Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/135

Rh Streatham. Boswell, who had the manuscript in his possession, says that it was wonderful to see how correctly it was written at the first heat. ‘I observe the fair hand of Mrs. Thrale,’ he adds, ‘as one of the copyists of selected passages.’

These Lives are the maturest and strongest of Johnson’s works. It ought to be a comfort to men past middle life to find that Johnson, like Dryden, wrote his best prose in his latest years. Good poetry has been written by young, even by very young, men; the best prose is out of their reach. They are too full of ideas which have never borne the test of practice; their prose tends to rhapsody, or argument, or the abstract graces of the mathematics. In poetry they can give shape to vague hopes and desires; in the more matter-of-fact treatment which prose demands, if they strike the personal note, they fear to be foolish, and are foolish. The confessions of a young man are always too defiant or too exclusively self-conscious; he has his account yet to settle with the world, and does not know exactly how he stands. He is dealing with an unknown and powerful adversary, so that even while he aims at truth, the instinct of self-preservation overmasters him, and he achieves only diplomacy. The best prose is rightly called pedestrian; at every step it must find a foothold on the ground of experience, firm enough to support its weight. It is more various than poetry, and richer in implied meaning; it assumes in the reader an old acquaintance with the facts of life, and keeps him in touch with them by a hundred quiet devices of irony, reminiscence, and allusion. It is a commentary on the world; not a complete exposition of it. The breadth of the vision of poetry can be attained by one who looks on human life from a distance;