No More Learning

ante, vol. Ix, chap. VI, sec. II, p. 191.


## p. 145 (#171) ############################################

Grongar Hill
145
must be recognised as a poet, and as a very remarkable poet,
from curiously different points of view. The Fleece and The Ruins
of Rome are merely examples of the extraordinary mistakes as to
subjects proper for poetry, and the ordinary infelicity in dealing
with them, which have condemned eighteenth century verse as a
whole to a lower place than it deserves. The Country Walk, not
disagreeable in itself, is either a vastly inferior first draft, or
a still more surprisingly unsuccessful replica, of Grongar Hill.
But Grongar Hill itself is one of those poems which occupy a
place of their own, humble though it may be, as compared with
the great epics and tragedies, simple and of little variety, as com-
pared with the garlands or paradises of the essentially lyrical
poets, but secure, distinguished and, practically, unique. That
even Johnson, though he thought it ‘not very accurately written,'
allowed it to be 'pleasing,' and felt sure that when once read
it would be read again,' is a striking testimony in its favour. For
it deals almost wholly with 'prospects,' to which Johnson was
contemptuously indifferent; and its 'inaccuracy' (which, in truth,
is the highest accuracy) was to prove a very crowbar for loosening
the foundations of the prosody that he thought accurate.
The poem is really a little wonder in subject and form alike.
The devotees of 'the subject' cannot fail, if they know the facts,
to recognise in it the first definite return to that fixing of the eye
on the object in nature which, though not so absent from Dryden
as Wordsworth thought, had been growing rarer and rarer (save in
such obscure work as Lady Winchilsea's) for generation after
generation, and which was to be the most powerful process in
the revived poetry of the future. The student of form cannot
fail to perceive in that inaccuracy which Johnson (for him) gently
blamed something neither more nor less than a return to the
peculiar form of the octosyllabic couplet which, after being de-
veloped by Shakespeare and Fletcher and the pastoral poets of
the early seventeenth century, had been exquisitely employed by
Milton in the twin masterpieces of his youth. The poem appeared,
in 1726, in the Miscellany of that remarkable person Lewis 1.
Even the first of The Seasons had but just been published; and,
if there is a certain identity of spirit between this poem and
Dyer's, the expression is wholly different. Even those who are
free from any half-partisan, half-ignorant contempt for the age of
Pope and the age of Johnson, must own how strange and sweet,
amid the ordinary concert of those ages, is the sound of
1 Cf. ante, vol. ix, p. 188.
T
E. L. X.
CH. VII.
10


## p. 146 (#172) ############################################

146
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
Who in the purple evening lie
On the mountain's lonely van . . .
or
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day. . .
or
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life, to endless sleep.
That Dyer was a painter as well as a poet goes, no doubt, for
something ; that, at least, he liked to think he had married a
collateral descendant of, in his own phrase, “everybody's Shake-
spere,' may go for a great deal.
a
In Dyer-or, at least, in Grongar Hill—we see some of the
first, and almost best, fruits of the romantic spirit and style. In
Matthew Green, both style and spirit are of the other kind, but
hardly less agreeable in their own way. He, also, so far as
good verse goes, is a “single-speech' poet; but he derives some
advantage from the fact that he hardly tried to speak on any
other occasion, though a few minor pieces usually accompany The
Spleen, and a few more might, it seems, be added to them. Green
was a quaker-freethinker (a curious evolution) and a clerk in the
custom-house, where he amiably prevented a reform which would
have disestablished, or, at least, dismilked, the cats. He seems, on
the whole, to have been more like a French man of letters of the
time than like an Englishman possessing a temperament which
may, at once, have qualified and disqualified him for treating the
English disease. ' It must be admitted that his treatment is some
what superficial, and more than a little desultory; but it certainly
exhibits a condition completely opposite to that of the ailment,
and even, for the time of reading, provides an antidote. The
octosyllables, 'accurate,' as Johnson would say, without stiffness
or limpness, and slipping lightly along without any Hudibrastic
acrobatism, frame a succession of thoughts that, if never very
profound, are always expressed with a liveliness of which the well-
known
Fling but a stone, the giant dies
is by no means too favourable a specimen. Sometimes, we have
satiric glances at individuals, as that, near the beginning, at Gildon;
sometimes, lively 'thumbnails' of contemporary manners; once or
twice, more elaborate drawings, as of the often quoted
Farm some twenty miles from town.


