Lonsdale’s Johnson

I have focused to this point on the thought and artistry shaping Johnson’s practice, methods and values as a literary critic. Judgments in the periodical essays, the Shakespeare criticism and the Lives often seem to cohere with judgments made elsewhere; they reinforce and explain them or suggest principles pervasive throughout the critical oeuvre. Other judgments do not, but register the diversity of Johnson’s values and the tensions between rival criteria. In this chapter I consider two recent editions of the entire text of the last extended example of Johnson’s criticism. My immediate purpose is to prepare the ground for a fairer appraisal of the Lives and to explain the connections between the work that Johnson produced and the editorial attention he now receives. The new editions stand as milestones in Johnson’s modern reception history; they attend to the minutest textual details and provide a record of scholarly deliberation.Footnote ¹ It is not merely the vast scale of the enterprise that makes editing the fifty-two “Lives” so demanding a task, a labor that cannot be reduced to the routines of period specialists: Herculean and Johnsonian drudgery are involved. But large issues in criticism, critical history, literature and biographical form are also at stake.

Roger Lonsdale’s edition of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (2006) benefits from Lonsdale’s long experience as an editor and anthologist of eighteenth-century poets; the three volumes of the Yale edition published four years later find their focus in attention to the Johnsonian text and delve into the intricacies of its evolution. Both, however, display the contours of Johnson’s taste in ways that selections and excerpts cannot. “[S]carcely any man ever wrote so much and praised so few,” says Johnson of the poet John Milton (Works xxi, p. 112), and the comment recalls that, overall in the Lives, there are correspondingly few expressions of unrestrained praise for individual poems. The English poets seem to have impressed on their greatest critic an experience marked less by pleasure than by pained disapproval or regulated derision. Johnson’s criticism is for this reason probably more widely known for its stress on the downsides of poetical tradition and for pungent observations on its valleys and troughs – the extravagance and coldness of the Metaphysical poets, the tasteless literary tears shed for a youthful friend that mar Milton’s Lycidas, the derivative philosophizing in verse of Pope’s Essay on Man, the empty rantings in Dryden’s plays, the stilted grandeur of almost all eighteenth-century tragic drama or the logical impiety of devotional poetry. Some poets, Hammond being a case in point, are treated with withering satire from which it is hard to believe any reputation could be salvaged. So too, on account of his tuneless croonings, the poems of Lord Halifax. Johnson may be too little appreciated as a critic for how radically he cleared the ground by sifting 150years of English poetry and the extent to which he relieved his poetical present of its second-rate past. Some of this judgment-making must leave readers to wonder why someone who found so much to dislike should spend life so passionately attentive to poetry.

But in a work as capacious and judicious (if controversial) as the Lives there remains a Johnson whose criticism brought the poet within him, and his love of poetry, exuberantly to the fore. Thus Abraham Cowley, for all his faults and stylistic quirks, was redeemed for poetical tradition by Johnson, who draws particular attention to the “gaiety of fancy” and “dance of words” in Cowley’s The Chronicle, and delights in the airy lightness of his Anacreontiques (Lives, vol. i, pp. 215, 216–17). Such comments display an unusual regard for comedy, replicated in the tilt of Johnson’s Shakespeare appreciation. The tone of Johnson’s authorial personality may evoke the famously deliberative critic, but he is frequently light and satirical on his own account, quietly witty, dry or laconic. “Surely,” writes Johnson on Hammond, having quoted some colorful lines in the pastoral mode on love unrequited, “no blame can fall upon the nymph who rejected a swain of so little meaning” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 117). We see how Johnson can turn literary criticism into a comic and satirical form now lost to its more intellectually selfconscious modes. Johnson is able to generate humor at the expense of, and sometimes in sympathy with, his poets.Footnote ²

Some tastes may be quite personal and surprise anyone wanting an overarching critical system or encompassing theory from Johnson. He discriminates Blackmore’s Creation as a poem in which the poet excelled himself, and the soft spot he had for Blackmore leads Johnson to recommend the poem be reprinted in the new collection (Lives, vol. iii, p. 78).Footnote ³ Elsewhere, and unexpectedly to anyone thinking Johnson favored ancient over more recent genius, we find him placing Milton’s Paradise Lost second only to the Iliad of Homer. He marks out Dryden’s second ode on St. Cecilia’s Day, Alexander’s Feast, as a moment of unusual excellence, and he honors Dryden’s whole achievement as a profound innovation in poetical diction, indeed its inauguration for poetry. From such a major turn in the history of poetry (see Chapter 4) there is no returning, and Johnson repeatedly praises the makers of original advances in metrical form, subject and style, however minor, relatively speaking, the poet who introduced them.

The ambitious new editions and their prestigious publishers bring Johnson’s judgments together, making contradictions, where we find them, easier to resolve. But some differences of taste, and the criteria used to underpin them, must be left to stand as the opinions of a contradictory, contradicting human being. In the process of unrolling the vast catalogue of poetical judgments in the Lives the modern editors discover how different Johnson’s critical tastes can be from our own. Academic courses and selected editions have tended to steer readers of Pope away from the extensive Homer translations in favor of the satires. But we see that Johnson’s evaluation of the satires of Pope, if dutiful, is hardly enthusiastic. His respect for the English Iliad on the other hand suggests that Pope’s Homeric translations are central to his achievement: “Had he given the world only his version, the name of poet must have been allowed to him,” writes Johnson: “if the writer of the Iliad were to class his successors, he would assign a very high place to his translator, without requiring any other evidence of Genius” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 80). Pope’s Essay on Criticism, often remarked by critical historians for its “neoclassical” commonplaces and trim couplets, Johnson regards as a work of excelling power, the more amazing in coming from a youthful prodigy merely twenty years old.Footnote ⁴ (Johnson was elsewhere impressed by the early flowerings of genius, as his comments on the young William Congreve suggest.) But to cap all this is the exhilarating general praise of the genius of Pope and a mind “active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 62). The way in which judgment, appreciation, analysis, discrimination, and taste coalesce with surpassing fineness in the Lives is illustrated by the detailed comparison of Pope with Dryden (Lives, vol. iv, pp. 64–66).

