Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/170

166 life; but it can never control the mysterious processes of language which blossoms in the market-place, or of thought which germinates in the darkness.

After all, it is not on vexed questions of literature that Johnson is seen at his best and greatest, but in judgements on human life and human motives. Against these judgements there have been wonderfully few effective appeals. Sometimes he lets fall an impatient dogmatic sentence, which, it will be found, is provoked not so much by the conduct of the poet, as by the partiality and servility of the poet’s abettors and eulogists. The public is an easygoing self-indulgent master, and a very lenient judge of the faults of its favourites. If a man has increased the public stock of wisdom or gaiety, there will always be those who stop their ears to the just complaints of his wife. Johnson practised no such leniency; in his judgement the poetical profession is of no more avail than a mechanical trade to exonerate a man from the common obligations of humanity. Yet when he deals with weakness, inconsistency, and error, where these have not been made the subjects of foolish praise he will always be found quick to understand, and reluctant to condemn. No one knew better than Johnson that if men have much to strive for, they have more to suffer. There is something very moving in the sentence on Savage: ‘If his miseries were sometimes the consequences of his faults, he ought not yet to be wholly excluded from compassion, because his faults were very often the effects of his misfortunes.’

Of Johnson’s care to be just an example may be taken from his Life of Dryden. Controversy has always been exercised upon Dryden’s conversions, in politics and religion. These conversions have seemed to some