Everyone admires the amazing speed and productivity of Samuel Johnson in the matter of publication. We need think only of the papers he so efficiently turned out for the Rambler or the Idler and the grind of the parliamentary reporting for the Gentleman’s Magazine. A quick competitive wit and a ready creative intelligence mark poetical compositions that suggest a talent for the extempore. Similar qualities infuse Johnson’s conversations with all who engaged in intellectual exchange with him; but he is also, in many ways, a genius in slow motion. “SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESS’D,” as Johnson laments in London (1738) (line 177; Works vi, p. 56).

Not only did Johnson’s professional elevation prove slow, but we also remember him for his succession of busted deadlines – the Dictionary that took so much longer than projected; the delays dogging the Shakespeare edition; the spurts and flurries of compositional energy that punctuated periods of lassitude and procrastination, combined with a good deal of travelling about, distracted by other tasks, that characterized the tardy completion of the Prefaces to the English poets. Detailing the composition of these late productions, Roger Lonsdale notes that, on a visit to Lichfield in 1777, “There is no sign that [Johnson] tried, or wished, to start work on his biographies while visiting his birthplace: as he told Mrs Thrale, he loitered, ‘and what is worse, loitered with very little pleasure. The time has run away, as most time runs, without account, without use, and without memorial’” (Lives, vol. i, p. 19).Footnote ² Johnson’s reckoning with time, and his running the race of the writing life against it, are profoundly connected to life’s possibilities and limits, to his religion, to the pleasures of literature and to his reading experience of writers whose work seemed so much longer than it was. How time is connected to mind is a constant source of imagery and analogy in Johnson’s writings, and his comments on all manner of things, persons and poets are haunted by a sense of the temporal.

Some of Johnson’s most famous passages and celebrated sayings (on the prospect of being hung in a fortnight, for example) entail a sense of time and its expiration. Among Johnson’s various forms of alertness to time, less often recalled, is his commendation of chronology to the teachers of young minds in the Preface to The Preceptor (1748). His advice deserves to be better known in circles where courses in English literature are devised:

There is much on the measuring-out of time in the work of Johnson, who is reputed to have bought his first watch at the age of fifty-nine.Footnote ³ His adjudication between the fictional characters of the novelists Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, according to the difference between the face of a timepiece and the complex inner workings, is the substance of one oft-quoted critical remark, and this is the more important because relatively little of Johnson’s published critical output is devoted to the novel. “In comparing those two writers,” Boswell records, “he used this expression: ‘that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate’” (Boswell, vol. ii, pp. 48–49).

Less prominent is the sense in which Johnson grasps the imponderables of time at the level of its philosophy. With this he seems to have been rarely credited – arguably because philosophers and their historians have largely ignored his achievement, though also, as Fred Parker has shown, because the categories made available by historians of philosophy are ones that Johnson does not easily fit.Footnote ⁴ In what follows I will suggest that Johnson nevertheless registers very movingly in his writings the conceptually elusive nature of time and that the mental experience of time for Johnson is a factor in his judgments of literary value. Johnson’s sense of time is made available to us through records of the painful, untheorized intimacies of daily experience. He offers in consequence of this experience no developed or explicit theory of time, but he brings, nevertheless, a high degree of personal detachment to a problem central to philosophy. Time is a leading theme of Johnson’s work, and the unresolved contradictions entailed in his engagements with time reveal a key relationship between the subject matter of his criticism and his personal nature.

A philosophically conscious parallel between on the one hand the material and measurable universe, and on the other the time-inhabited universe of mind, is brought out very eloquently in Rambler 8. In a manner directly pertinent to his literary, lexicographical and editorial labors, Johnson draws attention to the vast discrepancies between the mental time taken to conceive a project and the time needed to carry it out:

With, perhaps, something of his own Pembroke College undergraduate swagger in mind, Johnson wrote in his biography of Richard Savage that he admired “the extent of his knowledge compared with the small time which [Savage] spent in visible endeavours to acquire it” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 186). And the movement of time, as Greg Clingham has shown, is a determinant in Johnson’s eloquent memorials of human lives which found durable meaning in poetry.Footnote ⁵ Time and its tendency to expire, to drag, to betray, to be wasted, to pass or (as we shall see) to destroy create the existential structure of Johnson’s last great critical work and reflect back on the endurance of a literary life that was not long from its end as composition was concluded.

Johnson’s regret for time’s dreadful subtractions and extinctions is painfully felt, and as his diaries and annals show, the metaphorical life of these records gives voice to a personal experience of hard times, and expresses a will to “endure” that combines difficulty with duration. The fragment of an autobiography composed in the 1760s commences with a combination of memorized and reported glimpses of Johnson’s precarious birth and boyhood. This includes the recollection of what he must have been told of his early self and even of his prenatal struggle. The entry is written in the past tense from an advanced adult perspective: “SEPT. 7, 1709, I was born at Lichfield. My mother had a very difficult and dangerous labour” (“Annals,” Works i, p. 3).

In the course of this record, Johnson reflects on his yet-to-be-born and infant self from the position of middle age, and he relays the common experience that in one’s childhood world time passes more slowly, and is more drawn out, than in grown-up life: “I was with Hawkins but two years, and perhaps four months. The time, till I had computed it, appeared much longer by the multitude of novelties which it supplied, and of incidents, then in my thoughts important, it produced” (Works i, p. 17). For the young Johnson the crowding of life with new experience elongates time, so that time recalled and time computed (or remembered to have been computed) are discrepant. But in the entries dating from 1734 Johnson begins to take temporal stock of experience, and the annals reflect the pain of self-examination we find in his diaries, prayers and occasional letters. For an entry in 1736 under “Friday, August 27th, 10 at Night,” he writes: “This day I have trifled away, except that I have attended the school in the morning. I read to night in Rogers’s sermons. To night I began the breakfast law anew” (Works i, p. 35).