## p. 147 (#173) ############################################

The Grave
147
The epicurean attitude of the lighter, but not the coarser, kind
has seldom been better illustrated in verse.
6
Chronology could hardly have been more complacent in contrast-
planning than by putting the author of The Grave next in order.
Here, also, we have a poet of one poem ; but the subject of that
poem has at once greater possibilities and greater dangers. A poet
who writes unpoetically on death at once proves himself to be no
poet; and Blair has not failed to pass the test. But he has passed
it with the qualification of his time; and, perhaps, so universal a
subject ought to receive rather more universality of treatment.
Even the fine coda (which did not form part of the original edition
of the poem) dates itself a little too definitely; and the suicide
passage, to name no other, is somewhat rhetorical, if not even
melodramatic. But there is no doubt that it had a powerful
influence. The very fact that contemporary critics thought the
language lacking in 'dignity'offers the best testimony to its freedom,
at least sometimes, from the always irksome, and sometimes in-
tolerable, buckram which mars Young and Thomson, Armstrong
and Akenside, and which is by no means absent from Collins or
from Gray. The blank verse, like nearly all dating from this period,
though not so badly as some of it, abuses the abrupt full-stopped
middle pause, and is too much given to dramatic redundancy.
But it has a certain almost rugged massiveness, and occasionally
flings itself down with real momentum. The line
The great negotiators of the earth
possesses sarcastic force of meaning as well as prosodic force of
structure. It would be hard to find two poets of more different
schools than Blair and Blake. Yet it was not a mere association
of contradictories when Blake illustrated Blair1.
1
The peculiar 'tumid and gorgeous' style of the eighteenth
century in blank verse, in which Johnson professed to find the only
excuse--and that inadequate-for the metre he detested, not un-
frequently gives the wary critic a certain pause before he absolutely
excludes the notion of conscious or half-conscious burlesque on
the part of its practitioners. There had been no doubt about
this burlesque in the case of The Splendid Shilling? , which,
1 The close coincidence of The Grave, which was certainly written by 1742, though
not published till the following year, and Night Thoughts, the first part of which appeared
in the earlier year, has given occasion to the usual idle disputes about priority. The
conception of each of these poems was, probably, quite independent.
? See ante, vol. IX, chap. x, p. 256.
10-2


## p. 148 (#174) ############################################

148
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
a
undoubtedly, had led not a few of them to Milton. Even in
Thomson, a later and much stronger influence—in fact, one which
directly mastered most blank-verse writers after 1726—it is not
certain whether the temper which avowedly exists in The Castle of
Indolence may not sometimes lie concealed in The Seasons. And
John Armstrong, Thomson's intimate friend and more than
countryman-for their birthplaces, just inside the Border, were
within a few miles of each other-one of the garrison invalids of
the castle itself, was, by common consent of tradition, a remarkable
specimen of that compound of saturnine, and even churlish, humour
with real kindliness, which Scotsmen have not been indisposed to
acknowledge as a national characteristic. He seems to have pleaded
actual burlesque intent for his péché de jeunesse (as it would be
called in French literary history), The Economy of Love. But it
is difficult to discern much difference of style between this and the
more respectable Art of Preserving Health. The preposterous
latinising, which has made his 'gelid cistern' for 'cold bath' a
stock quotation, and the buckram stiffness of style which usually
goes with it, appear in both. His wellknown contribution to the
Castle of Indolence itself is avowed burlesque, and not unhappy;
while, though his imitations of Shakespeare are about as much
like Shakespeare as they are like Walt Whitman, his Epistle to
Wilkes, from the army in Germany to which he was attached, is
not without good touches. He seems to have possessed literary,
if not exactly poetical, power, but to have been the victim of
personal bad taste, exaggerating a particular bad taste of the time.
a
Richard Glover, like Armstrong, belongs to the 'tumid and
gorgeous' blank-verse division; but, unlike him, he offers not the
slightest provocation to direct or indirect amusement, and, unlike
him also, he has nothing of real vigour. His celebrated ballad,
Admiral Hosier's Ghost, is a curious success; but it is not certain
how much of its reproduction of the half-pathetic, half-bathetic
style of the broadside is art and how much nature. Of his
'great performances, Leonidas and The Athenaid (rash as literary
prophecy is), it may, with little fear, be said that no age will ever
resuscitate their popularity—a popularity which, even at the time,
was not lasting and, perhaps, to some extent, had been politically
engineered; while, almost certainly, the main cause of it was the
already mentioned fancy for the newly resuscitated blank verse.
Glover, perhaps, is not so absurd as is Blackmore: but he is equally
dull in substance; and, in form, he pushes one mannerism to an


## p. 149 (#175) ############################################

Shenstone's Shortcomings and Merits
149
almost maddening length. The effect which Milton produces by
occasional strong full-stops of sense coinciding with the metrical
middle pause is well known and unquestionable. But Milton uses
it carefully, and in combination with the utmost and most artful
variety of other pauses, and of stopped or overrun lines. His
imitators, from the first, were tempted to employ and overdo this
obvious device; and Thomson himself is by no means impeccable
in respect of it. Glover uses it on every possible occasion, not
unfrequently in several successive lines, and not unfrequently, also,
stopping where no stops should be, in order to achieve it. It is
difficult to imagine, and would be hardly possible to find, even
in the long list of mistaken 'long poem' writers of the past two
centuries, more tedious stuff than his.
>
The immediate cause which places William Shenstone here
next to Glover is merely chronological; but the sequence could
hardly be better arranged for a reader of the two. As a relief
from the probably vain attempt to read the London merchant,
nothing could be better than the poems of the Worcestershire
gentleman-farmer. Shenstone is not a great poet; but, perhaps,
there has been a tendency, at all times, to treat him too lightly.
Especially if his prose work on poetry be taken together with his
poems, it may, not as a mere fancy, be found that very few of his
,
contemporaries, perhaps none but Collins and Gray, had in them
more of the root of the matter, though time and circumstance and
a dawdling sentimental temperament intercepted and stunted fruit
and flower. With his prose', we are here not directly concerned;
but it is certainly surprising how, in a few aphoristic touches, he
lays a finger on some of the chief faults of the poetry of his day.
He did not quite practise what he preached : and there is no doubt
that posterity has not been wholly unjust in associating the rococo
decorations and the trivial artifices of the Leasowes with the
poems which partly show direct connection with that estate. But
artificial-pastoral was only a stage on the return to real nature;
and the positive achievements of Shenstone's poetry have much
less of the toyshop and the marionette theatre about them than it
has been customary to think or say. It is almost a pity that he
was of Pembroke, Oxford; for, had he not been there, Johnson's
belittling would hardly have been accompanied by a sort of
patronising endeavour to make the best of it—the most damaging
form of disparagement.
1 See, as to his letters, chap. XI, sec. II, post.


