Of Human Interest

One of my favorite books to read on the run – in the park, say, as my kids fall off the slide – is Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets. I have a two-volume edition from Oxford University Press, with an introduction by Arthur Waugh. One volume fits neatly in my hip pocket, like a second wallet. This edition was first published a century ago, and my printing dates from 1929. I found it about 10 years ago in a trash-filled bookstore in Schenectady, N.Y., and paid $4 for the set.

The poet James Fenton reviewed a new four-volume edition of the Lives, also from Oxford, in Saturday’s Guardian (Thanks to the ubiquitous, ever-helpful Dave Lull for the tip). Johnson is the inventor of literary biography. Years before writing the Lives, he said, “The biographical part of literature is what I love most,” and it shows in these 52 brief biographies. Johnson’s own finest biographer, W. Jackson Bate, praises the “directness with which Johnson is always facing the issue of what he himself calls `human interest’ (popular appeal, immediate pleasure, accessibility, and the virtues of `the familiar’) versus concentrated power of thought, original invention, and technical brilliance. Never before or since, among the major critics of literature, has the `common reader’ come so near to having a friend in court.”

Indeed, it’s a book aimed at the uncommon common reader, who is not in the market for theories but reads for the most commendable of reasons – pleasure. We experience pleasure, for instance, as we observe the growing, involuntary sense of kinship Johnson felt for Milton, whose politics he detested. This passage, ostensibly a criticism of Milton, reveals a depth of sympathy, an understanding of limitation, nearly kind in its utterance and virtually absent among today's critics:

“Milton would not have excelled in dramatick writing; he knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring, or the complexity of contending passions. He had read much, and knew what books could teach; but had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer.”

And here Johnson sums up the other-worldly grandeur of Paradise Lost:

“The characteristick quality of his poem is sublimity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but his natural port is gigantick loftiness. He can please when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish.”

Much the same, of course, for all his good sense and moral scrupulousness, might be said of Johnson.