Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 138.pdf/561

552 of criticism. His refusal to admire in several other cases is equally unfair. But even in these instances the fine working of his intellect in affording ingenious reasons for his detailed condemnations is not only interesting,—it is valuable; for if the applications of the reasoning are out of place more or less in the cases in hand, they may advantageously be borne in mind as real hints of a critical canon. We need not Stay to enforce this by such differing examples as his notices of Gray and Swift, both of whom he undervalues. Nearly the only critical verdict of his from which the general public has turned with much feeling is his judgment of Milton. Something of this is owing to lack of distinguishing between parts of the criticism. Johnson was embittered against Milton as a politician, and he had no liking for him as a man, but his appreciation of him as a poet could hardly rise higher than it does at the highest points. He scoffs at most of the minor poems, notably at the sonnets: possibly, the wonder is, after all, that in a case where his personal bias was so strongly acting, he erred no further. Indeed, considering the great constitutional defects of emotion Johnson's own poetry shows, it is little short of a literary miracle that his range of critical appreciation betrays him so little. It is certain that he must have praised more distinct kinds in poetry than those which gave him pleasure. 'The explanation, we believe, is that he was sometimes able, intellectually, to discern the mental marks of successful composition even where he failed to respond emotionally. In matters of mere constructive skill, as, also, in reference to the technical proprieties of embellishment, his judgment was solidly accurate. The sympathetic shortcomings are so hidden, are in a fashion so substituted, in the ways we have mentioned, that, excepting in a few instances, the public has never become, fully aware of them. Johnson cannot be called a great critic in the high, original sense; if he has perfected the rules of literary judgment within a certain compass, he has not really widened the popular taste, by any encouragement of novel kinds of merit, adding to the power of the public enjoyment of literature: still, in spite of this, what he has done he has done so well, that he is the only critic we have who is read from one generation to another. A great part of his work in this department, as in every other of it, is now _ labor lost. He was willing, at the publishers' dictation, to let their trade catalogues stand for the roll of fame, and to write about Hammond, or Somerville, or West, just as readily as about Pope, or Dryden, or Butler, or Young, or Thomson. Johnson positively had no sensitiveness as to his topics; anybody might set him a task; he justified to himself the execution of it by the fineness of the workmanship.

And now, lastly, the question remains, after all that we have said of his finish of style, what is Johnson's rank as a literary artist? what sense of form had he? Well, it cannot be put high. His power of excelling, wonderful as it was, did not go much further than the sentence, —certainly not beyond the paragraph. Even within those limits, if the criticism is to be absolute, there is a certain hardness, an absence of easy flow, a want of vital elasticity; the sentences are mechanisms of joints and hinges; clearly-cut, exactly-balanced, but still mechanical. They stand out in perfect distinctness, they shine, sometimes they glitter, but on none of them is there the varying, shifting bloom of phrase which is the last glory of verbiage. It is, however, when we regard the works as separate wholes that we see how much he failed. He has left no model, nor anything approaching to it. Essays, of course, do not pretend to merit of plan beyond the most rudimentary stage. His successful poems were imitations; his tragedy was very clumsy,—in the Jast act there are thirteen scenes; his novel makes little use of the first fine conception of the hidden Happy Valley, and so soon as the characters are in the world outside, the plot -degenerates into the simplicity of a mere ramble from place to place. On the high score of form, then, his works can make no claim. On the other hand, he must have the full merit of being one of the earliest of those who are called the moderns in our list of writers. He may be said to have given the finishing blow to pastoral in poetry, and to mythological ornamentation in any style of composition, Only in one respect does Johnson appear to present readers as antiquated,—in the great use he makes of personification, which is a literary artifice that has fallen wholly into desuetude. There is now an air of childishness about such sentences as these, —'" Criticism was the eldest daughter of Labor and Truth; she was at her birth committed to the care of Justice, and brought up by her in the Palace of Wisdom" ("Rambler," No. 3). "Labor was the son of Necessity, the nursling of Hope, and the pupil of Art; he had the strength of his mother, the spirit of his nurse, and the dexterity of his governess"