Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/34

30 hate each other in a world where they suffer the like trials and await the same doom was hardly conceivable to Johnson. That a man should dare to stand aloof from his kind and condemn them was a higher pitch of arrogance, destined to end in that tempest of madness and hate which is the Fourth Book of Gulliver’s Travels.

Lastly, it cannot be denied that Johnson did scant justice to Gray; although here, again, his praise of the Elegy could hardly be bettered. The causes of this imperfect sympathy are easy to understand. Gray was a recluse poet, shy, sensitive, dainty, who brooded on his own feelings and guarded his own genius from contact with the rough world. ‘He had a notion,’ says Johnson, ‘not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastic foppery, to which my kindness for a man of learning and virtue wishes him to have been superior.’ Surely this impatience will seem only natural to those who remember the story of Johnson’s life. He had lived for thirty years, and had supported others, solely by the labours of his pen. The pay he received was often wretchedly small. Fifteen guineas was the price of the copyright of the Life of Savage. He was driven from task to task, compelled to supply the booksellers with what they demanded, prefaces, translations, or sermons at a guinea a piece. In spite of sickness and lassitude and intense disinclination, the day’s work had to be done, and when work did not come to hand, it had to be sought and solicited. It is not easy for us to imagine the conditions of literature in London when Johnson first came there, and for many years after, the crowds of miserable authors, poor, servile, jealous, and venal. Immersed in this society he laboured for years. The laws that he