`At the Level of Style'

The scholarly summa of the young century must be Roger Lonsdale’s four-volume Clarendon Press edition of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, by Samuel Johnson, though it seems not to have been received with the jubilation it deserves. This reception has been somewhat rectified by William H. Pritchard’s review/essay, “Johnson’s Lives,” in the Spring 2007 issue of The Hudson Review.

Pritchard stresses the disproportionate ratio of Lonsdale’s commentary to Johnson’s original prose, which in the fourth volume is about 2.5:1. But he also encourages the reader to adopt a guilt-free laissez-faire approach to the text, reading what is useful and interesting and blithely skipping the rest:

“Eager to learn more about Milton or Dryden, I’m not so eager about William King or Richard Duke, the latter of whose poems Johnson wrote, `are not below mediocrity; nor have I found much in them to praise.’”

Pritchard cites a brief essay by Matthew Arnold with the same title as his own, included by Arnold as an introduction to his selection of the most substantial lives – Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift, and Gray. I had never known of its existence, and Dave Lull kindly supplied me with an electronic version. Of these six poets, Arnold approves only of Milton, and he finds Swift especially distasteful. But he endorses Johnson’s mingling of biography and criticism, and judges this an appropriate way to introduce student to the work:

“...of the real men and of the power of their works we know nothing! From Johnson's biographies the student will get a sense of what the real men were, and with this sense fresh in his mind he will find the occasion propitious for acquiring also, in the way pointed out, a sense of the power of their works.”

Pritchard encourages readers to view the Lives as a multifaceted work eliciting our appreciation as literary history, criticism, and veiled autobiography:

“But it is finally at the level of style – of the sentence, the paragraph – where we engage with Johnson most fully and unmistakably. Lonsdale speaks well in his introduction when he says that whatever Johnson’s critical limitations and idiosyncrasies, his `energy and trenchancy’ are always evident, particularly in passages from the Lives -- `in which his prose evokes, and even competes with, the qualities of the poetry he is describing.’”

In Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, Henry Hitchings makes a related point:

“Trenchant, opinionated and often deeply personal, the Lives proposes not so much a canon of essential authors as a continuation of the Dictionary’s unfurling of intellectual history. Moreover, unlike modern biographers, Johnson separates the events of his subjects’ lives from their achievements in poetry, rather than braiding them ingeniously. One of the results is a particular attention to writing per se: instead of extrapolating psychological points from the texts he examines, Johnson considers them as feats of language.”

Let Johnson have the final word, with this discussion of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”:

“To mention the particular beauties of the Essay would be unprofitably tedious; but I cannot forbear to observe, that the comparison of a student’s progress in the sciences with the journey of a traveler in the Alps, is perhaps the best that English poetry can shew. A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must shew it to the understanding in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy with greater dignity; but either of these qualities may be sufficient to recommend it”