Both major editions suggest the emotional nature of Johnson’s critical and biographical efforts at this late stage of life and give us a clearer sense of the moral and psychological logic of the Lives. We learn from Lonsdale that Johnson did not write the Lives of the Poets in the order in which individual “Lives” are printed, nor always all of any one “Life” in a single effort of composition. His overall progress seems to have been somewhat fitful. Different “Lives” engaged Johnson’s critical and human attention to different extents. In the earlier “Lives” we have seen how poetry improved and became more polished; in the later ones we gather how the ambition of elegance degenerates into clumsy or sentimental excess. There are exceptions to the general tendency in both phases, but in a world of mind, memory and immediate experience, whose poets have finite lives while part of the whole extended life of poetry, we trace once again the narrative arc of The Vanity of Human Wishes.Footnote ⁵

Form and meaning, dress and substance, are closely connected in such editorial projects. Lonsdale’s large-scale edition (of well over 2,000 pages) has on first inspection the effect of embedding Johnson more deeply within conventional contexts of eighteenth-century literary and Johnsonian studies. These it ably responds to, with select bibliographies of important secondary sources printed at the start of each collection of notes; but it does so in ways that pay due respect to the fascinating critical enigma that Johnson continues to represent. The implication is that Johnson’s writing characteristically rewards this attention. Lonsdale returns to basics on matters of textual accuracy, information, and authority, and selects as his copytext the 1783 four-volume Lives. This he collates with variant printings, manuscript and proof revisions which he has recorded in sections devoted to “Textual Notes.” His commentary substantially replaces the textual annotations of George Birkbeck Hill, editor of the three-volume Lives that appeared in 1905.Footnote ⁶ In place of Hill’s somewhat détendu Victorian or Edwardian scholarly demeanor, Lonsdale has brought a sense of complexity, depth and range. One of the most muted but important observations is the final section of Lonsdale’s Introduction on Hill’s choice of text for the Lives. If Hill’s edition is indeed based on an unidentified nineteenth-century text (a possibility conveyed to Lonsdale by the bibliographer J. D. Fleeman), the revelation would give serious pause to every scholar of Johnson who has quoted with scrupulous care from Hill over the years. Not that Lonsdale commits himself to saying which nineteenth-century edition this is, or whether Fleeman had in mind an edition of the Lives, or of the Works of Johnson where the Lives are reprinted.Footnote ⁷

Lonsdale’s analysis points up the patchwork quality of the Lives. Among the many resonant and acute paragraphs, considered judgments, extended comparisons, embedded digressions and so forth, he brings out how a sense of writing in or from the fragmented margins combines the material needed to embrace the poetical past. To a greater degree than we might think admissible for a critic of Johnson’s stature, its textual fabric appears stitched together from offcuts and shreds and is thereby a work that ought to find acceptance for itself, and its subject, in any post-postmodernist climate. The story that Lonsdale tells of Johnson at work on the Lives resembles the compositional narrative of other great efforts of literary creation – a combination of enthusiasm and boredom, flurries of intense productivity and lapses into spiritual exhaustion, a sense of purpose at some times and of futility at others, the integration of a working life with a life that is the common experience of writers. All this Lonsdale brings out in precise and sometimes moving detail.

Johnson’s pragmatism is made evident; one sees how sources of widely varying orders of authority are yoked together and how the joins between components expose the process of composition. In allowing us, as it were, behind the scenes in the making of the Lives, Lonsdale’s edition registers the drawn-together nature of Johnson’s enterprise. We see, for example, a “Life of Savage,” originally published in 1744, recycled into the Lives, with some changes, as if made to be there; an earlier “Criticism upon Pope’s Epitaphs” appended, with modifications, to the “Life of Pope”; a transcript of Dryden’s “Heads of an Answer” to Thomas Rymer’s criticism attached to the “Life of Dryden”; the adjoining of a long letter from Pope to Broome praising Elijah Fenton on the occasion of Fenton’s death; the biographical section of a “Life of Young” included, as it stands, in a letter from Sir Herbert Croft (Lives, vol. iii, pp. 120–88; vol. iv, pp. 81–93; vol. ii, pp. 157–63; vol. iii, pp. 93–94; vol. iv, pp. 132–66). As an argument against any late-life tendency on Johnson’s part to rest on his critical laurels, the changes Lonsdale charts through the successive early editions of the Lives confer a sense of instability, or fluidity, on his text.

The sources for the Lives in Lonsdale’s edition convey how far Johnson’s factual information is often piecemeal and personal. In an allusion to Sacheverell’s trial at the end of the “Life of Sprat,” for example, Johnson reveals that “[t]his I was told in my youth by my father, an old man, who had been no careless observer of the passages of those times” (Lives, vol. ii, p. 188). There is much, admitted as such by Johnson, that cannot be known or concluded, or there has not been time or life to discover, or which he will not trouble to investigate, even when his memory falters. Johnson begins the critical section of his “Life of Congreve” with unembarrassed candor: “Of his plays I cannot speak distinctly; for since I inspected them many years have passed” (Lives, vol. iii, pp. 70–71). The Lives, then, might give the appearance being of the most highly unintegrated, casual and provisional of the great literary-critical works in English.