In this habit of self-accounting, not only the day but the hour of the day bears the burden of emotion. It matters that it is “10 at Night.”Footnote ⁶ Johnson’s privacies of self-exposure develop from the conventional way time is divided up and from the names given to the divisions. The “hours” and the “days” in the calculus of Johnson’s time-awareness are often dogged with anxiety or regret, or an unbearable self-reproach. “Forgive me,” Johnson prays on November 19, 1752, that “I have this day neglected the duty which thou hast assigned to it.” And on January 1, 1753, he prays to Almighty God “who hast continued my life” to “this day” (Works i, p. 49). The phrases “the hour of death” and “the day of judgment” commonly accompany Johnson’s religious observance and movingly evoke a terminology of time intrinsic to his spiritual vulnerability and the regular tending of his Christian soul. Johnson habitually (as on January 1, 1745) offers a prayer on New Year’s Day, and his language captures his characteristic sense of the relation of being to time:

The ratio of an expired past to an unexperienced future changes with time, and the suggestion that days and years “pass over” us offers likewise a literary metaphor of time that Johnson repeats. The essential nature of being is first conceived as static in relation to time’s dynamic movement. As we stand still, time moves anyway, and leaves us trailing in its wake. But then, in a characteristically Johnsonian about-turn of perspective, the approach to the grave orientates the shifting nature of being toward an immovable datum corresponding with the individual’s death. For this interval between present time and the moment of one’s extinction no language is available – as Johnson suggested in his 1745 editorial note to Shakespeare’s “last syllable of recorded time”: “‘Recorded time’ seems to signify the time fixed in the decrees of Heaven for the period of life. The ‘record’ of ‘futurity’ is indeed no accurate expression, but as we only know transactions past or present, the language of men affords no term for the volumes of prescience, in which future events may be supposed to be written” (“Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth,” Works vii, p. 42). Johnson does not approach death as melodramatically as King Lear, by his “crawl” toward it (i.i.41), but the vital powers are given up bit by bit: “Days and months pass in a dream,” writes Johnson on April 6, 1777, “and I am afraid that my memory grows less tenacious, and my observation less attentive” (Works i, p. 267). When time is passing, as Henri Bergson was later to observe, it is we who pass.Footnote ⁷

Some of the most moving expressions of this temporal self-accounting, including the time of eternity, occur in the period immediately after the death of Johnson’s wife on March 17, 1752. On April 24 Johnson prayed to God that “by the assistance of thy Holy Spirit I may repent, and be comforted,” and “obtain that peace which the world cannot give,” and “pass the residue of my life in humble resignation and cheerful obedience” (Works i, p. 45). That phrase, “the residue of my life” (the smaller part of the whole of life that is left, the computed remainder, the probable, then the certain minority), is repeated by Johnson in his January 1 prayer of 1753:

Such revelations of Johnson’s time-conscious and time-penetrated inner life, and especially his communings with his creator, suggest the consolations available whenever he is read. His imaginative and rhetorical engagement with his emotional nature makes available to philosophical thought insights that are not presented in formal terms as a philosophy. But there is also an impersonal quality to some of his expressions of time that again bring Johnson within range of philosophical tradition and suggest a remoteness from the unprocessed and undistanced pain expressed in the annals, the diaries and the prayers.

One such moment might be Johnson’s tribute to Shakespeare’s undimmed durability as a writer in the Preface (1765), where he describes the unusually lasting appeal of Shakespeare’s comic scenes, beyond, he seems to be saying, that of the celebrated tragic material: “The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare” (Works vii, p. 70).Footnote ⁸ Pope had used the metaphor of “the stream of time” in his Essay on Man,Footnote ⁹ while Shakespeare had anticipated this image in lines attributed to the Archbishop of York from Henry IV, Part 2:

Sometimes the passage of time’s stream transforms into the “torrent” of Fate we are doomed to roll darkling down in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749; 1ine 346). Sometimes events in time divert the stream, and disrupt its smooth flow by the turbulence of a conflicted present and the urgent call to action. The metaphor of “the stream of time” also appears in other Johnsonian writings. The epigraph of Rambler 102 (1751) is quoted from the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

In rendering these lines for English readers, Johnson cites the translation of James Elphinston (Works iv, p. 179). The passage may also however be interpreted for the modern world through Dryden’s elegant version of Ovid from Fables Ancient and Modern (1700):

In this gathering of sources, the temporal metaphor shifts its terms of comparison, while in the body of the essay Johnson adds the complementary sense of advancing life as an oceanic meander:

Fluidity, process, interminability, uncertainty of prediction, are all called up by this image of the stream of time, and time assumes at this point an elemental identity, unfixed by calendar or clock.

