Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/262

236 236 LIONEL JOHNSON'S PROSE flames of desire" — but never once see the dire glare in the central piazza of the City of the Lilies. His figures of speech are never human figures ; his metaphors are always august — even Nature herself only enters obliquely, thrown back by the mirrors of the poets. We were once told that this Johnson knew BoswelFs Life by heart; but he was not sealed of the tribe of Sam. Even when he turns to praise his London it is still life at one remove that we get — life carefully filtered through earlier letters before judged fit for his own : — To the lover of London the noisy, flaring streets are a hunting- ground of emotions, a garden of ideas. Going out into the crowded day or the tumultuous night, fresh from Apuleius or Lucian, he will find all that ancient wit and beauty informed with new life. He wonders how Smollett would have hit off these motley humours. . . . It is the noise of London heard through closed shutters, as in his room at Clifford"s Inn. And then, on the other hand, he was insufficiently the renunciant. He was too temperate an ascetic. A man may brood above a single book until it becomes a door opening upon the infinite — can concentrate on his bookish essay till it becomes fuller of stir and vitality than the crowded streets he disdains. Pater could do that — Mr. Yeats can do that — so could Francis Thompson and Symons. But Johnson— no. After building those barriers against life he had perhaps too little energy. A sense of space and wide issues haunts this work — but it is gained by material devices, by a beautiful tangling of his topic among other topics — by ex- tending, not by transforming it. He thrust his delicate hands into the air about him, into Apollo's garden, brought them back laden with lovely rumours and echoes ; but the effect is still finite. Instead of the original flower we have a wonderful cluster