The extensive notes to Lonsdale’s edition evidence many parallels and allusions, but it is in the nature of an edition, even one as capacious as the Oxford, that the notes do not have vast scope for analyzing the quality of Johnson’s contact with his sources and analogues. A passing remark on Johnson’s judgment of Thomson’s poems, where Lonsdale finds Johnson in conflict with his underlying self, seems open to question:

Lonsdale accords this evaluation to a generosity Johnson extended to Thomson despite the negative assumptions he is supposed to have held about blank versification: “SJ stifles one of his deepest convictions about the importance of rhyme” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 375n.). In the commentary on the “Life of Young” Lonsdale refers to the same passage as a “concessionary statement” that Johnson approved (Lives, vol. iv, p. 450), but the openheartedness of the judgment to which this conclusion applies might as well suggest that Johnson held no such “deepest convictions,” and that to a greater extent than Lonsdale allows, Johnson judged Thomson without need to concede or stifle. The note illustrates how measuring a judgment made by Johnson in one place against a judgment in another may fall prey to overinterpretation. Johnson wrote against blank verse but enjoyed Thomson. Both things are true.

Perhaps most of what ultimately matters in Johnson’s Lives can be appreciated without notes. This might be obvious to anyone who learned to value the two-volume “World’s Classics” Lives, now long out of print, and has encountered unaided, and for very little money, the large questions of life and literature at stake in Johnson.Footnote ⁸ Such editions work by shedding the historical baggage of Johnson’s critical past and the logic of its necessity. Other imaginable editions might have notes that did more to capture the transhistorical reach of Johnson’s intellectual, emotional and critical world. But when such imaginings are given their due, anyone encountering Lonsdale’s edition is bound to wish that the same energy, scholarly dedication and editorial intelligence could be brought to any number of other literary or critical works more skimpily treated in major editions.

Definitively Johnson? The Yale Lives of the Poets

A great deal of the Yale edition’s self-valuation is invested in the attention accorded to a “sound, readable text” (Works xxi, p. xi). This the edition supports with fresh opportunities for understanding the method of Johnson’s composition, and to this end the editors put on record a sequence of minute or substantive variants dated before and after the point at which the text first entered the public domain. Here the conservationist roles of Boswell, to whom Johnson made a present of “copy,” now partly surviving, and a production management team that included George Steevens and the indefatigable John Nichols, are especially highlighted. Of the three official editions that appeared during Johnson’s lifetime (1779–81, 1781, 1783), the Yale editors choose as their copytext “the first edition, with the order of the poets adjusted to that of the second and third editions” (that is, conforming to the date order of their deaths). The text of the first edition is then modified by “occasional corrections and adjustments” made in the second edition and carried over into the third, and by the elimination from the first edition of some poems by West, Gray and Tickell. These are omitted from the collection but appended by Johnson. In addition to these changes, “Johnson’s substantive revisions for the third edition” (Works xxi, pp. xli–xlii) are also incorporated.

In weaving such an original and intricate fabric, with its catalogue of provisos and tacit and recorded amendments, a policy announced in the Introduction and supplemented in the notes and headnotes, we are given a Lives that Johnson did not see and could not – as it stands – have overseen. The “obvious basis for the text,” in the opinion of Lonsdale, was the third edition of February 1783. This Johnson was paid £100 to revise and did therefore see (even if it could be proved that he did not authorize detailed compositorial changes [Lives, vol. i, p. 183]).Footnote ⁹ Without an extensively explicit rationale – the “why?” of the editorial procedure – the Yale editors’ choice of an earlier copytext suggests how important is the first meeting of text and world. Certainly, the earliest of the printed editions does most to invite cross-references between the published form of the Lives, the manuscript, proofs and the corrected proofs (where any exist). But the claim made by the dustjacket to the volumes – that they also provide a “definitive text reflecting Johnson’s final wishes for its wording” – appears to shift the emphasis back to the corrected edition of 1783. How these “final wishes” are determined poses an interesting editorial challenge for the Yale, of which one consequence is that possible compositors’ amendments (punctuation changes from the second to the third edition or printers’ misreadings of Johnson’s difficult hand) are not incorporated into the copytext even when Johnson accepted them tacitly. This scrupulosity is reflected in remarks that appear passim in the body of the edition – for example in the headnote to the “Life of Otway.” The note has the ring of one long immersed in Johnsonian prose, and it suggests how difficult it may sometimes be to know whether improvements that Johnson made to the proof were subsequently overlooked by the printer or whether genuinely authorized amendments went unrecorded in the unbound sheets: “Although it could be argued that some of Johnson’s changes [in the proofs to this “Life”] are improvements over the final version,” writes John Middendorf, “I have, perhaps too cautiously, not admitted them into the text, for it cannot be determined when they were made” (Works xxi, p. 253).