These are striking expressions, and they engage the enduring perplexity of how, curiously and at once, we can exist in time and yet seem to observe time as it flows “over” our heads, or “before us” as a stream viewed from a point high and dry on the adjacent banks. Johnson is drawn to such problems and shares with the philosophy of time an ambition to disentangle them. But he is also a literary artist on time, and while his words have philosophical value and effect, Johnson’s treatment recalls the metaphorical temper of those for whom thought about time is a central theme, as it is for Ovid or Dryden, for example, or for Shakespeare or Proust. Like them, Johnson allows us access to a consciousness partitioned off by the specialized investigations into time of cosmology, philosophy or quantum physics. Other literary artists also suggest a contrast with Johnson on time. “Time’s winged chariot” is Marvell’s glorious conceit.Footnote ¹² But when confronted with the irony of time by the poetical image, we are lookers-on, like the Epicurean deities of Johnson’s “Life of Cowley” who “never enquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as Beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure” (Lives, vol. i, p. 201). By uniting observer and object, Johnson’s writing about time folds us back into our own consciousness. He gives us at first hand, as it were, an experience of what it means to be in time and out of time as an intimately shared condition. This condition is no less real for being elusive, ironic, comic and tragic; it is one and indivisible, as a function of General Nature, indefinable because universal.

More urgent and emotional is the time recalled in Johnson’s own poetry as the uncompromising enemy of mental content. Johnson’s compulsive marking of the calendar in the annals and diaries of his middle and late middle age registers a restless and active mind for whom, nevertheless, despair was criminal. For Heidegger, writing in less combative terms than Johnson, the concept of “Dasein” “‘reckons with time’ and regulates itself according to it.”Footnote ¹³ But for the Johnson of The Vanity of Human Wishes, we have not only to reckon but more actively to contend with Time as a destructive agent (the “antagonist not subject to casualties” of “He that runs against Time” in the “Life of Pope” [Lives, vol. iv, p. 16]). Toward the end of life:

Time’s superintending presence in these lines does not fly as an arrow might in a line from point A to point B, or flow as a stream, but keeps perpetual station. Time is here in suspension above the humanity on which it preys. The second line of the couplet is dominated by its seven monosyllables, and seems exceptionally compacted. Joy has its “passages” or avenues or channels of expression and reception, but Time’s impatience to “shut” them “up” suggests how the ledger of life’s opportunities falls closed with unnegotiable finality. Time devours its victim in the end, but not without a contest. Johnson’s flux of time is restrained by a pessimistic scorn that holds fatalism at bay.

From Time externalized as the hovering agent of annihilation, we can move to the experience of time that pervades Johnson’s literary criticism. Here, Johnson’s philosophical understanding appears historically akin to the imaginatively produced “Concept of Time” of the “Metaphysical Exposition” from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2nd ed., 1787): “Time is nothing but the form of inner sense,” writes Kant, “that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state.” Kant denies that time is something which exists of itself, “or which inheres in things as an objective determination,” and he goes on to characterize time as “nothing but the form of our inner intuition.”Footnote ¹⁴ In Johnson’s phrase from the 1765 Preface to Shakespeare, time is the “mode of existence” which is “most obsequious to the imagination” (Works vii, p. 78). Johnson is using the word “imagination” here as we might use the word “consciousness,”Footnote ¹⁵ and, in adopting the phrase, we have seen that he is famously defending Shakespeare’s ditching of the Renaissance pseudo-classicizing unity of time without damage to the continuity of his plays. Johnson explains why the passage of years is as easily accepted as the passage of minutes or days:

When carried along by the pace and passion of the action, we do not “count the clock” (Works vii, p. 77). Here Johnson does not mean to consult the dial-plate on one’s watch, but to “count” the number of tolls of the bell or the chiming of the hour, where the recording of time is audible and takes time, suspending the experience. In that time is “obsequious to the imagination,” the mind takes causal priority over time’s unfixities and perceptual warps:

The unity of the play is experienced as a coherence without gaps because we keep the past action in our heads as a memory.

Coleridge later echoes this famous Johnsonian passage when he claims in 1810 that so far as Shakespeare has the power of exciting our internal emotions “as to make us present to the scene in imagination chiefly, he acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in the imagination, obedient only to the laws which the imagination acts by.”Footnote ¹⁶ But later enquiry on time’s relation to space confirms Johnson’s philosophical prescience. In reacting against Kant’s sharp line of separation between time and space,Footnote ¹⁷ for example, Bergson distinguishes between the spatial, in which the elements are mutually exclusive and externally related, and the temporal, in which the quantitative is replaced by the qualitative. “Space contains only parts of space,” writes Bergson, “and at whatever point of space we consider the moving body, we shall only get a position … But in time we are compelled to admit that we have … to do with a synthesis which is, so to speak, qualitative, a gradual organization of our successive sensations, a unity resembling that of a phrase in a melody.”Footnote ¹⁸ This different experience of the “unity” of time involves a gradual synthetic organization of our successive sensations as not external one to another. Conceived in philosophical terms, Bergson’s formulation pinpoints the irrelevance of the Renaissance pseudo-classical unity of time that Johnson rejects as a critic. Johnson brings a philosophical psychology to a category error in contemporary critical thought, and suggests how Shakespeare’s willed or ignorant abandonment of the clock-counting unity of time weaves the seamless fabric of artistic experience. For Johnson, as for the W. B. Yeats of “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), the markings-off of “what is past, or passing, or to come” collapse within consciousness.Footnote ¹⁹

