Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/97

Rh Johnson’s, opinion of Warburton. When Foote visited Eton, the boys came round him in the college quadrangle. ‘Tell us, Mr. Foote,’ said the leader, ‘the best thing you ever said.’ ‘Why,’ said Foote, ‘I once saw a little blackguard imp of a chimney-sweeper, mounted on a noble steed, prancing and curvetting in all the pride and magnificence of nature,—There, said I, goes Warburton upon Shakespeare.’

Johnson himself would not have been ready to allow any weight to the critical opinions of stage-players. One of his heterodox opinions, says Boswell, was a contempt for tragic acting. In The Idler he describes the Indian war-cry, and continues: ‘I am of opinion that by a proper mixture of asses, bulls, turkeys, geese, and tragedians a noise might be procured equally horrid with the war-cry.’ He was more than once reproached by Boswell for omitting all mention of Garrick in the Preface to Shakespeare, but he was not to be moved. ‘Has Garrick not brought Shakespeare into notice?’ asked Boswell. ‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘to allow that would be to lampoon the age. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are the worse for being acted: Macbeth, for instance.’ This was the belief also of Charles Lamb, who expounded it in his essay On the Tragedies of Shakespeare. ‘There is something in the nature of acting,’ he concludes, ‘which levels all distinctions…. Did not Garrick shine, and was he not ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced—the productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns—and shall he have the honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind!’ It is a strange kind