## p. 150 (#176) ############################################

150 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
-
In fact, it is very easily possible to assign him far less than his
real value in the return to nature itself. When Fanny Burney,
many years after his death, saw Knowle for the first time, she
ranked it next to Hagley as the finest park she had seen, acknow-
ledging, however, with frankness the culpable or regrettable absence
of improvement by temples and grottoes, obelisks and view-seats.
We should, of course, exactly reverse the estimate. Yet Hagley
and the (as some will have it) Naboth's vineyard which patterned
Hagley's beautification were only schoolmasters to bring public
attention, at any rate, from town to country—if to a country
'townishly' bedizened and interfered with. The proper study
of mankind ceased to be man only, when he busied himself with
nature at all; even though for a time he might officiously intrude
his own works upon her. One may smile at
But oh! the transport most ally'd to song
In some fair villa's peaceful bound
To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue
And bid Arcadia bloom around-
but it is only fair to remember that the earlier part of the same
poem had almost expressly condemned meddling with nature as
contained in the lines
'Tis Nature only gives exclusive right
To relish her supreme delight,
and, as if with half-surprise at its own boldness, allowed 'preg-
nancy of (such] delight' to 'thriftless furze' and 'rough barren
rock. '
It may indeed be admitted that, both in his grounds and in his
poems, Shenstone allowed the charms of the villa to overpower
those of furze and rock.
One of the censor’s ironical anecdotes is that ‘nothing roused
Shenstone's indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes
in his water. The obvious innuendo has a certain justice; but it
may, to some extent, be retorted that he did try to 'stock 'some
part of his poetical water-very unprofitably. His Moral Pieces,
had they stood alone, would either have excluded him from notice
here altogether, or have left him with a line of condemnation. The
Judgment of Hercules has the smoothness, but also the insig-
nificance, of the average eighteenth century couplet ; Economy,
The Ruined Abbey and Love and Honour, the frigid bombast and
the occasional sheer 'measured prose' of its worst blank-verse. If
The Progress of Taste deserves a less harsh judgment, it is because
Shenstone, there, is writing autobiographically, and, consequently,
a
6
>


## p. 151 (#177) ############################################

Shenstone's Smaller Pieces
151
with his heart in the matter; while, as to form, he takes refuge
in the easy 'Hudibrastics' which the age generally wrote well, and
sometimes excellently. But, elsewhere, if the sense of impar
congressus is too frequently with us, there are, also, frequent
alleviations; while that other and consoling sense of reading one
who, at least, is a seeker after true poetry is seldom absent. The
Schoolmistress (which, we know, was undertaken irreverently and
converted the author in the writing) has generally been admitted
to be one of the happiest things of its kind, so far as its author
intended (and he has defined his intention very strictly) to reach.
Even the tea-garden 'inscriptions' are saved by the bestknown
of them, 'Here in cool grot,' which, by the exclusion of some of
the unlucky poetic lingo of the time, and the substitution for it of
better phrase, could be made a really charming thing. Whether
there are enough good things in Levities to save the others is a
nicer question : but, some things are certainly good. And the
same is the case with Elegies, which occupies the other wing of his
array. But it has practically long been decided that Shenstone
must be judged by The Schoolmistress and the Miscellaneous
Poems conscientiously subtitled 'Odes, Songs, Ballads etc. ' Of The
Schoolmistress we have spoken; of the others we may now speak.
To anyone who has read much poetry, and has thought a little
about it with due mixture of criticism and affection, some-rela-
tively many—of these pieces have a strange attraction. The true
and even profound notions as to poetical substance and form which
are scattered about Shenstone's prose seem to have exercised some
prompting, but no restraining, influence on his verse. A seldom
quoted, and not in the least hackneyed, piece, The Song of Valen-
tine's Day, illustrates this, perhaps, in a more striking fashion than
any other. He appears, at first, to have caught that inestimable
soar and sweep of the common measure which had seemed to be
lost with the latest Carolines; and the charm of it, as it were, is
in the distance throughout. But he never fully masters it. Some
lines, beginning with the second-
'Tis said that under distant skies,
Nor you the fact deny-
are hopelessly prosaic. The fatal jargon of the time, 'swain' and
'grove' and the rest, pervades and mars the whole. The spell is
never consummated; but the possibility is always there. Of the
Ode to Memory, something the same may be said, and of others.
His best known things, The Dying Kid, the Jemmy Dawson ballad
and the four-parted Pastoral, are unequal, but only because they