When we are enjoying Shakespeare, as with other pleasures, time speeds up: “others please us by particular speeches,” Johnson writes in his Preface, “but he always makes us anxious for the event, and has perhaps excelled all but Homer in securing the first purpose of a writer, by exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity” (Works vii, p. 83). Yet Johnson’s thought on time often speaks of its slowness. This dragging-out of time is burdensome; but there is no desire that life should arrive with abnormal swiftness at its terminus, and in the finite life of the critic, a part of the available whole is used up by the reading of poetry and the watching of plays. This time can be measured (as if it were space), and a spatial metaphor of time in fact appears prominently in Johnson’s criticism when the time-compressing excitements of Shakespeare are replaced by a more tedious eighteenth-century poetry. Thus, the author of Solomon (1708), Johnson writes in his “Life of Prior,” did not discover “that [the poem] wanted that without which all other [qualities] are of small avail, the power of engaging attention and alluring curiosity.” The development of Johnson’s remarks on “tediousness” exhibits the impatient consciousness of wasted time that Johnson brought to negative literary judgments: “negligences or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole; other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself. He that is weary the first hour, is more weary the second; as bodies forced into motion, contrary to their tendency, pass more and more slowly through every successive interval of space” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 61). The experience of empty time is not here made replete by literary pleasure, and Johnson remarks in Rambler 41 that “So few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man, and so frequently are we in want of present pleasure or employment, that we are forced to have recourse every moment to the past and the future for supplemental satisfactions, and relieve the vacuities of our being, by recollections of former passages, or anticipation of events to come” (Works iii, p. 221). Because its slowness seems to extend unwanted experience, time is oppressive; and when the measurements of time impose themselves too heavily on the conscious mind they contaminate what is left of our lives, recalling the lines from Lucretius where Man is revealed “Unsatisfy’d with all that Nature brings; | Loathing the present, liking absent things.”Footnote ²⁰ Kipling wrote of the urgency of the “unforgiving minute” as the inspiration to pack life full with the immediate living of it;Footnote ²¹ but for Johnson the “hours of life” are subdivided by “the weary minutes flagging wings” (The Vanity of Human Wishes, line 300; Works vi, p. 105). Whether the time is long or short, linear as an arrow or a stream, or volumetric (and able to be “filled”), the duplicity of time is at the heart of Johnson’s experience.

Stuart Sherman has suggested that time’s void for Johnson is “transformed into a plenum by text” and that this comes from writing down daily experiences of the Western Isles tour in his journal (1775) and in letters to friends. By this he is referring to the sense of fulfilled purpose, by which Johnson keeps boredom at bay; Sherman observes that time, for Johnson, “is left vacuous,” or is inclined to drag, when no writing is done.Footnote ²² But from the evidence of Johnson’s criticism salvation from empty time also depends on the quality of the literary experience available to the reader, and this is registered in the capacity of works to compress time, as Shakespeare does, or to slow it down, as does Prior. Johnson’s critical imagery suggests that this time, while immeasurable as simply time, symbolizes or analogizes duration by the external, measurable, nonimaginary world of quantities and divisions. When therefore Johnson writes of being bored reading Prior he is employing a literary figuration which restrains the exercise of metaphysical curiosity in the interests of a practical critical judgment and poetic valuation. Johnson’s critical imagery conceptualizes Time within the science of a three-dimensional world inhabited by “bodies” subject to inertia and moving through time, in its aspect as space, with measurable, and decreasing, velocity; so that for Johnson unsatisfactory experiences of poetry such as Prior’s are associated with the drawn-out experience of time and the sacrifice of intensity to extensity. The temporal and the spatial are not confused; as Bergson allowed, each dimension is necessary to the expression of the other. Johnson repairs experience which philosophy murders to dissect.

We have observed how time’s clock and calendar divisions confront Johnson with an unforgiving reality, and we have witnessed the anguish of his annals and prayers when the mental calculations are done; but Johnson also has one of the most eloquent accounts in literature of the remediating flux of time, fluid, endless and indefinable. Thus Johnson’s philosophical fiction of Rasselas, published fifty-nine years after Dryden’s rendering of Ovid quoted above, can take the alternate deprivations and healing powers of time as the theme of a philosophical consolation. The situation is the gloomy atmosphere of the travellers’ grieving for Pekuah, a young woman presumed dead after a kidnap; the words are spoken by Imlac the poet:

“Lost” stands against “acquired” in this passage; “lessening” is set against “increasing.” The alternations in this advocacy of self-renewal register the opposite of mental vagrancy or neurotic vacillation. According to Sherman, Johnson found that “the imagination, operating upon time, discovers vacuity rather than fullness.”Footnote ²³ But Sherman may overstate the tragic manifestation of time in Johnson’s writings at the expense of its power to recuperate being, a role appreciable in the accelerated “mingled” drama of Shakespeare where “the loss of one is the gain of another.” We have seen that time, for Johnson, is a mode of existence “obsequious to the imagination” (Preface to Shakespeare, Works vii, p. 66), and the imagination itself exists in the condition of time. But in the passage from Rasselas “minds” and “bodies,” the mental and the corporeal, the temporal and spatial, run together as the Shakespearean “course [or current] of the world.” And in this collaboration between inward and outward reality, the “whole system of life is continued in motion” (Works vii, p. 62).

