'Praise Cannot Be Totally Denied'

“[William] Somervile has tried many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that ‘he writes very well for a gentleman.’”

 

The well-read reader new to Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works (1779-81), the product of six years of Johnsonian labor, can be forgiven his confusion. Who is this gentleman, Somerville? Who is the endearingly named Thomas Tickell? And where among the fifty-two biographical/critical sketches included by Johnson are Spenser and Donne? No poet writing before the Restoration appears in Johnson’s final masterpiece, and none who were still alive (no Cowper, no Chatterton). He tells us he wrote the Lives “in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily; unwilling to work and working with vigour and haste.”

 

The work was commissioned as a publishers’ venture. Basically, Johnson accepted the list of approved subjects chosen by a group of booksellers from roughly the century preceding what we know as the Age of Johnson. That leaves Johnson’s savage, amusing, mistaken, shrewd, sentimental, baffling profiles of Milton, Pope, Dryden, Swift and dozens of more obscure figures. Johnson’s book, in other words, cannot be read as an efficiently arranged survey of English verse in the manner of a Norton anthology. No, we read it for Johnson, his loves and aversions, his insights into poets as men. We’re intrigued by what Johnson chooses to include. They make for good reading, their unique mingling of critical judgments and gossip. Take one example drawn from the seven paragraphs devoted to Somerville:

 

“His great work is his Chase [1735], which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which, however, his two first lines give a bad specimen. [‘The Chase I sing, hounds, and their various breed, / And no less various use. O thou, great Prince!’] To this poem praise cannot be totally denied.  He is allowed by sportsmen to write with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first requisite to excellence; and though it is impossible to interest the common readers of verse in the dangers or pleasures of the chase, he has done all that transition and variety could easily effect; and has with great propriety enlarged his plan by the modes of hunting used in other countries.”

 

For a reader without interest in hunting or its celebration in verse, The Chase is resistant to comfortable reading. Poetic conventions of the time make it read as though written in an unfamiliar dialect of English:

 

“Awed, by the threatening whip, the furious hounds

Around her bay; or, at their master’s foot,

Each happy favourite courts his kind applause,

With humble adulation cowering low.

All now is joy. With cheeks full-blown they wind

Her solemn dirge, while the loud-opening pack

The concert swell, and hills and dales return

The sadly-pleasing sounds. Thus the poor hare,

A puny, dastard animal! but versed

In subtle wiles, diverts the youthful train.”

 

Somerville was born on this date, September 2, in 1675, and died in 1742 at age sixty-six.