The Yale edition addresses in its own way, then, the difficult task that had confronted Lonsdale. The material prefatory to the Yale volumes contains “A Note from the General Editor,” Robert DeMaria, Jr., who describes the extended gestation period of the project,Footnote ¹⁰ summarizing the few things he thought necessary to change, and determining not to take advantage “of very recent work on the Lives which John [Middendorf] did not live to consider” (Works xxi, p. xvii). Middendorf’s own Preface provides a personal take on the project and a record of assistance received, while his Introduction, though relatively short, contains some respectable, if unremarkable, encapsulations of the critical value of the Lives: “It is for their psychological, moral, and critical penetration that the Lives are now chiefly admired, outstanding testimony to Johnson as a critic who viewed literature in relation to life and, in turn, life as the essence of poetic history” (Works xxi, p. xxxvi). Not new, perhaps, but certainly true, and the edition offers a more nuanced and critically astute introduction than, say, the companion Yale edition of another great series of critical essays, Johnson on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Sherbo and published in 1968 in two volumes (Works vii and viii) with an unambitious essay by Bertrand Bronson.

The Yale text collates thirteen editions, and the textual notes make available the detailed variants of the “Lives” in manuscript, in proof, in corrected proof (where available) and in the forms printed during Johnson’s lifetime: The proofs of thirty-odd “Lives” have survived, though only two manuscripts are extant – of “Pope” and of “Rowe.” Drawing on the aforementioned scholarly work of Harriet Kirkley,Footnote ¹¹ the edition transcribes Johnson’s manuscript notes for a “Life of Pope” (by Frederick W. Hilles), and the list of findings from the editors’ record of capitalization and spelling variants is so long that it has had to be lodged separately in the library of Columbia University. This painstaking attention means that we are now equipped to see what passages or phrases Johnson worked on, what he worried over and what he left to others to approve, repunctuate or otherwise put right. From Johnson’s approach to composition one can infer an aspect of the personality he brought to composition: that he is both more casual and more cautious than we had previously thought.

The fact of Alexander Pope’s central poetic importance, that his was the last composed of the “Lives,” and that we have in sequence manuscript, corrected manuscript, proofs, corrected proofs and revised proofs of the “Life,” means that this text above others offers a test case for the Yale editorial protocols. The textual annotation of this “Life” is especially intricate and prolific. Referring to a corrected sentence in manuscript of heavy Johnsonian irony concerning Pope’s Essay on Man, and perhaps with a smile at his own dogged tracking of complexity, the editor notes that “Sometime between MS and proof [Johnson] apparently had had second thoughts about his second thought” (Works xxiii, p. 1219, n. 2). Obvious errors and misreadings aside, we see how fine, or how very fine, the changes for the better (where they are better) can be. Commencing his comparison of Dryden and Pope, for example, Johnson first wrote in the manuscript that “Integrity of understanding and justness of discernment were not allotted in a less proportion to Dryden than to Pope” (Works xxiii, p. 1187), but corrected “justness of discernment” to “nicety of discernment” and so achieved both a stylistic grace and a more accurate comparison.Footnote ¹² As the textual notes reveal, Johnson’s famous contrastive judgment that “Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners” (Works xxiii, p. 1189) was refined in printed form from the twice-corrected state of a manuscript version which began by opposing temporal as distinct from spatial terms: “local manners” was once “present manners.” There is a cumulative effect to such changes, and their frequency suggests Johnson’s attentiveness to details of expression as well as factual accuracy and conceptual form; but the alterations are often exceedingly small, and although it is good to have them somewhere recorded, little stylistic or substantive difference is sometimes made.

The Yale decision to adapt the first edition of the Lives by reference to changes made in the second and third is consistent with the incorporation of Johnson’s “final wishes,” but means some material is deleted. Given Johnson’s commendation of Blackmore, one might, for example, prefer that the song of Mopas from Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, dropped in editions during Johnson’s lifetime after the first, where he specified its inclusion, had been retained in a note. Self-imposed rules are in any case bendable where light can be shed. The edition helpfully re-attaches Granville’s “Essay on unnatural flights in poetry” (Works xxii, pp. 816–22), abandoned after the first edition, to the end of the “Life of Granville” (Lord Lansdowne). The text we read in the Yale is avowedly, then, a latter-day realization of the editors’ making; it exists at the confluence of minute changes of varying authority. Some of these changes are admitted into the copytext while others are excluded, according to judgments made case by case and interpretations of intent or estimates of timing, some inevitably better than others. One big unshiftable fact deserves, however, more weight if the aim is to reconcile “Johnson’s final wishes” with a first edition: that Johnson published a revised third edition of the Lives of the Poets before he died. Individual editors make sensible decisions about detailed changes to the copytext reading, and from time to time they warrant, and get, a clear justification in the notes. Such moments subtract from the appearance of editors resolving difficulties of their own making.

Though very few pages of the Yale have no notes, the light touch of the annotation is coherent with the textual style of the earlier volumes. (Lonsdale, in taking a different approach, has no equivalent obligation to the house style of a Works of Johnson.) The Yale, seeking elegance as part of the design, operates within limits of economy that some will prefer, and while too parsimonious annotation can suggest a text less richly allusive than it actually is, there are efficiency gains, and some “Lives” justifiably attract more attention than others.