Telling Lies

“[A] Story says Johnson ‘should be a Specimen of Life and Manners; but if the surrounding Circumstances are false, as it is no longer any Representation of Reality it is no longer worthy our Attention.’”Footnote ¹ Events in time guide the true narratives of an historical “Representation of Reality.” The art of poetry may seek truth by fictional means, by acts of invention; both forms of artistry recruit imagination to their distinctive purposes; but poetry, narrative or otherwise, makes no pretense to precise historical representation and in conventional wisdom needs no basis in material facts. The relative unconventionality of some of Johnson’s judgments means, however, that his critical deployment of key terms, and the latitude he allows to them, require more elaborate teasing out. Recent studies in fakery and literary fraud within the world of eighteenth-century scholarship have drawn attention to the problematic glorification of truth within the Johnsonian oeuvre and the critical standards he applies. One recent example is an essay on “The Poet as Fraud” by Nick Groom, who seems to accuse Johnson of being ready to play fast and loose with truth when it suited him to do so: “[E]diting fabricated parliamentary reports, composing dedications for writers he had not met and books he had not read, and spending his nights walking the streets with a convicted murderer.” Groom suggests a measure of hypocrisy in Johnson’s practice that is continuous, he seems to imply, with his tendency to consort with reprobates such as Savage. He brings to the fore Johnson’s early authorship of the antiquarian “Marmor Norfolciense: Or, an Essay on an Ancient Prophetical Inscription, in Monkish Rhyme, Lately Discover’d Near Lynn in Norfolk,” published in 1739 by Johnson under the pseudonym of “Probus Britanicus” (Works x, pp. 19–51).Footnote ² In his parliamentary reporting, writes Groom, Johnson “concocted speeches supposedly given in the House of Commons as if he was actively reporting the words of Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Elder.”Footnote ³ And so Groom has us place Johnson’s later denunciation of the Macpherson Ossian fraud against his own readiness to make things up.Footnote ⁴ He is willing to relate the proceedings in Parliament without actually doing so, and is complicit in having others pass off as their own compositions that had no author but himself.

Groom’s “fabricated” and “concocted” do more than heavily hint a fault; but perhaps one need not see dishonesty in all or any of this. Given the legal prohibitions of the age, the parliamentary debates were published under the fictional rubric of “Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia,” as Groom actually points out.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, the willingness to ghost-write, a practice that has to this day made the Johnsonian canon hard to fix, might equally signal duties of friendship and charity, and for this he is properly praised.Footnote ⁶ The labors Johnson undertook on others’ behalf might similarly reflect a spirit of generosity toward those in want that Groom seems to begrudge him. There is, after all, no plagiary on Johnson’s part and what is “made up” is, of course, “made.”

Nevertheless, there is point in Groom’s observations. The complications that hover over the term “truth” have generated unease among Johnson’s critics, and since Johnson uses the term with some confidence he will be understood, it is timely to reopen questions about its content and force. We have, for example, the outspoken claim in the Preface to Shakespeare of 1765 that while “the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted,” “the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.” Or when, later in the Preface, explaining the improving innovations of Shakespearean drama when there prevailed a taste for “strange events and fabulous transactions,” Johnson remembers the regressive context of contemporary reception: “The mind, which has feasted on the luxurious wonders of fiction, has no taste for the insipidity of truth” (Works vii, pp. 61–62, 82). Later again in the “Life of Waller,” he writes that while “Poets, indeed, profess fiction,” “the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 40). In his “Life of Milton” Johnson had famously affirmed that “Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason” (Lives, vol. i, p. 282).

As the axiomatic form of these remarks would suggest, the traditional opposition of truth and fiction (like pleasure or imagination) instances concepts that are interlinked and that together shape core beliefs from which Johnson’s judgments flow. In his Dictionary Johnson defines the poet as “an inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems,” and he gives three definitions of “fiction” – (1) “The act of feigning or inventing”; (2) “The thing feigned or invented”; (3) “A falsehood; a lye.” “Fictitious” is defined variously as (1) “Counterfeit; false; not genuine”; (2): “Feigned; imaginary”; (3) “Not real; not true.” As the antonym of “fiction” defined in any one of these senses, truth, with its strongly emotional resonance, is among the mainstays of Johnson’s literary criticism. In his “Life of Savage” (apropos Savage’s historical drama Sir Thomas Overbury) Johnson had written that the “mind … naturally loves truth” (my emphasis; Lives, vol. iii, p. 129).Footnote ⁷

The Truth and Untruth of Fiction

Johnson commonly acknowledges limits to unhindered theoretical speculation and with the exception of religious revelation takes issue with foolish ambitions in the face of universal imponderables. In what follows I will examine Johnson’s disconcertingly strong affirmation of a truth of literary fictionality specifically grounded in nonfictional actuality – in real-life events of an historical nature as distinct from sources in what can be imagined, fabricated, made up or merely created – the “feigned” or “not real” or “lyes” of the above dictionary definitions. By reviewing individual judgments, I suggest the complexities that attach to Johnson’s routine terminology and I explore the implications of Johnson’s attraction to the retrievable verities of the recorded past.

An inherent bias has often been supposed to restrict Johnson’s interest in the new fiction of the novel – indeed, has spawned the accusation that Johnson was living in the critical past on this subject. But in Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), Johnson defended “The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted,” and he explained that the works “exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.” He went on to contrast the modern fictions of which their effect arises from “general converse, and accurate observation of the living world” with the ancient traditions of romance:

But even if Johnson does not develop the criticism of novelists far in his writings, his criteria of appreciation could only encourage the creative directions taken by such novelists as Jane Austen.Footnote ⁸ On “fiction” or the “fictitious” as recurrent critical terms, Johnson can recall the salutary contact with reality that marks his admiration for the novel in the Rambler. When discussing instances of poetical fiction in the Lives a correspondingly strong moral aversion to fictional indulgence will almost always arise. “Where there is leisure for fiction,” Johnson complains of Milton’s Lycidas, “there is little grief” (Lives, vol. i, p. 278). “No man,” he writes of Cowley’s amorous fabrications in The Mistress, “needs to be so burthened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences” (Lives, vol. i, p. 194).

