nineteenth century. He has been abused for his mistakes. What critic is without them? What about the Edinburg Reviewers? How many of Francis Jeffrey's literary verdicts remain? . . What will Carlyle's historical criticism be worth fifty years hence? What are Mr. Froude's worth now? Of Johnson, it may be said that as he produced the best dictionary in an age when philology was in its infancy, so he was the best literary critic of an age when there was very little criticism to speak of. Look at the stuff which passes for literary judgments with Horace Walpole, who was always sneering at Johnson's "tasteless "tasteless pedantry!"' pedantry!" Johnson

was, in fact, a good deal better than his age and his prejudices.-MASSINGHAM, H. W., 1890, Some Johnson Characteristics, The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 268, pp. 160, 161.

When the coffin was lowered into the grave, one able to read the outward signs of coming change might have seen buried with it the whole of the eighteenth century literature, as Johnson understood literature, and not to speak of frivolous productions such as those of Fielding and Smollett, who had also gone before. After Johnson's name in the list of English poets, scholars, and essayists may be drawn a thick black line such as in railway guides they use to indicate that here the train stops. Johnson's train of literature, which started merrily with Pope, Addison, Steele, and a glorious company of wits, had been running slowly of late, and has now come to a final stop. Not only was the old order changing, as happens continually, by the laws of being, but it was completely dead, and its successor as yet was not born. There was to be no more literature of the old school: nothing worth reading on the old lines was to be published; and the world must wait until the new men should begin their work with new thoughts, new ways of looking at things, and new forms of expression.-BESANT, SIR WALTER, 1891, Over Johnson's Grave, Harper's Magazine, vol. 82, p. 927

Johnson, in addition to his other great achievements, was capable of making colossal errors without the slightest help from others.-LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1892, Studies in Chaucer, vol. 1, p. 149.

There was an intellectual dress, as it

were, put on by the man of genius of those times. those times. It hung loosely upon Goldsmith's irregular frame. It sat close, well-fitting and fashionable upon Addison, but Samuel Johnson's mighty limbs almost burst its seams and betrayed at every movement the giant who wore it.-CRAWFORD, F. MARION, 1893, The Novel, What Is It? p. 101.

While he wrote some strong and quotable verse, full of vigorous and telling rhetoric, he is pre-eminently a prose writer in an age of prose. The uninspired and practical temper of his time found prose rather than poetry its natural medium. While Johnson thus stands as the bulwark of the old order, both by his own work and by his critical verdicts on that of others, all about him new agitations were already rife. Absolute as was his literary dictatorship, his throne was reared on the verge of that revolution which begins the modern period of our literary history.-PANCOAST, HENRY S., 1893, Representative English Literature, pp. 318, 319.

Johnson's paragraph is remarkably short. In the "Rambler" there are but 2.32 sentences to the paragraph; the two rises to three in "Rasselas." The fewness of the sentences per paragraph and the high percentage (27 per cent.) of paragraphed sentences are phenomena not due in either case to dialogue. Johnson was exceedingly particular that each paragraph should form an integer; beyond this he cared not how few the sentences. His favourite order is loose, with a large share of deductive paragraphs. He loves a short introductory sentence, and when the chance permits he likes to make this sentence a generalization far wider than can be substantiated from the subsequent details. In the matter of proportion by varying short sentences with long, Johnson in his later work is by no means weak. Even in the earlier works the percentage of sentences of less than 15 words is considerable-9 per cent. in "Rambler" and "Rasselas," while the "Lives" shows 16 per cent. of simple sentences.-LEWIS, EDWIN HERBERT, 1894, The History of the English Paragraph, p. 116.

To attempt the Johnsonian period without a familiar knowledge of the Latin tongue is to practice diving before learning to swim; thereafter there is life to

be saved at sea.-RALEIGH, WALTER, 1894, The English Novel, p. 260.

Johnson's weighty and impressive style suits well with a subject of moral grandeur such as not seldom employed his pen; but it grows monotonous, and becomes even ludicrous, when applied on occasions of ordinary or trifling importance. It was to this uniform pomposity of style that Goldsmith alluded when he said that Dr. Johnson would make little fishes talk like whales. But while Johnson's style of writing is overloaded with long words from the Latin, and ponderous with rolling sentences, his speech presented a contrast in pithy and pointed idiomatic Saxon English. He was to his century what Dryden had been to the seventeenth-a literary dictator whose verdict was final. The moral integrity of Johnson gave weight to his decisions.-ROBERTSON, J. LOGIE, 1894, A History of English Literature, p. 217.

Perhaps a little over-fond of trumpeting; loving so much his long sonorous roll of Ciceronian vocables.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 98.