Doubtless the wish to be rigorously selective in the notes has been hard to reconcile with the wide-ranging audience envisaged, and while the Introduction refers to “informed literate readers” and to “the newcomer to Johnson” (Works xxi, p. xi), the space given to the notes is not always used to best advantage. A note on Dryden’s reluctance in conversation seems superfluous when the editors remind us that “When roused, SJ was a formidable talker” (Works xxi, p. 425) – as if anyone might not know this and when general readers have often encountered Johnson through his conversations in Boswell. Notes at the foot of the page are more firmly under the condition of necessity than the expansive post-textual commentary of Lonsdale. But some Yale notes suggest a rather curt, no-nonsense, editorial demeanor that thwarts rather than invites further analysis. In the “Life of Dryden,” for example, Johnson reflects on the “degradation of genius” that diminishes the great mind behind many of Dryden’s plays (Works xxi, p. 426). The editor notes: “SJ’s view was unequivocal: ‘It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better.’” It is not that the content of this note – taken from the Preface to Shakespeare (Works vii, p. 71) – is irrelevant to understanding the “Life of Dryden”: A merit of both editions is that we appreciate the connective tissue that links Johnsonian critical thought in its different contexts; but the famous remark from the Preface is not specific to the “Life” in any way that extends understanding, nor is it right to say so peremptorily that “SJ’s view [on the question of a writer’s making the world better] was unequivocal” (Works xxi, p. 426). Following F. R. Leavis’s notorious assertion that for Johnson “a moral judgment that isn’t stated isn’t there,”Footnote ¹³ the place of moral purpose in Johnson’s critical writings is a topic on which much ink has been spilt. Again, one recalls the clarity with which Johnson can state the implied (but unstated) moral point of Falstaff in Henry IV (Works vii, pp. 523–24) as against the very difficult or hopeless grasping for finalist moral conclusions at the close of King Lear and the possibility – without it clearly counting against the worthwhileness of experiencing Shakespeare’s power in this play – that there may not be any moral, stated or stateable (Works viii, p. 704). The time in critical history has passed when it seemed plausible to attribute “unequivocal” views to Johnson on the intersections of literature and morality.

Where delicate qualifying perspectives are required, the economy of the Yale notes can reinforce a tendency to simplify the criticism. On one occasion Johnson is expatiating with eloquence on the point of view necessary to encompass and compare major works of English poetry: “It is not by comparing line with line that the merit of great works is to be estimated, but by their general effects and ultimate result.” From such remarks we acquire the essence of a critical procedure appropriate when dealing with works of the stature of Dryden’s “Virgil.” However, the note at the foot of the page seems only to pigeonhole Johnson in a hand-me-down category of critical history: “A neoclassical commonplace, associated with ‘the grandeur of generality’” (Works xxi, p. 481). Not quite or entirely wrong, perhaps (assuming you accept the force of that “neoclassical,” and so much has been written on the subject in the years of the Yale edition’s development that makes this concession risky), but not apposite either: “associated with” compounds the imprecision of the note’s formulation in the presence of a difficult idea and a complex historical relationship.

On a more positive note, the Yale’s brief editorial headnotes comment succinctly on matters of composition and answer textual and biographical questions efficiently by supplying information one does not have to search for. The comparatively attenuated apparatus bespeaks a similar stringency while the Introduction, not entirely accurately, can claim in their defence that the notes “stop short of the merely speculative” (Works xxi, p. xxxvii). Yet “speculative” they can’t help but be – for at least part of the time, and often helpfully so. Thus, for example, note 5 at volume xxii, p. 827, suggests, speculatively enough, where and how the Dictionary can furnish a “possible clue” in the resolution of a textual problem in the “Life of Yalden.” On the uncertain matter of dates of composition for individual “Lives,” Lonsdale may sometimes offer suggestions, or weigh probabilities, or possibilities, when the evidence is slight or open to interpretation. The Yale editors are usually readier to say simply that the date cannot be known (as in the headnote to the “Life of Walsh” [Works xxi, p. 358]). Here Johnson’s own thinking on the value of unfalsified assertions of fact, even when unverified, suggests the merits of a more elastic approach than the Yale allows. But the directness of the Yale edition aids the reader-friendliness of the volumes by getting earlier to the point.

Sometimes neither of the two great editions quite hits the mark. When Johnson writes at the end of his “Life of Pomfret” that the poet “pleases many, and he who pleases many must have some species of merit,” the Yale editor refers the reader to a source in Cibber, and to Johnson’s own “Life of Dyer,” where “Grongar Hill” is said to raise images “so welcome to the mind” with “reflections of the writer so consonant to the general sense of mankind, that when it is once read, it will be read again” (Works xxiii, p. 1338). Lonsdale cites the “Life of Milton” and the remark that “Since the end of poetry is pleasure, that cannot be unpoetical with which all are pleased” (Lives, vol. ii, pp. 289, 224). But a closer (and more obvious) correspondence than either of these, whereby the “Life of Pomfret” echoes one of the most famous rhetorical repetitions of Johnson’s entire prose oeuvre, is the praise of Shakespeare in the Preface: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature” (Works vii, p. 61).

The Lives is Johnson’s last major work of any kind, and by coming late in a series begun in the 1950s the Yale edition enjoys one advantage of lateness: By referencing previously edited Yale volumes his latest editors can suggest the interconnection in Johnson’s thought across his long, productive and varied career: A paper from the Rambler, say, or the Idler, or an example from the Shakespeare criticism can be juxtaposed with a remark in the Lives. The editorial policy as defined in the Yale Introduction states that “Cross-references pointing to … echoes and parallels have been kept to a minimum” (Works xxi, p. xxxviii), and includes the astute caveat that whatever their origin, Johnson’s critical observations at times “suggest a dialogue with his source” (Works xxi, p. xxxvii). It would always be in the spirit of this latter remark for us to appreciate how “ideas,” though apparently replicated within Johnson’s oeuvre, may nevertheless shift in content with their context of judgment.

