There has been a surge of F. R. Leavis reappraisals in recent years and some excellent new books on Leavis’s influence have received thoughtful reviews.Footnote ¹ Yet the rehabilitation of Leavis, as far as it goes, has yet to account fully for his critical relations with Johnson. It remains to draw the line of critical history between them and to mark both the difference and the areas of common ground. Hovering over both the twentieth- and eighteenth-century critic is the somber observation of Pope’s Temple of Fame (1715):

An earlier and more savage version of the rule of succession appears in the splenetic lines of William Wycherley of 1704 on the “currish Pack of Critics” who “Like other Snarlers” “will never spare | Each other, when they hungry grow for Fame; | But on each other fall, for want of Game.”Footnote ³ In their different ways Johnson and Leavis embody the fiercer strains of British critical history. Combative by nature, they can be outspoken to the point of giving offense; both disdain the insincerities of literary flummery and the marks of intellectual pretension. For Leavis, the literary critic was an “anti-philosopher,” and in his influential 1952 collection The Common Pursuit, he writes that “‘Aesthetic’ is a term the literary critic would do well to deny himself.”Footnote ⁴ Johnson, for his part, could not resist a satirical smile at the self-indulgence of contemporary aesthetic curiosity. In 1759 he observes of Dick Minim the critic that he was “the great investigator of hidden beauties” (Works ii, p. 188).

Having It Both Ways

In his 1944 essay for Scrutiny entitled “Johnson as Critic,” Leavis paid an especially warm and eloquent tribute to Johnson’s critical writings: “Johnson’s criticism, most of it, belongs with the living classics: it can be read afresh every year with unaffected pleasure and new stimulus. It is alive and life-giving.” Yet having praised Johnson in the opening paragraph of the essay, Leavis can in the next breath seem to reverse his verdict and assert that Johnson’s criticism is, in fact, “Not for enlightenment about the authors with whom it deals (though it may impart some), and not for direct instruction in critical thinking.”Footnote ⁵

How can both things be true? What adequate concept of criticism (and the history of criticism) allows that Johnson’s critical writings are “living literature” yet asserts that, as the literature of criticism, they are “not for direct instruction”? The working-out of this latter judgment constitutes much of the essay’s remainder. Leavis takes up Johnson’s verdict on the blank verse of Milton’s Paradise Lost. His approach at this point is both contextual and personal in curious combination. Leavis first suggests how Johnson’s judgments come from a determining positive culture; but in other parts of the same essay he envisions this culture as equally predictive of Johnson’s critical trammels, and he returns to Johnson’s “Life of Milton” to discuss his criticisms of the pastoral elegy Lycidas. The nature of Johnson’s disablement, Leavis then writes, “deserves to be precisely noted” (p. 190). Here the tin ear, the poetic tone-deafness that Leavis accords to Johnson, is a real problem when one is trying to understand how Johnson’s standing as a literary critic might be respected: “Those surprising judgments, imputing ‘harshness’ and lack of ‘music,’ are to be explained by reference to the cultivated predilection, the positive ‘ear,’ with which they are correlated” (p. 190). The cause of such “surprising judgments” Leavis identifies as Johnson’s Augustan “training” (his liking, perhaps, for such proto-Augustans as Denham and Waller, the one strong, the other sweet). Leavis avers that this antecedent doctrine of taste, existing on different principles from Leavis’s own, however “positive” the poetical “ear” of Johnson may have been, makes the music of Lycidas an acoustic embellishment the older critic is deaf to.

Though Leavis does not share the lingering Victorian taste for the mellifluence of Milton, he nevertheless comes down on the side of those who see Lycidas as a poem of a profoundly different kind from what Johnson suggests that it is: “It is difficult to see how, granted the approach,” writes Leavis, “Johnson’s essential criticism can be disposed of. The answer, of course, is that the approach is inappropriate and the poem a different kind of thing from any appreciable by Johnsonian criticism” (p. 192). But whatever is meant by this “Johnsonian criticism” (at once logically hard to disregard “granted the approach” yet “inappropriate”), Leavis’s effort to qualify Johnson finds reasons that echo commonplace eighteenth-century enthusiasms for Milton’s poem. The period represents a tradition from which Leavis otherwise takes pains to distance himself; but he shares, if unconsciously, its concerted irritation with Johnson’s hostility.