## p. 152 (#178) ############################################

152 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
condescend nearer to the fashion. The three-footed anapaestics
of the last are jingling enough, no doubt; and it is wonderful
that Shenstone should not have anticipated the variations and
ennoblings of the metre which, even then, though chiefly in light
matter, had been sometimes hit upon, and which were perfected
by Byron, Praed and Swinburne. But there is a favour and a
prettiness about them that still appeal to all but very superior
persons; and not merely they, but many of their companions, show
that Shenstone was certainly a 'called,' if he could not quite rise
to be a 'chosen,' poet.
It may be desirable, and should certainly be permissible, to use
once more the often misused comparison, and observe that, while
Shenstone would probably have been a better poet, and would
certainly have written better poetry, in the seventeenth or the nine-
teenth century, there is little probability that Mark Akenside
would at any time have done better than he actually did, and small
likelihood that he would ever have done so well. His only genuine
appeal is to the intellect and to strictly conventionalised emotions;
his method is by way of versified rhetoric; and his inspirations
are political, ethical, social, or almost what you will, provided the
purely poetical be excluded. It is, perhaps, not unconnected with
this restricted appeal to the understanding, that hardly any poet
known to us was so curiously addicted to remaking his poems.
Poets of all degrees and kinds, poets as different from each other
as Thomson and Tennyson, have revised their work largely;
but the revision has always, or almost always, been confined to
omissions, insertions and alterations for better or worse, of isolated
phrase, line or passage. Akenside entirely rewrote his one long and
famous poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, and did something
similar with several of his not very numerous smaller pieces.
Since his actual intellectual endowment was not small, and
his studies (though he was an active practising physician) were
sufficient, he often showed fairly adequate stuff or substance of
writing. But this stuff or substance is hardly ever of itself poetical;
and the poetical or quasi-poetical ornament is invariably added,
decorative and merely the clothes, not the body—to borrow the
Coleridgean image—of such spirit as there is.
He, therefore, shows better in poems, different as they are
from each other, like the Hymn to the Naiads and An Epistle to
Curio, than in his diploma piece. The Pleasures of Imagination
· The title of the second edition (1757) runs : The Pleasures of the Imagination.
:


## p. 153 (#179) ############################################

Smart
153
6
might, by a bold misnomer or liberty, be used as the title of a
completed Kubla Khan, and so might designate a magnificent
poem. But, applied strictly, and in the fashion congenial to
Akenside and his century, it almost inevitably means a frigid
catalogue, with the items decked out in rhetorical figures and
developments. The earlier form is the better; but neither is really
poetry. On the other hand, the Hymn to the Naiads, in blank
verse, does, perhaps, deserve that praise of being the best example
of the eighteenth century kind' which has been sometimes strangely
given to The Pleasures themselves. More than one of the Odes
and Inscriptions, in their formal decorative way, have a good deal
of what has been called 'frozen grace. ' But only once, perhaps,
does Akenside really rise to poetic bloodheat: and that is in An
Epistle to Curio. It may deserve, from the point of view of the
practical man, the ridicule that Macaulay has applied to it. But,
as an example of the nobler satiric couplet, fashioned in a manner
between that of Dryden and that of Pope, animated by un-
doubtedly genuine feeling, and launched at its object with the
pulse and quiver of a well-balanced and well-flung javelin, it really
has notable merit.
Such a thing as this, and such other things as semi-classical
bas-reliefs in description or sentiment, Akenside could accomplish;
but, except in the political kind, he has no passion, and in no
kind whatever has he magnificence, or the charm of life.
a
>
If Shenstone and Akenside present an interesting parallel
contrast in one way, that presented to both of them by Christopher
Smart is even more interesting; while, in another way, he approxi-
mates to Collins. Akenside, with all his learning, acuteness and
vigour, never found the true spirit of poetry, and, perhaps, did not
even look for it, or know where it was to be found. Shenstone,
conscious of its existence, and always in a half-hearted way seeking
it, sometimes came near it or, at least, saw it afar off. Smart
found it once for all, and once only; but that once was when he
was mad. Since A Song to David at last gained its true place (and
sometimes, perhaps, a place rather higher than that), it has been
the fashion rather to undervalue the positive worth of those other
poems from which, by certainly one of the oddest tricks in literary
history, fortune separated the Song in the original edition of
Smart's work, leaving it for Chalmers to find in a review fragment
only, and for the nineteenth century at last to recover completely.
Smart's Latin poems, original and translated, are now quite out of


## p. 154 (#180) ############################################

154 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
fashion; and they are not, as a rule, strikingly good. He had
not, when sane, the power of serious poetry; but his lighter verse
in a Hudibrastic or Swiftian vein is, sometimes, really capital;
and neither in those great originals, nor in Barham, nor even in
Thackeray, can be found a better piece of burla rhyme than
Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader,
Hast thou that hare? or hast thou swallowed her:
But, in A Song to David, as it has been said, furor vere poeticus
has seized and inspired his victim. It has been so much praised
in the last half-century as to be, perhaps, to some extent, in
the danger of Aristides; and it is anything rather than faultless.
The ideas, and, indeed, much of the language, are taken at second-
hand from the Bible; there is, as, in the circumstances, there almost
must have been, divagation, repetition, verbiage, inequality, with
other things not good in themselves. But the tide of poetry carries
the poem right through, and the reader with it; the old romance-six
or rime couée-a favourite measure with the eighteenth century,
but often too suggestive of Sir Thopas-once more acquires soar
and rush, and the blood and breath of life, so that the whole crowd
of emotional thought and picturesque image sweeps through the
page with irresistible force.
There is little for us that is irresistible in James Beattie or in
William Falconer. But men not yet decrepit, who in their youth
were fond of haunting bookstalls, may remember that few poems
were commoner in ‘elegant pocket editions, as their own times
would have said, than The Minstrel and The Shipwreck. We
know that Byron was strongly influenced by Beattie in point of
form; and it has been credibly asserted that his influence, at least
in Scotland, on young readers of poetry, is not, or was not very
recently, exhausted. It is difficult to think that this can have
been the case with Falconer. The 'exquisite harmony of numbers'
which Chalmers could discover has now completely vanished from
such things as
With joyful eyes th' attentive master sees
Th’ auspicious omens of an eastern breeze;
and scarcely will any breeze, of east or west, extract that harmony
again from such a lyre. The technicalities are not only unlikely
to interest, but, to a great extent, are, unluckily, obsolete. The
few personal touches are of the faintest; and even Falconer's
Greece is a Greece which, if it was ever living, has ceased to live
now. His smaller poems are few and insignificant.


