Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/161

Rh can but describe what all men, literate and illiterate alike, have to suffer and enjoy. The goodness of a poem, is, at best, a subordinate kind of goodness. This view finds amusing expression in his comment on the Reverend Mr. Milbourne, who attacked Dryden’s translation of Virgil. ‘His outrages,’ says Johnson, ‘seem to be the ebullitions of a mind agitated by stronger resentment than bad poetry can excite.’

Yet he is so far from narrow, that in many of his opinions he is in sympathy with later Romantic criticism. When he tells how Denham, in his earlier practice of the rhyming couplet, carried on the sense from line to line, and broke the unity of the couplet, he adds:—‘From this concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has perhaps been with rather too much constancy pursued.’ The war against the closed couplet, which was so fiercely waged by Keats, has its apologist even in Johnson.

Nor will he allow the carping of prosaic critics against the freedoms of poetic language. In Astraea Redux the following couplet occurs:

For this Dryden was ‘persecuted with perpetual ridicule:’ Johnson defends him in a passage of notable good sense: ‘Silence is indeed mere privation; and, so considered, cannot invade; but privation likewise certainly is darkness, and probably cold, yet poetry has never been refused the right of ascribing effects or agency to them as to positive powers. No man scruples to say that darkness hinders him from his work, or that cold has