Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/25

Rh judgement, but his good sense abounds in surprises. There is a delightful touch of surprise in his comparison of a ship to a jail. ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ And again, ‘A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.’ The same dislike of the sea expresses itself in a paper of The Rambler which discusses the possibility of varying the monotony of pastoral poetry by introducing marine subjects. But unfortunately the sea has less variety than the land. ‘To all the inland inhabitants of every region, the sea is only known as an immense diffusion of waters, over which men pass from one country to another, and in which life is frequently lost.’

Wherever you open the pages of Johnson’s works you will find general truths sincerely and vigorously expressed, but behind the brave array of dogma you will find everywhere the strongest marks of an individual mind, and the charm and colour of personal predilections. The Romantic writers must not be allowed the credit of inventing the personal note in literature. What they invented was not themselves, but a certain sentimental way of regarding themselves. Johnson despised all such sentiment. ‘When a butcher tells you,’ he said, ‘that his heart bleeds for his country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling.’ Rousseau is not more individual in his cultivation of sentiment than Johnson in his dislike of it. He carried this dislike to strange extremes, so that all gesticulation and expression of the emotions became suspect to him. Of the preaching of Dr. Isaac Watts he says, ‘He did not endeavour to assist his eloquence by any gesticulations; for, as no