## p. 155 (#181) ############################################

Beattie
155
He was
Beattie, on the other hand, retains at least a historic interest
as a pioneer of romanticism, and as the most serious and extensive
handler, up to his own time, of the Spenserian stanza.
hampered in general effect inasmuch as, if he was possessed of
any strictly poetic faculty, it was of a singularly small and weak
one; and he hampered himself in a special way by failing to
observe that, to make a Spenserian stanza, you need a Spenserian
line and Spenserian line-groupings. As it was (and he taught the
fault to Byron), the great merit of the form—its complex and yet
absolutely fluent harmony—is broken up by suggestions, now of
the couplet, now of the old dramatic blank-verse line, now, again,
of the Miltonic or pseudo-Miltonic paragraph arrangement. Nor,
though the matter might more than compensate contemporaries
and immediate posterity for a defect in manner which they would
hardly notice, is it such as can give much enjoyment either now, or
ever again. That it is not only plotless and characterless but, also,
unfinished, need not be fatal. It has hills and vales and other
properties of romanticism à la Rousseau; suggestions of knights
and witches and so forth in the manner of romanticism à la Percy.
But the drawing is all in watered-out sepia ; the melody is a
hurdy-gurdy strum.
His minor poems are more numerous than Falconer's and
intend much more greatly: but they have little more significance.
He tries Gray's ode manner, and he tries his elegy manner: and
he fails in both. A tolerable opening, such as that of Retirement:
When in the crimson cloud of even,
The lingering light decays,
And Hesper on the front of Heaven
His glistering gem displays
is followed by some twenty times the number of lines mostly
rubbish. The Pastorals, if less silly, are not much better than
pastorals usually are; and the most that can be said for The
Judgment of Paris, wherein Beattie employs the elegiac quatrain,
is that it is rather less bad than one would expect-a fact which
may account for its unpopularity at the time as well as for its
omission from his collected poems'.
The poets-for, in a few cases, they most certainly deserve that
name—and the verse-writers—an indefeasible title-who have
been mentioned in this and in an earlier chapter do not require
1 As to Beattie's once celebrated Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth,
cf. chap. xiv, post.
3 Ante, vol. ix, chap. vi, sec. II.


## p. 156 (#182) ############################################

156 Young, ,
Collins and Lesser Poets
6
any peroration with much circumstance. But it would not only
be uncivil to give them none; it would amount to a sort of
petty treason in failing to make good their claims to the place
they have here received. This place is, perhaps, justified in one
case only-that of Collins-by the possession of intrinsic genius
of the strictly poetical kind, in quality if not in quantity, sufficient
to have made its way in any age; though, undoubtedly, in
some ages, it would have been more fertile than in this. Yet
Collins acquires not only interest but intelligibility when he is
considered in company with those who have been associated with
him here. "Why was he not as they ? ' 'What was it that weighed
on him as on them ? ' These are questions which those who disdain
the historic estimate—who wish to 'like grossly,' as Dryden put
it-may disdain likewise. They add to the delight as much, at
least, as they satisfy the intelligence of better exercised tastes.
So, again, in various ways, Garth and Watts, Young and Dyer and
Green, Shenstone and Akenside and Smart, have special attractions
—sometimes, if not always, strictly poetical; always, perhaps,
strictly literary-in one way or another, sufficient to satisfy fit
readers, if they cannot abide the same test as Collins. And so, in
their turn, have even the numerus, the crowd of what some harshly
call poetasters, whom we have also included.
They, also, in their
day and way, obeyed the irresistible seduction which urges a
man to desert prose and to follow the call of poetry. They did
not go far or do much; but they went as far and did as much as
they could.


## p. 157 (#183) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
JOHNSON AND BOSWELL
6
It was a supreme fortune that gave Johnson the friendship of
Reynolds and Boswell. His great personality is still an active and
familiar force. We know him as well as if he had lived among us.
But the first of Reynolds's portraits was painted when Johnson had
completed The Rambler and was already 'the great moralist,' and
Boswell did not meet him till after he had obtained his pension.
The Johnson that we know is the Johnson who loves to fold
his legs and have his talk out. ' The years in which he fought
poverty and gained his place in the world of letters are obscure
to us, in comparison with those in which he enjoyed his hard-won
leisure. He never cared, in later life, to speak about his early
struggles; he never spoke much about himself at any time. Even
when he wrote the lives of authors whom he had known and might
have told his own experiences without disturbing the unity of his
picture, he offered little more than the reflection of his feelings.
Sir John Hawkins did not make full use of his great opportunity.
He alone, of all Johnson's biographers, had known him almost from
the start of their work in London, but he drew on his recollections
fitfully and lazily. He has given enough to show how much more
he might have given. Boswell, with all his pertinacious curiosity,
found that he had to rely mainly on his own researches. There
were in these early years subjects too delicate to question Johnson
upon. ' Much remained, and still remains, for others to discover.
New letters, anecdotes or facts will not disturb our idea of
Johnson? They will, at most, fill gaps and settle doubts. The
man himself is known. Yet the very greatness of his personality
has tended to interfere with the recognition of his greatness as a
A large amount of new material on Johnson's family and early life has recently
been made accessible in The Reades of Blackwood Hill and Dr Johnson's Ancestry (1906)
by Reade, A. L. , and in his Johnsonian Gleanings (1909 etc. ). New material on his
later life is given in Broadley and Seccombe's Doctor Johnson and Mrs Thrale (1910).


