception of form and order is not narrowly moral. 'He found it brick, and he left it marble'. In praising Dryden he endorses the essential Augustan pretension; that referred to by Mr Krutch when he says that 'Johnson'sDfcriofwy was thus a contribution to a much more inclusive task which the eighteenth century had set itself—the task, namely, of discovering and es-tabhshing in all human affairs (including language) the most reasonable, most durable, most efficient, and most elegant procedure.'

This, then, is surely central to the interest Johnson should have for us: a genius of robust and racy individuality, notably direct and strong in his appeal to firsthand experience, he nevertheless finds himself very much at home in a cultural tradition that lays a peculiarly heavy stress on the conventional and social conditioning of individual achievement, and is peculiarly insistent in its belief that individual thought and expression must exemplify a social discipline, and enlist tradition as a collaborator, or be worthless. Johnson is not, like the Romantic poet, the enemy of society, but consciously its representative and its voice, and it is his

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strength—something inseparable from his greatness—to be so. This aspect of Johnson's interest Mr Krutch is unable to develop to the full because he is insufficiently a literary critic.

It is in his treatment of Johnson the poet that the insufficiency is most apparent. It is in the verse that we can see most clearly the extremely positive civilization to which Johnson belonged expressing itself as literary convention. The poet to whom such a convention and such an idiom are so congenial exemplifies a relation of artist to contemporary civilization of a kind that we are not familiar with—we should find it the more significant. The unfamiliarity is too much for Mr Krutch. He cannot see that the Augustan tradition as we have it in Johnson's verse represents the strength of the eighteenth century in poetry. So when he comes to the poem on the death of Robert Levet, which he righdy finds a * singularly touching poem* ('readers who have little taste for formal satire in couplets may well find it the best of Johnson's verse'), he thinks it worth suggesting that the * rhythm and diction are perhaps influenced by Gray's Elegy.' Here for once (the implication appears to be) we have Johnson responding to the * novel elements' in the poetry of the time. In any case, the reference to Gray reveals a disabling ignorance of eighteenth-century verse (I mean ignorance not by academic, but by critical standards). There is indeed an element in the Elegy that constitutes an affinity with Johnson; but no one who saw it would see it as a reason for suggesting that Johnson was influenced by Gray. It is the element that enables Johnson to 'rejoice to concur with the common reader', and exalt the Elegy as a classic of the profound commonplace:

The Churchyard, abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning, 'Yet even these bones' are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself chat he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise.

Gray succeeded in blending in the Elegy the two lines of eighteenth-century verse-tradition: the meditative-Miltonic, specializing in 'mouldered* ruins, ivy-mantled towers and guaranteed poetical sentiment, with the Augustan. His stanzas have the Augustan

social gait and gesture (they have a movement as of the couplet extended) and the Augustan prose-strength—that strength which seeks the virtues of statement: the mot juste, the final phrase, and the neatness and precision that run to wit.

How naturally and radically Augustan Gray's sensibility was, comes out in the Impromptu he left behind in a dressing-table drawer in the country. It seems to me the best poem he did (which is not to say that it can aspire to the classical status of the Elegy ; but the Elegy pays for its substance and size with unevenness and instability). Since it is virtually unknown (though it is to be found in the Oxford Gray and Collins, where my attention was called to it by Dom Hilary Steuert), and since its coming from Gray enforces my point, I will give the poem here (the Impromptu was 'suggested by a view, in 1766, of the seat and ruins of a deceased nobleman, at Kingsgate, in Kent'):

Old, and abandoned by each venal friend,

Here Holland form'd the pious resolution To smuggle a few years, and strive to mend

A broken character and constitution.

On this congenial spot he fix'd his choice;

Earl Goodwin trembled for his neighbouring sand; Here sea-gulls scream, and cormorants rejoice.

And mariners, though shipwreck'd, dread to land.

Here reigns the blustering North and blighting East,

No tree is heard to wmsper, bird to sing; Yet Nature could not furnish out the feast,

Art he invokes new horrors still to bring.

Here mouldering fanes and battlements arise,

Turrets and arches nodding to their fall, Unpeopled monasteries delude our eyes,

And mimic desolation covers all.

* Ah T said the sighing Peer, 'had Bute been true, Nor Mungo's, Rigby's, Bradshaw's friendship vain,

Far better scenes than these had blest our view, And realiz'd the beauties which we feign.

'Purg'd by the sword, and purified by fire,

Then had we seen proud London's hated walls; Owls would have hooted in St Peter's choir, And foxes stunk and litter'd in St Paul's'.

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This is an unalloyed Augustan; the 'mouldering fanes and battlements', significantly, are present only for ironical attention. But this is the strength that raises the Elegy above all the verse in the meditative-Miltonizing line to which the elegiac Gray also belongs. And this is the strength that relates Gray to Johnson, the strength of the central Augustan tradition. Failure to realize that centrality, and the mistaken ideas about the decay of the Augustan tradition that go with illusions about the vitality of the 'novel elements' (which, for the most part, are incurably minor-poetical, and wholly dependent on the Augustan), means a failure to realize to the full the nature and significance of Johnson's genius.

Closely correlated with Mr Krutch's inability to appreciate Johnson's verse is his inability to see clearly Johnson's limitations as a critic of Shakespeare. He states quite well where the stress falls in Johnson's appreciation. It falls, one might say, on Shakespeare the novelist, and is in keeping with his approval of Richardson and of the new art of fiction:

This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes fiom which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.