Given critical history’s cultural divisions it comes as no surprise that the editors of the Yale edition should make no attempt in their notes to suggest the chain of historical causation between the critical past and the recent critical present, and so bring the Johnsonian criticism into an active relationship with the modes of intellectual enterprise that have developed over the years of its emergence as an edition (not insignificantly within Yale University). From these unmentioned cultural presences, abominated on the one hand and hailed as revolutionary on the other, not exclusively Gallic in their derivation and not uniformly commendable, but indisputably there, Johnson’s work of criticism is kept at a distance. Both recent editions offer more on Johnson’s context of origin than on his context of reception. But just as Johnson entered into a dialogue with his own sources, so editions can do much to suggest the conversability of critical past and present. Middendorf writes in his Yale Preface that the Lives is “recognized as the finest body of English literary criticism of the eighteenth century and still very much to be taken into account today” (Works xxi, p. xii). But it would always be good to know more about what it means to take this criticism “into account today,” and to do so “very much.” The new edition of an old critic provides a forum.

In a “From the Editor” essay for the Johnsonian News Letter, Robert DeMaria, Jr., writes preemptively of the Yale Lives with respect to Lonsdale’s that “we hope that in … comparisons [between the two editions] reviewers will see how different the two editions are,” and he goes on to suggest that the Yale commentary “is focused more sharply on Johnson” (as opposed to the poets on which he wrote).Footnote ¹⁴ No one could miss the difference between the two editions or escape the fact that their aims vary. Yet for the later edition to focus more “sharply” on Johnson might necessitate fuller annotation of the critical sections of the Lives than the Yale sometimes allows, while if the price of focus is to downgrade relations between critic and poetry, it is too high. In fact, by including in the notes from time to time quotations from the poets in the tradition of Hill (1905) and of Lonsdale (2006), the Yale edition sensibly reinforces these relations – poetry being the context against which all other settings for Johnson’s criticism are secondary. That said, DeMaria is right to suggest that the two editions do not have to be viewed in the spirit of competitive enterprises. Relative superiority depends on how the volumes are used, and is in any case hard to judge in works so various, complex and extensive. The fact that in a space of four years we have had two major editions of the Lives so different in design, and from such temperamentally different academic cultures, is an enrichment that need embarrass no one. Time now, then, to move from editorial policies and the details of practice to how both major editions reflect a conception of the artistic form of the Lives.

Lives in Pieces

To recapitulate: Starting out as “prefaces” to a new edition of the English poets, the Lives as we know the work was commissioned by a consortium of London booksellers who recruited the prestigious literary authority of Johnson as their unique selling point in the race for profits. That the project at first seemed attractively undemanding is well known. Johnson wrote to Boswell that “I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets” (Boswell, vol. iii, p. 110; Letters, vol. iii, p. 20). But also apparent is that once undertaken the commission expanded and, as the editors of the Oxford and Yale editions have shown, Johnson became increasingly taken over by it, so that some “little Lives” – “a few dates and a general character” – spun out into dissertations the length of entire books (Lives, vol. i, p. 189). Lonsdale has outlined the many interruptions, periods of frantic composition and creative longueurs; so that what started out as a task of modest proportions for the old and ailing Johnson consumed increasing quantities of time. “I have been led beyond my intention,” Johnson writes in the “Advertisement,” “I hope, by the honest desire of giving useful pleasure.”Footnote ¹

Debates about what was fairly counted in and counted out of the Lives and about how far it fell to Johnson to admit some poets and exclude others have arisen; why there are no women poets, why the chronological range begins only around 1660 and why all the poets Johnson writes about are dead. Answers to these questions have been proffered, though rarely to the satisfaction of those disposed to find Johnson’s actual judgments wrongheaded. The fact that Johnson thought ill of Lycidas or the Odes of Thomas Gray can seem then to reflect a sensibility in other ways misguided. No Charles Churchill, no Christopher Smart, no Oliver Goldsmith, but a work on the most “eminent” of the English poets that could still (with apparent absurdity) welcome such minor genius as Smith, Hammond, Mason, Dorset, Halifax, Hughes, Duke and other forgotten figures. The fact of the matter is that apart from the obvious greats, the tally of poets was largely an unsystematic compromise; the selection was in the event settled pragmatically from the rights maintained by the holders of literary copyright at the time the project took shape. Johnson, it is true, made five suggestions of his own – Watts, Pomfret, Thomson, Yalden and, most enthusiastically, Blackmore (for his poem Creation).Footnote ² Yet he distanced himself from the booksellers’ program and he objected when publicity for the collection referred to “Johnson’s Poets.”

Yet when individual “Lives” are taken together, Johnson’s personal artistry cannot be disowned.Footnote ³ In his essay on “Johnson as Critic and Poet” T. S. Eliot insists that “[W]e must read [the Lives] as a whole if we are to appreciate the magnitude of Johnson’s achievement,”Footnote ⁴ and in a review of Lonsdale’s edition Colin Burrow has lately remarked on the difference between the literary results of what Johnson finally produced in the Lives and the various sources on which he had relied for their making:

The holistic perspective is easily overlooked. If the Lives is perceived only as a “suite of biographies,”Footnote ⁶ as separate pieces of life-writing hastily assembled under the pressures of a strict deadline, the search for meaning in an overview of the work may yield little. Johnson’s stop-start composition and the fact that he did not begin at the beginning might strengthen this impression. Moreover, the wide landscape of Johnson’s achievement has always been obscured by the excerpting and selecting through which the Lives has most often entered the consciousness of the modern world.Footnote ⁷ This excerptibility is invited by the Lives. There are many passages – often but not only theoretical digressions devoted to matters of principle – that stand apart to be judged especially typical, foolish or fine. I have earlier commended the judicious comparison of Dryden and Pope in the “Life of Pope.” At the end of this comparison Johnson confesses “some partial fondness for the memory of Dryden” (Lives, vol. iv, pp. 65–66). But various set-pieces stand out, and it seems Johnson intended they should – for example the passage on the power of epic poetry in the “Life of Milton” (Lives, vol. ii, pp. 282–83), or again, in the “Life of Pope,” Johnson’s famous digression on the relation of Sound and Sense. The latter consists of paragraphs that Lonsdale points out Johnson revised “with particular care” in the manuscript of the “Life.” Having reflected on the simile on the Alps from the Essay on Criticism, and then similes in general, Johnson here flags up his intentions:

The theoretical topics raised in the Lives are the leading issues of eighteenth-century literary thought, and Johnson often seeks to resolve them. After a page of analysis, he concludes his deliberations on Sound and Sense in decisive style: “Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and when real, are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected, and not to be solicited” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 70).

Such emblematic concerns are often probed in compact, closely argued asides, and Johnson’s subjects include the form of the Pindaric ode, pastoral poetry, the nature of blank verse, the character of imitation, the integrity of allegory, metaphor and much more. Even if other textual features suggest a work cobbled together to satisfy the booksellers’ urgent demands, these are without question highlights, and they would not be there if Johnson had not been invited to write. Other set-piece passages that stand out from their context would include the artful comparison between the criticism of Dryden and that of Rymer in the “Life of Dryden.” The passage joins imagery from the natural world with allusion to the different means of exerting power over the state – criticism as a journey of discovery and criticism expressed by wielding the rod:

To this we can add the enthusiastic praise of the Essay on Criticism in the “Life of Pope” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 68). The celebration of Pope is closely followed by Johnson’s deliberations on his poem’s treatment of poetry’s sound as an echo of its sense. This “representative metre” is a topic Johnson revisits in the “Life of Pope” three decades after his earlier analysis in Rambler 94 (Works iv, pp. 135–43).

Lost, however, in this summing of parts is the major form of the Lives. It may be said that we live in patterns, but that we do not see them except from the distance that art affords us. My suggestion is that the constituent parts of the Lives are limbs equally necessary to a body whose underlying structures and vital rhythms describe the patterns we do not ordinarily see. The Lives’ major form has us witness a human condition that includes the most painful examples of personal suffering endured in the experience of life or consequent on artistic experience. We see such suffering from a due distance, remedially, therapeutically and in combination with life’s joys. Moreover, once the framework of the Lives was established, Johnson found opportunities for forms of thought present within the backwaters of his mind for many years. Both the passage from the “Life of Dryden” and the celebration of Pope’s Essay on Criticism suggest material likely to play a role in the “History of Criticism as it relates to judging Authours from Aristotle to the present age”: a prospective title listed in Johnson’s manuscript catalogue of “Designs.” The “History” of this “art” of criticism (as Johnson calls it in the brief abstract of his plan) was never written. However, it is easy to imagine that the Lives provided Johnson with a template to express potentially prominent moments in his unwritten work.Footnote ⁸

Reading between the “Lives”

In the final paragraph of the “Life of Gray,” on Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Johnson imposes form on a choice of biographical subject matter over which he had little control. We have seen that the remarks offer a valedictory finale and sound an appropriate elegiac note:

“Had Gray written often thus,” Johnson observes, “it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 184). The cadence of this sentence appears in the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical printed prior to the revised Lives of 1781 (Lives, vol. iv, p. 482). Such phrasing enables one to imagine that Johnson had meant a certain judgmental poise should conclude his great work; the balanced expression offers an artistic grace applied to the bare bones of the booksellers’ remit. When, therefore, the critical biographies of the Lives were reorganized chronologically according to the dates of each poet’s death and the “anticlimactic” “Lyttelton” replaced the “defiant” “Gray” (the adjectives are Lonsdale’s), we find an impairment. But we also see how other kinds of meanings might arise. This is because the essays now published in looser connection to their occasion enable a reading with more facility from one “Life” to the next. As successive chapters of the same book, they give significance to the poets to which they refer but also strengthen the reference they make to each other. Such integration becomes apparent when we trace the internal transitions, changes and shifts of topic, tone and gradations of critical engagement that mark Johnson’s progressively ambitious interpretation of his task.

Maintaining the rhythm of the Lives is the surprising brevity, even peremptoriness, of some “Lives” when set against the generous proportions of others – Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Swift and Pope are understandably the most voluminous. Within any one “Life” some passages can be cool and sardonic; others are infused with Johnsonian warmth and geniality. We respond to these rhythms when we read along the length of the work (so to speak), and in contravention of Johnson’s own somewhat haphazard practice as a reader; I mean by reading through the Lives – sufficient to sense what Burrow calls the “rhythm of [Johnson’s] mind,” and to comprehend what Johnson once called the “mutability of mankind” (Adventurer 98, Works vol. ii, p. 429). Johnson exalts the qualities that make poets immortal and disdains time-wasting trivia and empty convention in the verses of those he often struggles to say something about; there is verbal succinctness with critical digression, the perfunctory snub with the willingness to dilate anecdotally, affection and pity with expressions of brusque contempt. The “Lives” of poets are seen then as individual episodes realizing a vision of humanity. I have suggested at an earlier point that one might think of the Lives alongside other capacious works of literary artistry dependent on the juxtaposition of successive narratives.