The inspiration of poetry grounded in personal experience is clearly crucial. “We know that they never drove afield, and that they had no flocks to batten,” Johnson observes defiantly of Lycidas in 1779. The note of impatience with the poem and its poet (and to an equal extent the poem’s many contemporary admirers) comes from the observation that we “know,” as Milton himself knows, that what is said by the real poet of the real friend is not true; this is not altered by the warmth of our response to Milton’s pastoral and lyrical fancy. About the poem’s relationship to the known events we don’t even ask: “[T]hough it be allowed that the representation may be allegorical,” Johnson observes of the lines that prompt his contempt, “the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is never sought because it cannot be known when it is found.” Grieving over lost friends is for Johnson far too serious an emotional state for such trivial diversions. The poem is consequently barren of feeling and unable to generate any in the reader: “He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honour” (Lives, vol. i, p. 279).

This famous disavowal of the poetic logic of Lycidas did much to turn the twentieth-century British critic F. R. Leavis against the criticism of Johnson; but Johnson is expressing in his judgments criteria of truth that he had begun to work out and to apply critically earlier in his career. Johnson’s remarks from Adventurer 92 (1753) on the two best pastorals of Virgil relate poetical credibility to the knowledge of “events that really happened.” Several of the Virgilian poems confirm that Johnson, at this stage, is not hostile to pastoral invention as such but that he rather reserves disapproval for occasions where fiction as “the act of feigning or inventing” (Dictionary definition 1) is too weak. Of the fifth pastoral he writes that “whoever shall read it with impartiality, will find that most of the images are of the mythological kind, and therefore easily invented.” In the tenth, however, there is “the genuine language of despair,” and in the first, which is Johnson’s overall favorite, “The description of Virgil’s happiness in his little farm, combines almost all the images of rural pleasure”: “he, therefore, that can read it with indifference,” Johnson observes, “has no sense of pastoral poetry.” The two poems taken together, he concludes, “may be of use to prove, that we can always feel more than we can imagine, and that the most artful fiction must give way to truth” (Works ii, pp. 419–24). The fiction is most artful when it gives way to truth specific to poetry. That it is composed in the pastoral genre is no disqualification.

History and Fiction in Poems by Dryden and Pope

This principle of taste leads us to two judgments in the mature criticism of the Lives of the Poets that reinforce the appeal of poetry based on “events that really happened.”Footnote ⁹ The first (1781) is Johnson’s account of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard from Poems (1717). Johnson’s commentary upon this celebrated piece recalls the priority he attaches in the Adventurer to what we feel over what we can imagine, and similarly accords the success of the poem to historical sources of truth: “The heart naturally loves truth. The adventures and misfortunes of this illustrious pair are known from undisputed history … So new and affecting is their story that it supersedes invention, and imagination ranges at full liberty without straggling into scenes of fable” (“Life of Pope,” in Lives, vol. iv, p. 72). Again, this time in the comparison from the “Life of Pope” of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast with Pope’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, Johnson observes that “Dryden’s plan is better chosen; history will always take stronger hold of the attention than fable” (“Life of Pope,” in Lives, vol. iv, p. 67).

Doubtless the reference to historical truth reinforces the impression of a Johnson hostile to the inventive achievement of such poems as Lycidas, and his distaste for “scenes of fable” may remind us of the scant attention he accords to Dryden’s last work, his celebrated Fables, Ancient and Modern of 1700. Poems in this widely admired collection of translations have their sources in Chaucer, Boccaccio and the mythology of the Greek and Roman classics. In several instances the appeal of the translations depends on the fanciful imaginings of strange and wonderful stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Johnson’s matter-of-fact verdict markedly downplays the volume’s immense contemporary fame, a celebrity lasting well into the nineteenth century:Footnote ¹⁰

One suggested explanation for this cool response is that Johnson was preempting and attempting to curtail the developing enthusiasms of his friend Joseph Warton as they were to surface in the second volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1782): “It is to his fables,” wrote Warton, “that Dryden will owe his immortality … The warmth and melody of these pieces, has never been excelled in our language.”Footnote ¹² When therefore Johnson writes that “history will always take stronger hold of the attention than fable,” he may seem out of step with his times. It appears, however, that there is no invariable rule of judgment asserted in Johnson’s assessment of the two poems by Dryden and Pope independent of the critical occasion of these judgments.Footnote ¹³ Were that the case such a rule would be recalled more consistently across the range of Johnson’s critical opinions than it actually is. He would, for instance, be making a special claim for Shakespeare’s history plays (King John, the two Richards and the various Henrys gathered up as a group) in contrast to the tragedies and the comedies. The latter depend less (or not at all) on known historical narratives. But Johnson does not do this. Indeed, in the Preface of 1765 he writes with undifferentiated approval of Shakespeare’s plots “whether historical or fabulous” as “always crouded with incidents” (Works vii, p. 83). In Rambler 4 Johnson had commented without disapproval on “narratives where historical veracity has no place” (Works iii, p. 24).

Fanciful narratives that have no historical basis but nevertheless retain their emotional force could moreover impress Johnson. Just as he makes no special plea for the “Histories,” so Johnson can be assumed to have fully endorsed the first note in his 1765 Shakespeare edition on The Tempest, retained from Warburton. He prints without any qualifying comment Warburton’s critical praise of the play (1747) for “that sublime and amazing Imagination, peculiar to Shakespear, which soars above the Bounds of Nature without forsaking Sense; or, more properly, carries Nature along with him beyond her established Limits.”Footnote ¹⁴ Johnson echoes the remark when in his Preface he passes his own judgment on nonnaturalistic beings: “Even where the agency is supernatural,” he allows, “the dialogue is level with life”: “Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful” (Works vii, pp. 64–65). Nor, conversely, as we shall see, does Johnson systematically commend seventeenth- or eighteenth-century political or occasional poetry. Critical reservations remain even when examples of poetry “on affairs of state” evoke historical events one could fairly describe as “undisputed.”

