'I Would Rather Be Attacked Than Unnoticed'

If I could take only one volume of Dr. Johnson’s to that mythical desert island, much swooned over by readers with too little time and too many distractions, I would pack Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). Not an easy choice. Rasselas is tempting – one of my favorites, a book that mingles the novel with wisdom literature. And don’t forget The Rambler's learned, moving moral essays. Most tempting is Johnson’s Dictionary, an anthology of English prose and poetry. A good dictionary always makes for entertaining reading. I select the Lives because in it Johnson combines biographical storytelling with critical assessment, which in his case means tart, unexpected judgments. Take this from his “Life of Pope”: 

“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”

 

There’s nothing bland or mincing about Johnson. You can read the lives for their human interest even when the poet in question is unfamiliar. Like John Aubrey in his Brief Lives, Johnson understands the worth of a good anecdote. Here is one about Thomas Yalden, when the poet was a student at Magdalen College:

 

“It was his turn one day to pronounce a declamation, and Dr. Hough, the president, happening to attend, thought the composition too good to be the speaker's. Some time after, the doctor, finding him a little irregularly busy in the library, set him an exercise for punishment, and, that he might not be deceived by any artifice, locked the door. Yalden, as it happened, had been lately reading on the subject given, and produced with little difficulty a composition, which so pleased the president that he told him his former suspicions, and promised to favour him.”

 

In his biography of Johnson, John Wain describes the Lives as “Johnson’s gentlest, most companionable work.” This is true yet Johnson is often at his most entertaining when cantankerous. In his “Life of Milton” he famously said of “Lycidas” that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.” Johnson knew what he was doing and how some readers would react. Boswell reports that on this date, March 26, in 1779:

 

“He said he expected to be attacked on account of his Lives of the Poets. ‘However (said he,) I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an authour is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse; an assault may be unsuccessful; you may have more men killed than you kill; but if you starve the town, you are sure of victory.’”

 

Today, in the circle-jerk world of poetry reviewing, this would trigger more than a few poets who deserve a good triggering. In his Lives, Johnson is not gratuitously cruel. Much of his cruelty seems perfectly appropriate. As a postscript to an essay about Kingsley Amis collected in The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008 (Picador, 2009), the late Clive James writes:

 

“One doesn’t say that Aubrey’s Brief Lives set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, any one of which is the first thing to read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to keep abreast of the essentials first.”