'To Honor Every Side of His Subject'

How rare for a critic to write as well or better than the writers he criticizes. Writing badly while presuming to criticize another is an act of self-cancellation. If what you choose to write is stupid, pretentious or tedious, how can we rely on you to judge the work of others? Good criticism is itself a form of literature, and thus open to criticism. Russell Fraser begins his essay “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets” like this: “Dr. Johnson is our greatest critic but often wrong, not least when he knows himself right.” That’s what’s known among newspaper reporters as a “good lede” – provocative, probably correct and yet arguable as to specifics. 

Fraser’s subject is Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), devoted to the life and work of fifty-two poets active in the century between Cowley and Gray. The collection is endlessly rereadable and I read it less for Johnson’s judgments – though they are often shrewd and sometimes outrageous, I’ve already made up my mind about most of these poets – than for the charm of Johnson’s prose, his zesty anecdotes and the reminder that lesser-known writers are still worthy of attention.

 

An English professor my sophomore year had us select one life and write about it. I chose Dryden because the same professor had introduced us to his work and I liked it. Here is the passage I concentrated on and still find extraordinary:

 

“Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.”

 

Read in isolation, its subject might be mistaken for a much later writer, perhaps Hölderlin or Rimbaud. In the same brief life, Johnson formulates a handy gauge for deciding which books work and which move us to put them aside without completing:

 

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”

 

A good critic is a catalyst fostering a sort of chemical reaction between reader and writer. I still read Dryden fairly regularly, in part, thanks to Johnson. Fraser reminds us that the book’s principal attraction is Johnson, not his ostensible subjects. Fraser writes: “Most of all Johnson wrote to drive away demons.” And: “Like everyone else he has his hobbyhorses.” And here is Fraser on Johnson on Swift:

 

“This mingling of praise and blame lets us see how the style is the man, lucid and balanced, one phrase matching another so nicely as almost to cancel the other out. Johnson's is a style magnanimous with his wanting, like Shakespeare, like Henry James, to honor every side of his subject.”

 

[Last week I referred to an essay Fraser had written about his friend Edgar Bowers.]