Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/160

156 These are reasonable and well-argued opinions, worth the hearing. Johnson, it may be said, had no ear for the subtleties of metrical cadence. But the habits and pleasures of the ear vary so amazingly from generation to generation, that all dogmatic judgement is unsafe. It is praise enough for the critic that his account of the perils attending on blank verse has been illustrated many times in the work of later poets.

To get rid of the affectations, conventions, and extravagances of literature; to make it speak to the heart on themes of universal human interest; to wed poetry with life;—these were Johnson’s aims. It is a little bewildering to the student of literary history to find that Pope, Johnson, and Wordsworth, each and all regarded themselves as the champions of a Return to Nature. Johnson, like Pope, confined nature somewhat too rigorously to human nature, and over-estimated the power of direct moral teaching. He speaks slightingly of the innovators who ‘seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do good and avoid evil.’ Yet in criticizing the works of other men he does not apply this doctrine in any narrow or unintelligent fashion. He praised Shakespeare; he praised Boccaccio; and he would doubtless have praised the great poets of the nineteenth century, whose work conforms very little to his own stricter code. Perhaps his chief difference from the critics of other schools is to be found in his comparatively low estimate of the importance of poetry; and this was due, not to any contempt, for he had been all his life a reader and lover of poetry, but to his deep sense of the greater issues of life and death. Literature