Leavis’s disapproval nowhere comes out more strongly than when he is critiquing Johnson on Shakespeare. On a number of occasions what Johnson says and what Leavis says that he says are markedly different. Firstly, Leavis asserts that Johnson “exalts the comedies above the tragedies” (p. 199). But Johnson writes of “comedy” and “tragedy” (singular nouns), and the passage from the Preface to Shakespeare containing these terms is the one that Leavis actually quotes (Works vii, p. 69). Johnson is not in fact comparing whole plays or groups of plays at this moment but the relative success in both genres of Shakespeare’s “natural disposition” (which tended to comedy). Elsewhere, Leavis claims that Johnson is guilty of a “censure of Shakespeare’s indifference to poetic justice” (p. 197). It is true that when in the Preface he reflects on Shakespeare’s neglect of moral purpose, Johnson writes of “justice” as “a virtue independent on time and place” (Works vii, p. 71); but he nowhere uses the phrase so stated by Leavis. Nor does he invoke “poetical justice” except when assessing objections he pointedly disagrees with or wishes to place in perspective. The endnote on Hamlet is a case in point: “The poet is accused of having shewn little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability” (Works viii, p. 1011).

Another mark of Leavis’s disapproval is the suggestion that Johnson did not appreciate Shakespeare’s “exploratory creative” use of poetical language. Yet Leavis’s own quotation of a passage from Macbeth having, in Johnson’s words, “all the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being” (Rambler 168, Works v, p. 127), appears to undermine this belief. “[C]an we say,” asks Leavis, “that the critic who finds [such words] when trying to express his sense of the peculiar exploratory creativeness and metaphorical concreteness of Shakespeare’s poetry doesn’t appreciate the Shakespearian use of language?” (p. 193). The obvious answer to this rhetorical question might reasonably be “no” – how does Johnson’s formulation not recognize the creative?

Finally, among the tally of readings that do not withstand scrutiny, we see that Leavis thinks Johnson “cannot appreciate the ways in which not only Shakespearean drama but all works of art act their moral judgments,” adding that “For Johnson a thing is stated, or it isn’t there” (p. 197). Here only a fairly cursory inspection of Johnson’s text is required. Johnson’s sense of literature’s moral operations, and the considerable – unstated – implications, are everywhere, as I illustrate in what follows.Footnote ⁶

How could so much be so wrong? One clue is a biographical anecdote by Leavis’s former pupil Ian MacKillop, who makes mention of an evening in Cambridge when an editor of the Cambridge Quarterly, John Newton, “was lecturing on the importance of eighteenth-century literary criticism” and who adds that “It should be remembered that while Leavis himself had great respect for Johnson, it was central to his literary aesthetic that Johnson did not grasp the ‘creative-exploratory’ (that is, the Shakespearean) use of language.” MacKillop observed that “Newton,” in defending Johnson against Leavis, “was playing with the heart of Leavis’s convictions.”Footnote ⁷ But in making these points, and more, Leavis writes as if challenging Johnson’s appreciation of Shakespeare for the first time. He does not say so or perhaps does not know, but he closely echoes the frustration with Johnson that comes through the earliest responses to Johnson’s Shakespeare edition, as in more general reactions by Johnson’s eighteenth-century detractors. In common with Johnson’s contemporary critics, Leavis diagnoses the problem of critical judgment as the radically undramatic habit of mind manifest in his own (failed) tragic play of 1749, Irene (p. 196). Even Boswell judged that Johnson’s criteria could be inferred from the literary works that he wrote.

Whatever one might think of Irene – and Johnson did not himself think it a success – there was, in fact, nothing at all “undramatic” about Johnson’s appreciation of Shakespeare. There is this, on King Lear:

Or this, on what it feels like to experience a Shakespeare tragedy:

Leavis’s desire to blame Augustan culture for Johnson’s “failings” leads to some risky and fallacious generalizations of his own:

So much for Johnson’s verdict on Pope, who “had likewise genius; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 62).