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158
Johnson and Boswell
a
man of letters. No other author whose profession was literature
seems to owe so little of his fame to his books. Many writers,
Dryden and Scott among others, give the impression that they
were greater than anything that they have written. It has been
the unique fate of Johnson to be dissociated from his works. He
would have welcomed the knowledge that he was to be remembered
as a man, for he had no delusions about authorship. But he is to be
found in his works as he wished to be known, and as he was. If the
greatest of biographies catches him at moments which he would not
have recorded, it is also true that his writings give us his more
intimate thoughts, and take us into regions which were denied to
his conversation.
He was born at Lichfield on 18 September 1709, in the year in
which his father, one of the chief booksellers of the midlands, was
sheriff of the city. As a schoolboy, he seems to have been already
distinguished by his ease in learning, his tenacity of memory, his
lack of application, and delays adjusted to his power of rapid work.
But the best part of his instruction he acquired for himself in his
father's shop. There, he prowled about at leisure, and read as his
fancy directed. He was never a laborious reader. The progress
which the understanding makes through a book, he said, has more
pain than pleasure in it. “Sir; do you read books through ? ' he
once asked. There may have been few books that he read through
himself. His defective eyesight had probably some bearing on what
came to be an intellectual habit. But he had in a supreme degree
the gift of discovering the matter and quality of a book, almost on
opening its pages. The extent of his knowledge was the wonder of
all his friends: Adam Smith declared that Johnson knew more
books than any man alive. He had begun this knowledge by
sampling his father's store. And in these days, before he had left
school, he was already a good enough Latinist to be diverted from
a search for apples by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch.
He was intended to follow his father's business. Hawkins and
Mrs Piozzi both say that he could bind a book. But, after two 1:
.
years at home, he contrived to proceed to Oxford. He entered
Pembroke college as a commoner on 31 October 1728, and
remained there continuously, with, at most, one week's break in
the long vacation, till December 1729. Thereafter, his residence
was irregular, and he left the university without taking a degree? .
1
6
1 Boswell says he left in autumn, 1731. ' There is much support for this date in
Hawkins. But Croker argued that he never returned after December 1729, though his


## p. 159 (#185) ############################################

6
Oxford and Birmingham 159
The outstanding fact of his college career was the translation of
Pope's Messiah into Latin verse, as a Christmas exercise. This
was the first of his works that was printed, being included in
A Miscellany of Poems by Several Hands (1731), collected by
J. Husbands, fellow of Pembroke college. Latin was already
almost as familiar a language to him as his own. Late in life,
during his tour in France, he was ‘resolute in speaking Latin,'
though he had a command of French idiom that enabled him to
supply the first paragraph to Baretti's translation of Rasselas'.
'Though he is a great critic in French,' said Baretti, 'and knows
almost as much Italian as I do, he cannot speak either language,
but he talks Latin with all Cicero's fury? His knowledge of the
renascence poets was unusually wide. He regretted that they
were not generally known, and that Pope's attempt to rescue
them from neglect by his Selecta Poemata Italorum had been
fruitless. The first book which he himself designed was an edition
of Politian, with a history of Latin poetry in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Proposals for printing it by subscription were
issued in August 1734; but nothing came of the scheme, and the
Latin poems of Politian still await an editor.
Of his five and a half years in the midlands after his residence
in Oxford, the records are fragmentary. His earliest extant letter
(30 October 1731) has reference to an unsuccessful application for
the post of usher in the grammar school of Stourbridge. He acted
in this capacity for some time, in 1732, at Market Bosworth,
in Leicestershire. Later in the same year, he paid a visit to
his lifelong friend Edmund Hector, then settled as a surgeon
in Birmingham; and it would appear that Birmingham was his
home for the next three years: What is certain is that his hopes
had now turned to writing. He contributed to The Birmingham
Journal a number of essays, all of which are lost; he planned
his edition of Politian; he offered to write for The Gentleman's
Magazine ; and he completed his first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia,
name remained on the books till October 1731 ; and this view has been commonly
adopted. The arguments for residence till 1731 remain the stronger.
1 See Prior’s Life of Malone (1860), p. 161.
2 See Giuseppe Baretti, Collison-Morley, L. (1909), p. 85.
8 The issue of the Politian proposals at Lichfield in August 1734 appears to be the only
evidence for the common statement that he then returned to Lichfield. It was to be
expected that the subscriptions should be received by his brother Nathanael, who, with
his mother, had carried on the family business from the death of his father in 1731. A
Voyage to Abyssinia was all written at Birmingham. If it was completed before
August 1734, there must bave been a delay of six months in publication. The letter to
The Gentleman's Magazine was written from Birmingham on 25 November 1734.


