'Keep Abreast of the Essentials First'

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “very much the biographer's humble admirer,” and continues:

“His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion, upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgement.”

Cowper had been reading Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). His assessment of Johnson’s critical judgment is accurate. Incidentally, it might also be applied to Yvor Winters. We no longer associate criticism with common sense and a refutation of “theory.” In his biography of Johnson, John Wain tells us Johnson’s “method” relied on “his memory, his judgement, his learning.” The same might be said of the way he assembled his Dictionary more than twenty years earlier. In writing of fifty-two English poets, Johnson combines biographical storytelling with critical assessment, which in his case means tart, unexpected judgments. He’s not shy about praise or condemnation. 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.”

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 March 26, 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.’”

Reading the Lives is always entertaining. Were I forced to bring only a single work of criticism, or a single work by Johnson, to that mythical desert island, it would be this one, Johnson’s final masterpiece. Who do you think Johnson is writing about in this passage:

“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 the complete biography and you’ll never think the same way about John Dryden. In his 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.”