The difficulty that Leavis experienced over Johnson’s Shakespeare, as with his criticism of Lycidas, recalls an eighteenth-century sense of disappointment with Johnson and accords a quantity of critical nuisance value to his views. The complaint emerges in a range of eighteenth-century texts and includes Joseph Warton’s despair with Johnson in the second volume of his Essay on Pope (1782), its publication possibly provoked by the second series of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1781). The spirit of revolt appears in Warton’s inclination to contest verdicts within the Lives for their awkward refusal to fall into line. This strengthens in the notes printed in the first volume of Warton’s edition of Pope of 1797. Again, it is Johnson’s whole unpoetical cast of mind, evidenced by his own literary productions, which degrades the criteria of his literary judgments and leads to his deeply uncongenial conclusions:

To the personal dismay that pained Warton, writing as an old friend whose later relation to Johnson appears in the comically imagined dialogue between the two celebrated Doctors of Robert Potter’s “A Dream” of 1789,Footnote ⁹ we can add James Gillray’s outrageously vivid cartoons at Johnson’s critical expense that I have mentioned above in Chapter 10 – these from an artistic genius for whom every celebrity in sight was a legitimate target. In one such image, Johnson’s negative verdicts on Milton and on other poets such as Hammond and Gray are subjected to ridicule: Milton’s name, with theirs, appears in a list on the dunce’s cap worn by a half-naked Johnson in the stunning image of “Dr Pomposo” driven by the vengeful Muses around Mount Parnassus. Johnson sought to resist the cult of the minor Milton in the middle and later years of the eighteenth century and was duly admonished by contemporaries. A volume of Deformities of Dr Johnson by James Thomson Callender of 1782 brings many of the key criticisms together.Footnote ¹⁰ Leavis is serious enough to appreciate Johnson’s human objections to a poem shamelessly applying pastoral images to the death of a friend. Yet he recycles an eighteenth-century resistance to Johnson. It is pertinent to ask why.

Odd Man Out or Representative Mind?

The incoherence of this 1944 Scrutiny article is resolved two years later in a very different account of criticism’s historical relations. This is outlined in a second essay which condemns Johnson more harshly. In a review of Joseph Wood Krutch’s Samuel Johnson for the Kenyon Review reprinted unchanged six years later in The Common Pursuit as “Johnson and Augustanism” (pp. 97–115), Leavis begins with a tribute to the American scholar.Footnote ¹¹ He regards Krutch as having done proper justice to Johnson’s humanitarianism – the fact, for example, that his polemic against the Americans “is significantly correlated with his indignant hatred of slavery” (p. 99). But Leavis now denied that Johnson’s criticism had anything like the lasting value that he had himself, two years earlier, occasion to praise. The question that Leavis tries to answer shifts from critical disagreement (“Is Johnson right or wrong in his critical judgments?”) to cultural analysis (“Why is Johnson so wrong?”) – so obviously and unquestionably and symptomatically wrong in his judgments that we don’t any longer need to marshal evidence of their wrongness to dispose of them.

In answer to this question-which-begs-a-question Leavis deploys two arguments that do not sit well together. The first posits an ultimate cultural cause (that of “Augustanism”) for the phenomenon of Johnson’s “case”; the second asserts a proximate cause for Johnson’s misjudgments (the eccentric nature that marks Johnson out). The paradox involves our seeing Johnson as a representative Augustan but at the same time an exception. He is one on his own, but simultaneously “trained” by his period’s pervasive convictions to the point where he stands proxy for its poetical tastes. The diagnosis that Leavis delivered was the awkward one: that Johnson’s sensibility was an “extravagant and disqualifying abnormality” yet prey to the conventional mindset of an entire cultural era embracing the poetry of Dryden and Pope (p. 100). (Such thinking incidentally ignores the fact that Johnson has much to say of a negatively critical nature about the poems of Dryden and Pope.) Leavis reconciles these two incompatible inferences by means of an opposition where the second element gets the rhetorical better of the first. Note the role of “nevertheless” in the following remarks on a Johnson who, while he is:

Later, and warming to the same theme, Leavis writes that “Johnson was representative in his inability to appreciate the more profoundly creative uses of language – for that was his case” (p. 110).