## p. 160 (#186) ############################################

160
Johnson and Boswell
by Father Jerome Lobo. With a Continuation of the History of
Abyssinia, and Fifteen Dissertations, by Mr Le Grand. From
the French. The volume was printed in Birmingham and published
in London, anonymously, in January 1735.
In this translation, there is much more of Le Grand than of
Lobo. In parts, Johnson condensed freely; where he allowed him-
self least liberty was in the sixteen (not fifteen) dissertations, which
occupy more than half the volume and deal with such subjects as
the Nile, Prester John, the queen of Sheba and the religious
customs of the Abyssinians. He was always an eager reader of
books of travel; and it was fitting that the passion for whatever
afforded views of human nature, which led him to describe his own
experiences of another country and to urge others to describe theirs,
should be shown in his first work. But the main interest of the
volume now lies in the short preface. In the translation, he is
.
content to convey the meaning of the original, and, while he
follows in haste another's thought and language, we fail to find
the qualities of his own style. But they are unmistakable in
such a passage as this :
The Reader will here find no Regions cursed with irremediable Barren-
ness, or bless’d with Spontaneous Fecundity, no perpetual Gloom or unceasing
Sunshine; nor are the Nations here described either devoid of all Sense of
Humanity, or consummate in all private and social Virtues, here are no
Hottentots without Religion, Polity, or Articulate Language, no Chinese per-
fectly Polite, and compleatly skill'd in all Sciences: He will discover, what
will always be discover'd by a diligent and impartial Enquirer, that wher-
ever Human Nature is to be found, there is a mixture of Vice and Virtue, a
contest of Passion and Reason, and that the Creator doth not appear Partial
in his Distributions, but has balanced in most Countries their particular
Inconveniences by particular Favours.
a
He who writes much, Johnson said, will not easily escape a manner.
But here is Johnson's manner in his first book. And here, too,
is a forecast of the philosophy of The Rambler and The Vanity of
Human Wishes. There are no distinct periods in Johnson's literary
development, no sudden access of power, no change in his outlook,
no novelties in his methods. He continued as he had begun. He
grew in confidence and facility; he perfected his command of
expression ; but there was not any change in the spirit of his
expression or in what he wished to express.
His experience of letters at Birmingham had not promised
success, and, on his marriage in July 1735 with Mrs Elizabeth
Porter, the widow of one of his Birmingham friends, he set up
a school at Edial, near Lichfield. His first reference to the new


## p. 161 (#187) ############################################

From Edial to London. Irene
161
a
enterprise is found in a letter of 25 June 1735, recently published
for the first timel.
'I am going,' he writes, 'to furnish a House in the Country and keep a
private Boarding-house for Young Gentlemen whom I shall endeavour to
instruct in a method somewhat more rational than those commonly practised. '
His "scheme for the classes of a grammar school, as given by
Hawkins and Boswell, illustrates what he was to say about teach-
ing in his Life of Milton. The school failed, and, on 2 March
1737, he set out for London with one of his pupils, David Garrick.
Henceforward, London was to be his home. Having no profession,
he became by necessity an author.
He had no promise of work, but he looked to find employment
on The Gentleman's Magazine, and he had hopes in the drama.
He had written at Edial three acts of his tragedy Irene? . He
worked at it during his first months in London, and finished it on
his visit to Lichfield to settle his affairs, in the summer of 1737.
But there remained for him the labour of introducing it on the
stage, an undertaking which to an ingenuous mind was in a very
high degree vexatious and disgusting'-as he wrote of another's
experience while his own tragedy was still unacted. The goodwill
of Garrick, whom he placed under a heavy debt by the great
prologue which heralded his managership of Drury lane in 1747,
at last brought it on the stage in February 1749', and protracted
its run to nine nights, so that there might be three third-night
benefits. With all his knowledge of human nature, Johnson was
unable to exhibit dramatically the shades which distinguish one
character from another. Irene is only a moral poem in a suc-
cession of dialogues on the theme that ‘Peace from innocence
must flow' and 'none are happy but the wise and virtuous. ' And
the thought struggles with the metre. He could not divest his
blank verse of the qualities of the couplet. The same faults are
to be found in his translation, made many years later, of a short
passage of Metastasio. We expect the rime at the end of the line;
and, when we come on it in the couplets with which each act
1 Bi-Centenary of the Birth of Johnson. Commemoration Festival Reports, edited
by Raby, J. T. (1909), pp. 26—7.
? It was founded on a story in Knolles's History of the Turks, previously treated in
The Tragedy of The Unhappy Fair Irene, by Gilbert Swinboe, 1658; Irena, a Tragedy,
of unknown authorship, 1664; and Irene, or the Fair Greek, by Charles Goring, 1708.
Before Knolles, the same subject had been treated in Peele's lost play The Turkish
Mahamet and Hyrin the fair Greek (see Peele, ed. Bullen, A. H. , vol. 1, p. xxxvii, and
vol. II, p. 394).
3 The title on the play-bills was Mahomet and Irene. See An Essay on Tragedy,
1749, p. 12 note, and Genest, English Stage, 1832, vol. iv, pp. 265—6.
E. L. X. CH. VIII.
11