On this count Johnson mounts in the Lives a defense against Warton’s charge that Addison’s war poem The Campaign (on the Duke of Marlborough’s historic victory at Blenheim) is a “gazette in rhyme”: “his images are not borrowed merely from books,” Johnson writes in his “Life of Addison,” and observes of the poem that “The rejection and contempt of fiction is rational and manly” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 24). But much of this kind of poetry seems to Johnson’s eye undistinguished. The satirical form of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel may famously depend on the history of the Popish Plot (and the allegory of Old Testament narrative); but Johnson’s appraisal offers no unqualified approval for Dryden’s poetical classic of political ridicule:

Johnson here sees “historical truth” as an inescapable impediment to the poetical image-making that gives the poetry its life.Footnote ¹⁵

The imaginative works that Johnson himself composes are too various in their modes to explain his favoring of historical sources in other poets. Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes recalls real-life figures from history, Cardinal Wolsey, Charles XII of Sweden, Jonathan Swift and so on, who did indisputably exist. But others – the ruined young woman in the portrait of “Pride and Prudence” – can in the same text claim only the fictional reality proper to a Jane Austen novel. Johnson’s only tragic drama, Irene of 1749, draws on a real history of the Turks.Footnote ¹⁶ However, Johnson’s prose fiction of 1759, Rasselas, commences in a utopian “Happy Valley” and takes the form of an Eastern Tale: not exactly a vote of confidence in the superior attractions of “undisputed history.” Once again, there are no grounds for the belief that Johnson thought fictional works were written with an intention to deceive or lie. Readers of Rasselas notice that characters and events are made up for the purposes of the story and in that sense “fictional.” But pace Groom, no “fraud” – no dishonest pretense that something is true when it is not – is perpetrated.

History, Myth and Poetry

One complicating factor is that the break between history and mythology may not always be as sharp as historians would like. What once counted as historical fact may no longer go unchallenged; yet, even if the ancient narrative of Persepolis affording Dryden’s ode its “plan” might now be disputed, Johnson does not appeal for verification to his own generation of historians. Truths about the nature of the world that derive from enduring myths may be encapsulated in poetry; but they are not the same thing as history, and what occurs when history is transformed into art may not have happened. What did happen (unknowable when facts are lost in the mists of time) may nevertheless be needed to generate the poem. A poet may retell a mythological tale believing it to be true when the content is fictional. This accords with what the philosophers Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen call the “description sense” of “fictional” (i.e., “unreal”).Footnote ¹⁷

Johnson wrote that Dryden’s ode “has been always considered as exhibiting the highest flight of fancy, and the exactest nicety of art” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 148), but he spends no time dwelling on correspondence between the “real events” of Alexander’s Feast and Dryden’s retelling of them in the ancient poetical form. As the opening lines of the poem would suggest, the retelling highlights the gulf between poetical fictionalization and history’s representational debt to the real. The Dionysian temper of the lines signals Dryden’s will to unshackle his discourse from historical source material:

In his translation from Fables of Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (“The Cock and the Fox”), Dryden could entertain a self-mocking allusion to his own poem when he joked that “Princes rais’d by Poets to the Gods” are “Alexander’d up in lying Odes.” Footnote ¹⁹ Whether Dryden’s “lying” ode is true within the fictions permitted by poetry, whether the poetry arises from events that really occurred and whether or how it is true to them if they did happen are different issues. But factual reality still counted with Dryden. In their Longman edition of the poem Paul Hammond and David Hopkins note that the sources Dryden used “bequeathed a profoundly ambivalent picture of Alexander to posterity.” At the same time Dryden wanted “to protect himself against the charge of historical inaccuracy”: he wrote to Tonson for this reason to ask him to “alter the name of Lais [in the poem] for Thais.” Footnote ²⁰

Johnson’s supposition that Pope was relying on historical events in Eloisa is well grounded: Abelard and Eloisa were “real life” characters to be sure. Pope emphasizes the factuality of his narrative in the “Argument” prefixed to the poem: “Abelard and Eloisa flourish’d in the twelfth Century; they were two of the most distinguish’d persons of their age in learning and beauty, but for nothing more famous than their unfortunate passion.”Footnote ²¹ The reference is to the historical circumstance of Abelard’s castration and the couple’s tragic separation. Pope includes occasional notes to his poem recording the dates of the protagonists’ deaths, and he points up the rootedness of the poetical story in a universe of fact. This is despite the finding that Pope is basing his Eloisa on a romanticized French version of their Latin letters by Bussy-Rabutin from 1697, a rendition that was itself translated into English in 1713 by John Hughes.Footnote ²² On this evidence, his editor Roger Lonsdale concludes, Johnson’s belief in Pope’s poem taking its start from “undisputed history” is “hardly justified” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 331). Pope’s view of the narrative behind Eloisa to Abelard is that of a true history that has gone through more than one previous “fictional” transformation and remains true nevertheless.