But this verdict once more hangs on the thread of misreading. Again, Leavis reserves his most fundamental criticisms for Johnson’s Shakespeare. Quoting Johnson’s paragraphs from the Preface on the natural “disposition” that led Shakespeare to comedy (he found puns endearingly hard to resist), Leavis claims that “The critic who can in this way exalt the comedy above the tragedy exhibits a failure in the appreciation of Shakespeare that no one to-day, surely, would hold to be anything but major” (p. 108). There is much that Leavis ignores – for example the compelling passage on Lear quoted above from the notes to the plays; the fact that the major extended endnotes to the plays are concerned with the major tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth); that “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies” (Works vii, p. 66), and that in the paragraphs that Leavis quotes, Johnson writes of Shakespeare’s “tragick scenes” (my emphasis).Footnote ¹²

Perhaps Johnson esteemed Shakespearean comedy more highly than did Leavis. There is evidence to think so. But if Johnson is writing about scenes rather than whole plays, then Leavis’s distance from Johnson is not nearly as great as he thinks. The same can be said of Leavis’s pointed distortion of the moral value Johnson accords to dramatic works. He not only repeats the substance of the bogus charge laid against Johnson in the earlier Scrutiny article but is even more emphatic: “Johnson cannot understand that works of art enact their moral valuations. It is not enough that Shakespeare, on the evidence of his works, ‘thinks’ (and feels), morally; for Johnson a moral judgment that isn’t stated isn’t there” (pp. 110–11).Footnote ¹³ Evidence to the contrary is not hard to find. “The moral to be drawn from this representation [of the character of Falstaff] is, that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please” (Works vii, p. 523). The portrayal of the character of Edmund in King Lear is such as to suggest that “crimes lead to crimes” and eventually “terminate in ruin” (Works vii, p. 704). The person stating these particular morals is not Shakespeare but Johnson.

There is a double irony here. The first is that Leavis’s sentiments reflect Johnson’s critical priorities. Both critics foreground the value of “life,” an esteem for “living literature,” as preeminent, and they are famously taken to do so. “I don’t believe in any ‘literary values,’” writes Leavis with characteristic bravura, “and you won’t find me talking about them; the judgments the literary critic is concerned with are judgments about life.”Footnote ¹⁴ “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men”; his dialogue is “level with life”; his language is “the language … of men,” writes Johnson, more impersonally (Works vii, pp. 64, 84).

The second irony is historical and concerns Johnson’s intrusion into the critical business of the twentieth century where he is not welcome. Leavis reveals again an imperfect consciousness of his own position vis-à-vis the critical past. William Kenrick, Joseph Warton, James Gillray and Robert Anderson, together with William Blake and ultimately the ranks of the great Romantics, foreshadow Leavis’s twentieth-century rebellion against Johnson’s critical presence within their world. Gillray’s early cartoon of Johnson’s head placed on the body of an owl as he stares at busts of the past poetical greats has given us the vivid image of “Old Wisdom Blinking at the Stars.” “Winking and Blinking like Dr. Johnson” is Blake’s line from An Island in the Moon.Footnote ¹⁵ Anderson in his 1795 Life of Samuel Johnson laments that “A certain inelegance of taste, a frigid churlishness of temper, unsubdued and unqualified by that melting sensibility, that divine enthusiasm of soul, which are essential to a hearty relish of poetical composition, too often counteracted and corrupted the other poetical principles of his intellect.”Footnote ¹⁶ On poetry as “melting sensibility” or “divine enthusiasm of soul” Leavis is closer to Johnson than to Anderson, but his method is nevertheless to place Johnson in a double bind, as abnormal yet somehow conventional. By this measure Leavis seals the ears of his critical present to the Johnsonian past and makes more space for his personal critical project. It is a process that Pope and Johnson would have easily foreseen. “[The] great part of the labour of every writer is only the destruction of those that went before him,” writes Johnson: “The first care of the builder of a new system, is to demolish the fabricks which are standing” (Works vii, p. 99).