## p. 162 (#188) ############################################

162
Johnson and Boswell
a
closes, instead of feeling that they are tags, as we do in our great
tragedies, we find the verse bound forward with unwonted ease.
Johnson had too massive and too logical an intellect to adapt
himself readily to the drama. He came to perceive this, but not
till long after he had described the qualifications of a dramatist in
his Life of Savage, and had proceeded with a second play, Charles
of Sweden, of which the only record is an ambiguous allusion in a
letter (10 June 1742). The labour he spent on Irene led him to think
well of it for a time; but, late in life, when he returned to it afresh,
he agreed with the common verdict. He 'thought it had been better. '
He could speak from his own experience when, in the passage on
tediousness in his Life of Prior, he said that 'unhappily this
pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. '
It was The Gentleman's Magazine that gave Johnson his real
start as a man of letters. Founded by Edward Cave, under the
name Sylvanus Urban, in January 1731, it had been growing
steadily from small beginnings. Its original purpose was to
reprint, from month to month, a selection of the more interest-
ing matter that had appeared in the journals; and the name
'magazine' was, in this its first application to a periodical, in-
tended as a modest title for a collection which made small claim
to originality. The idea was not altogether new. The Grub-street
Journal contains a section of domestic news' extracted from
other papers, and sometimes so treated as to suggest to the
modern reader the more urbane comments in the pages of Punch.
But, as the editors of The Grub-street Journal complained in the
preface to Memoirs of the Society of Grub-street (1737), their
rival of The Gentleman's Magazine took anything he fancied-
news, letters, essays or verses—and printed as much or as little
of them as he pleased. The success of the Magazine was never
in doubt. The first number went into a fifth edition ; and with
success came ambition. In the number for January 1739, a
correspondent, who evidently was Johnson, observes that the
extracts from the weekly journalists have shrunk at length into
a very few columns and made way for original letters and dis-
sertations. ' The Magazine now included parliamentary reports,
poetical essays, serial stories, mathematical papers, maps, songs
with music, and a register of publications. Most of the devices of
modern journalism were anticipated in these early numbers. Cave
had the luck and the skill to hit on what the public wanted. If
we may trust the preface to the collected numbers for 1738, there
were immediately almost twenty imitations. Yet The Gentleman's
9


## p. 163 (#189) ############################################

The Gentleman's Magazine
163
6
Magazine had many features in common with The Gentleman's
Journal; or the Monthly Miscellany, which Peter Motteux had
started in January 1692 and carried on with flagging zeal to 1694.
The earlier periodical had begun on a much higher literary level and
remains a work of very great interest; but its fortunes were not
watched over by a man of business. It had been modelled partly
on Le Mercure Galant. The Gentleman's Magazine was, in its
origin, independent of both its French and its English forerunners.
In the letter which Johnson sent to Cave from Birmingham in
1734, besides offering to contribute, he suggested several improve-
ments. For the low jests, awkward buffoonery, or the dull
scurrilities of either party,' which were to procure for it or its
imitators a place in The Dunciad, might be substituted, he thought,
‘short literary dissertations in Latin or English, critical remarks
on authors ancient or modern, or loose pieces worth preserving. '
Nothing came of the letter; but the suggestion that the Magazine
should take itself more seriously accorded with Cave's business
instincts, and the changes gradually introduced were in accordance
with Johnson's wishes. His first contribution, the Latin alcaics
beginning Urbane, nullis fesse laboribus, did not appear till
March 1738. From that time, he was regularly employed; and
he at once asserted some sort of literary control. There cannot be
any doubt that the subsequent steady rise in the character of the
Magazine was largely due to him. He also helped to guide its
fortunes through a grave crisis. Reports of the proceedings and
debates in parliament had been given in the Magazine since 1732;
but, on 13 April 1738, the House of Commons declared such reports
to be 'a notorious breach of the Privilege of this House. The
Magazine could not easily omit a section on which much of its
popularity depended, and, in June 1738, there appeared 'debates
in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia. ' If, as Hawkins says, the
device was Cave's, it had Johnson's approval; and his hand is
unmistakable in the passage in which the device is explained.
He began by editing the reports, which continued to be written
by William Guthrie, the first of his many Scottish friends. He was
their sole author only for the thirty-six numbers and supplements
from July 1741 to March 1744, and author rather than reporter.
According to Hawkins, he had never entered either House ; ac-
cording to Murphy, he had once found his way into the House of
Commons. He expanded in Cave's printing office, long after the
actual debates, the scanty notes supplied to him, and invested
them with his own argumentative skill and eloquence. Some of
11-2


## p. 164 (#190) ############################################

164
Johnson and Boswell
6
7
the speeches are said to represent what was said by more than
one speaker ; others he described as the mere coinage of his
imagination. His reports are, in fact, original work, and a very
great work. To us who know the secret of their authorship, it is
surprising that they should not have been recognised as the work
of a man of letters. They are on a high level of literary excellence,
and there is an obvious uniformity in the style. Even when they
succeed in suggesting the idiosyncrasies of the different speakers,
they show one cast of mind and texture of language. They are
Johnson's own debates on the political questions of the day, based
—and based only—on the debates in parliament. He said, within
a few days of his death, that he wrote them with more velocity'
than any other work—often three columns of the Magazine within
the hour, and, once, ten pages between noon and early evening.
The wonder is, not so much that debates thus written could
have been so good, as that debates so good could have been
accepted as giving the words of the speakers. Johnson had not
expected this; and, when he recognised it, he determined not to
be any longer 'accessory to the propagation of falsehood. ' This
is the explanation given for his sudden abandonment of them in
1744. But the secret was long kept, and they continued to be
regarded as genuine. There is more of Johnson than of Pitt
in the famous speech about 'the atrocious crime of being a young
man. ' And two speeches entirely written by him appeared, to his
amusement, in the collected works of Chesterfield.
The extent of his other contributions cannot easily be de-
termined. We have often only the evidence of style to guide us,
and his editorial privileges make it difficult to apply.