“Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much classical or Christian erudition one brings to the task) predict confidently how Johnson is going to respond to this or that specific question; yet of course by the end one knows that the answers will very largely be found to cohere if one works patiently enough.”
It’s merely
human to expect consistency in others, even critics, and it’s easy to mistake
their likes and dislikes for dogma or at least a systematic set of literary
values. That makes it easier to dismiss them as dictators and crackpots. Thoughtful
critics and even common readers aren’t obligated to devise a rigorous critical
system, weigh every work against it and issue ironclad judgments.
I remember
the shock I felt when learning what Johnson said of Laurence Sterne: “Nothing odd will do
long, Tristram Shandy did not last.”
I had just read Sterne’s novel and Johnson's dismissal sounded foolish. For a
baffling misstep, consider this passage in Johnson’s “Life of Swift”:
“In the
poetical works of Dr. Swift there is not much upon which the critic can
exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the
qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for
the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers
are smooth, and the rhymes exact.”
At the top, John
Fraser is writing in his essay “Yvor Winters: The Perils of Mind,” published in
the Fall 1970 issue of The Centennial
Review. Winters had died two years earlier at age sixty-seven. Fraser
quotes him: “The number of people capable of doing valuable work in
literary criticism is very small. A great critic, indeed, is the rarest of all literary
geniuses . . . perhaps the only critic in English who deserves the epithet is
Samuel Johnson,” followed by Fraser’s conclusion: "So too with Winters’ literary
judgments.” I know a blogger who called Winters “a fanatic” and “a fascist.” He
means Winters had rigorous standards and little use for shoddy work.
For Winters,
a prerequisite for critical judgment is life experience. Literature is not an
abstraction in an Erlenmeyer flask. I like Winters’ remark about a poem by J.V.
Cunningham: “I confess that I retain a kind of bucolic distrust of all theories
which seem to be in conflict with the facts of life.” He writes of the overrated William Carlos Williams: “[He] was a thorough bore in print except on a few occasions.” That makes up for Winters' silly critical elevation of Charles Churchill, F. G. Tuckerman and Jones
Very.
1 comment:
Johnson had some strange views on Shakespeare, from the little I've read. On King Lear especially, but I have a soft spot for Cymbeline and it's pity that he calls it imbecile.
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