In the case both of Dryden’s poem and of Pope’s we ask whether Johnson’s making a point that the fiction of the poetry is founded on history is mistakenly to prize an accidental attribute as a central artistic quality. The legitimate end of fiction can be the “conveyance of truth”; but truth and fiction may not always connect through the logic of ends and means. Truth and fiction are sometimes antagonists in seeming competition: Johnson can suggest fiction’s tendency to corrupt truth by excess: “Where truth is sufficient to fill the mind, fiction is worse than useless; the counterfeit debases the genuine” (“Life of Gray,” in Lives, vol. iv, p. 182). How, then, are these terms of judgment resolved within Johnson’s outlook? Can they in fact be resolved?

Realities Found and Imagined

My conjecture is that Johnson’s praise of the historical basis of the poems by Dryden and Pope is founded on an emotional embrace of reality and signals our universally precarious grasp of the real. Johnson recognized the bedrock importance to literary pleasure of this investment in the material; and when the cultural conditions of the late 1770s were increasingly defined by taste for fictions unhinged from realities – as the popularity of Lycidas reminded him – the need was more urgent.

Other factors inform the remarks on Dryden’s ode: Playing their part are Johnson’s unshakeable disdain for free-floating fabulation and time-wasting journeys into “the dark and dismal regions of mythology, where neither hope nor fear, neither joy nor sorrow can be found” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 68). Johnson can claim that “Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 147); but he is always on guard against our seeing the physical world of real objects as a construct of mind (hence the famous Boswellian verification anecdote of the rock, the kick and the philosophical prestige of Berkeley).Footnote ²³ Johnson’s faith in material authenticity is in this way often at odds with movements in his own day to extend the role of fiction and with the imaginings of recent theorists who have cast doubt on the reality of a given objective world standing in sharp contrast to the made up worlds of literary artists. “[I]f we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our description of it,” writes Richard Rorty wistfully, “and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found.”Footnote ²⁴ Granted, some facts in Johnson’s “found” reality are more a matter of dispute than others – history, like science, proceeds on the assumption that its findings can be overturned by new scholarship, fresh interpretation or experimental refutation. But if all established facts were open to dispute to the same degree, then Johnson would have no use for history or knowledge of material sources.

In his discussion of the fictional use of real events in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin was to find evidence of the great novelist’s devotion to first causes and a determination “to go to the root of the matter at whatever cost”:

Johnson, who is one of the “thinkers of the eighteenth century” not “taken in” by the “shadows” of superstition, turns to tangible, verifiable, irresistible, concrete reality, when and if this can be known – as against the delusive manifestations of the other-worldly or figments of the poet’s “voluntary dreams.” If what is depicted in an imaginative poem really happened, then that matters; but the fact that it really happened leaves intact the imaginative pleasure of a poetry that draws on history. Ascertainable, factual, historical truth enhances the emotional appeal of such a poetry because it is undiminished by the arcane poetical consciousness not available to normal apprehension.

Johnson claims that the “undisputed” historical basis of Eloisa’s horrific narrative, as traced through the letters, gives Pope’s imaginative construct a similar validity. In the case of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, a Johnsonian favorite celebrated for at least 150 years following its publication in 1697, the remarks famously develop the comparison between the two St. Cecilia’s Day odes of Dryden and Pope: “The passions excited by Dryden are the pleasures and pains of real life, the scene of Pope is laid in imaginary existence. Pope is read with calm acquiescence, Dryden with turbulent delight; Pope hangs upon the ear, and Dryden finds the passes of the mind” (Lives, vol. iv, pp. 67–68). Reference to historical origins counts when distinguishing the different effect of the odes – one on the “ear,” one on the “mind”; one at a superficial level, one having psychological penetration. The test is the experience of the reader: “it was not clear if the passions of ‘real life’ were excited in Alexander,” write Tom Mason and Adam Rounce of Dryden’s ode. But “it is clearly the reader whose attention is held, the reader who feels turbulent delight, and the reader the ‘passes’ of whose mind are found.”Footnote ²⁶

Historical truth, writes Berlin, is “the material out of which genuine answers – answers needing for their apprehension no special sense or faculties which normal human beings did not possess – might be constructed.”Footnote ²⁷ In a universe of which our understanding is uncertain, a call for the “genuine” and “normal” as against the special is as instinctive to Johnson as it is to Tolstoy. Johnson writes to related effect at the close of the “Life of Gray” of a poetry grounded in the “common sense” of an unspoilt “common reader” who, “after all the refinements of subtilty and dogmatism of learning,” stands “uncorrupted with literary prejudices.” By this nonspecialist standard, available to normal faculties and apprehensions, “must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 184).

A statement of what remains when all is said and done we have encountered in Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare: “Nothing can please many, and please long,” he writes, “but just representations of general nature.” Whatever sensations are excited by fiction, “the mind can only repose on the stability of truth” (Works vii, pp. 61–62). “After all the refinements”; “finally decided”; “Nothing can please”; “only repose” (my emphases). Such formulations evoke the finalist foundations of Johnson’s criteria. The fictional spirit that Tolstoy shared with Johnson is anchored by history, and will call into question not only the insincerities and untruths of Lycidas but all efforts to overrate the impalpable, the enigmatic, the undecidable, the ambiguous, the mesmeric or the occult. Johnson invokes historical source material when appraising the strange, dark, singularity of the narrative of Eloisa and its early appeal to the luminous, youthful imagination of Pope. In his final sentence on Eloisa Johnson says that the story “supercedes invention, and imagination ranges at full liberty without straggling [my emphasis] into scenes of fable.” Johnson’s earthy horticultural metaphor, “a fruitful soil, and careful cultivation,” suggests how even the dark fictions of Eloisa are grounded and knowable. Fiction may legitimately grow out of history, and history remains, other things being equal, particularly “fruitful soil” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 72).