Literary criticism
Johnson’s moral essays and Rasselas have long been admired, and his prayers and
meditations can move atheists. His literary criticism is especially valuable, and now
that criticism has few general readers, especially enjoyable. Often we do not agree –
neo-classical principles can be technical or moralistic – but Johnson makes his
judgements on clear grounds, obliging us to agree or disagree. He also escapes 18th-
century limitations, as often in the Lives quoted in this History. Johnson is clearer
than Coleridge, more analytic than Arnold and straighter than T. S. Eliot. He deliv-
ers the reaction not of the judging intelligence only but of the whole man. Milton
‘thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion’. Pope ‘never
drank tea without a stratagem’; although he translated the Iliad he did not ‘overflow
with Greek’. Gray did not use his learning. But these imperfect men wrote extra-
ordinary works compelling rational admiration:Paradise Lost, or ‘the Churchyard’.
What he thought false,he disdained: Milton’s Lycidas or Gray’s Odes.
Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeareis the first good general account, and the last
before worship set in. ‘Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern
writers, the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of
manners and of life.’ Yet he was careless with plot and with moral; he rushed his
endings; he was too wordy and obscure and fond of puns and wit-contests. He is also
the writer Johnson loves and quotes most, both in the Dictionary and in life: to
Boswell as they ride through Scotland, and to his doctor when he is dying: ‘Can’st
thou minister to a mind diseased?’ Johnson thinks it undignified that Macbeth
makes Heaven ‘peep through the blanket of the dark’: is he literal-minded, or have
we been vague? He cannot bear the pain of Cordelia’s unjust death: could we justify
it to Johnson? His premises can be narrow, but he makes us think.
Johnson also destroyed two ruling prejudices. Critics objected to mixed or tragi-
comic drama; Johnson defends it by appealing from art to nature, ‘in which, at the
same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend’.
Secondly, the prestige of the ‘unity of place’ had kept Antony and Cleopatra, in which
there are many changes of scene, off the stage. Johnson:
The object ion arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria and
the next at Rome supposes that when the play opens the spectator really imagines
himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to
Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this
may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies
may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be
admitted, has not certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded that his old
acquaintances are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the
plain of Pharsalia ..., he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason or truth, and
from the heights of empyrean poetry may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial
nature. ... The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the
first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.James Boswell
This embodiment of English common sense was not the creation of Boswell, yet
Johnson’s solidity is largely thanks to the memory, devotion and skill of a man very
unlike himself. Boswell’s Life (1791, 1793, 1799) is the first and perhaps the only
gr and life ofan author.216 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790