In style alone, we may justly claim that he is the vertebrate column of our prose. He could not accomplish the impossible. Once more I venture to express the conviction that the highest conceivable perfection of English prose was possible only to the Elizabethans, and that when the task passed unaccomplished from their hands, the hopes of it vanished beyond recall. But what Johnson could do, he did with consummate power. To him it was left to establish a code, to evolve order out of disorderly materials, to found a new ideal of style in absolutely logical precision, adding to that precision dignity and eloquence of force. To ascribe to him a slavish propensity to cumbrous and pedantic sesquipedalianism is to mistake the travesty for the original. His dictatorship in literature, based on native strength, was most unquestioned in the sphere of style; and it is not too much to say that all that is best in English prose since his day is his debtor in respect of not a few of its highest qualities, above all in respect of absolute lucidity, unfailing vigour, and saving common sense.CRAIK, HENRY, 1895, ed., English Prose, Introduction, vol. IV, p. 10.

What, then, was Johnson's method? and what its practical application? The method is nothing if not magisterial. It takes for granted certain fixed lawswhether the laws formulated by Aristotle, or by Horace, or the French critics, is for the moment beside the question-and passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the critical decalogue or transgresses it. The fault of this method is not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a miserably narrow and perverted basis. That there are principles of criticism that the artist's search for beauty must be guided by some idea, is obvious enough. It can be questioned only by those who are prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual impressions. It need hardly be said that the very men who are most ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently and rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. No creative work, no critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression; it is the impression of a trained mind-that is, of a mind which, instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or ideas. So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask, What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes that the principles of art-and that, not only in their general bearing (proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of "correct writers," ancient and modern; and which, once established, is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to his bar. In effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope. It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future.

Yet again. In the hands of Johnsonand it was a necessary consequence of his

critical method-poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of mechanism.

As has already been said, Johnson is nothing if not a hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that his sentences are the most severe.-VAUGHAN, C. E., 1896, ed., English Literary Criticism, Introduction, pp. lvi, lviii, lix.

The gradual tendency of the century had more and more come to be concentrated upon attention to common-sense, and in Johnson a character was developed, of noble intelligence, of true and tender heart, of lambent humour, in whose entire philosophy every impulse was subordinated to that negative virtue. Johnson became, therefore, the leading intellect of the country, because displaying in its quintessence the quality most characteristic of the majority of educated men and women. Common-sense gave point to his wit, balance to his morality, a Tory limitation to his intellectual sympathy. He keeps the central path; he is as little indulgent to enthusiasm as to infidelity; he finds as little place in his life for mysticism as for coarse frivolity. Vita fumus, and it is not for man to waste his years in trying to weigh the smoke or puff it away; bravely and simply he must labour and acquiesce, without revolt, without speculation, in "all that human hearts endure." This virile hold upon facts, this attitude to conduct as a plain garment from which the last shred of the Shaftesbury gold-lace optimism had been torn, explains the astounding influence Johnson wielded during his lifetime. His contemporaries knew him to be thoroughly honest, profoundly intelligent, and yet permeated by every prejudice of the age. They loved to deal with facts, and no man had so large a stock of them at his disposal as Johnson.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modery English Literature, p. 249.

Thus, inured in life-long struggles, fortified in spirit by a robust faith, exalted in mind by the loftiest expression of Greek philosophy, Johnson was one of those few who are numbered among the immortals while still in this life: even as that other great Englishman and greatest of modern men, whom the world has just mourned with you, but whom immortality now claims as one of her noblest ornaments.36 34

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GENNADIUS, J., 1898, Dr. Johnson as a Grecian, Johnson Club Papers, p. 48.

Johnson's style is formal, balanced, and Latinized, and his manner is rather oracular. He influenced English prose greatly for fifty years. His writing now

"Neglected and deserted lie,

As they were not of nature's company.' But he is full of good sense, often expressed in apt and forcible language. His range of thought is limited and insular, he is a typical eighteenth-century writer,

-a good deal of a Philistine, but a great deal of a man.-JOHNSON, CHARLES F., 1900, Outline History of English and American Literature, p. 279.

Some wits of the day said that he used long words to make his "Dictionary" a necessity. If we read much of Johnson, we are in danger of imitating him unconsciously. A critic in the latter part of the nineteenth century, describing Johnson's style, says: "He delivers himself with severe majestical dignity and vigorous authoritative brevity." This critic was unconsciously writing Johnsonese. In the second place, Johnson loved formal balance so much that he used too many antitheses. Many of his balancing clauses are out of place or add nothing to the As a rule, Johnson's prose is too abstract and general, and it awakens too few images.-HALLECK, REUBEN POST, 1900, History of English Literature, pp. 299, 300.

sense.

All true Johnsonians treat with an amused contempt the statement so freely circulated in newspapers that nobody nowadays reads Johnson's writings. People are, of course, free to read what they like, and (if they like) not to read at all. Some of us keep books, other poultry. One man drives a motor car, whilst his brother is perhaps an amateur photographer. All the tastes are respectable. But if it so happens that you are fond of English literature, you will be a reader of Johnson, and from his works, whether in prose or verse, you will be infected and become possessed with a perception of a strong character, and a constant habit of mind presented in the pages of Boswell and Burney and Thrale, and indeed all the other sources of our knowledge.—BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1901, Do We Really Know Dr. Johnson, Outlook, vol. 69, p. 914.