With the end of each life comes a new birth and the beginning of another poetical career – until that in turn is cut short. The liaison between one essay and the next invites reflection on the diversities of character and fate. Take the close of the “Life of Savage” with its rhetorical appeal to those “who languish under any part of [Savage’s] sufferings” or those who, “in confidence of superior capacities or attainments, disregard the common maxims of life.” Johnson reminds us that “nothing will supply the want of prudence; and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 188). Turn, now, from this moralizing climactic to the start of the next “Life” – the “Life of Swift.” “An Account of Dr. Swift has been already collected,” Johnson begins, “with great diligence and acuteness, by Dr. Hawkesworth” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 189). We are at ground level once again and reminded of the mundane labor of gathering materials for a “Life.” We are present at the start of another personal adventure whose destination will be a different form of success and a different kind of failure: We have seen that Johnson inserted the “Life of Savage” into the Lives from an earlier version of 1744, but its placing does not diminish the moral and emotional import behind its composition. The biography stands within a context of interpretation its new location creates; other “Lives” must now likewise be read in company with the “Life of Savage.”

It is not, then, any single element or collection of best passages that makes the Lives the aesthetic and expansive moral experience that it is, a “piece of English literature of the very first class” according to Matthew Arnold.Footnote ⁹ Johnson traces a flux of life through the vicissitudes of Rasselas and in the Lives through different configurations of personal history. The revised order is determined by the dates of the deaths of the poets; but the control of background and foreground, of length, light and shade, is Johnson’s. The representative, the rightly overlooked or the most eminent English poets, are discriminated in a dramatic narrative of critical biography. The order that chronological arrangement imposed on Johnson is not in the event the constraint it had first seemed to be. Granted there are givens. Thus the “Life” of Milton must fall between the great poet’s lesser near contemporaries Denham and Butler, that of Dryden between Walsh and Smith, and that of Pope, the second longest and last written of the “Lives,” must be bracketed between Broome and Pitt – the former Pope’s assistant in translating Homer, the latter a fellow translator of classical poetry and a Pope admirer. But many chronological overlaps occur. Episodes are cross-referenced via poetical quarrels and alliances; lives lived at great length play into others of shorter span. A mode of composition, haphazard at first sight, assumes an organic form.

Johnson’s six years writing the Lives were a time of interruptions, indolence and concentrated spurts, and the order in which the “Lives” are printed is not the order in which they were composed. The interleaving of major and minor essays is broadly reflective of major and minor poets. Subsequent critical opinion has not overturned the relative standing of such figures. But alongside the incongruities of “mingled” drama, where “the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend,” where “the loss of one is the gain of another” (Works vii, p. 66), the Lives defines a human state subject to every revolution of fortune, triumph, disappointment, reckless impulse, acquired capability and the privilege or inconvenience of birth. Our relation to the disruptive causes of things, the reversals, and realities, becomes the logical subject of the Lives and an encapsulation of life. In a conversational exchange with Lord Monboddo during his Scottish tour Johnson is reported as saying: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use” (Boswell, vol. v, p. 79). The biography and criticism of the Lives grew from a commercial prospectus; but the material is subject to Johnson’s management of tone, mode and register. Such “use” of the Lives – “written I hope in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of piety” – Johnson’s humanity and empathy were well equipped to promote (April 2, 1779, Works i, p. 294). In choosing the right man for the job, the booksellers could not have known how right they would prove to be.

The mix of biography functioning as criticism, criticism functioning biographically, operates creatively upon Johnson’s original brief. In some “Lives” Johnson decisively segregates these modes. We thus have a relatively tight-lipped “Life” of Milton openly disapproving of the poet’s politics and personality. This is followed by concerted, item-by-item treatment of the poems and turns on the difficult tribute to the greatness of Paradise Lost, an epic performance with all its contradictions honored as second only to the Iliad of Homer. Sometimes the modes cannot be fully disengaged: hence the leisurely unfolding of the “Life of Dryden.” In the example of “Swift,” the eccentric human figure is recreated through anecdotes harvested widely. These far outweigh the restricted attention given to the writings, and we have seen how the “Life” concludes with the cursory dismissal of the poetry and a sense of tragic futility. In the case of Prior, life as a competent career diplomat took precedence over the poet’s commitment to poetry; but space adequate to Prior’s poetical oeuvre is nevertheless found. Sometimes, as in the “Life of Cowley,” the structure is tripartite. Johnson inserts the famous theoretical essay on Metaphysical “wit” (Lives, vol. i, pp. 199–202) at the hinge-point between a “Life,” substantially based on Sprat, and new analyses of poems by Donne, Cleveland and Cowley himself. The longest of all, the “Life of Savage,” has little to say about the verse. Sometimes the ordered nature of the writing seems to echo the ordered mind of the poet who is the subject of the “Life,” as in the carefully signalled transitions between individual writings and between writings and life in the “Life of Pope.” “The Works of Pope,” writes Johnson as he turns from an account of similarities and differences between Pope and Dryden, “are now to be distinctly examined” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 66). Contrast this textual signposting with the baggy extent and swings between biography and criticism of the “Life of Dryden.” The truth of a poetic character is enacted by the biographical and critical structure that represents it. Dryden’s experience, and our experience of him, then take their place in the awkward tangle of the writing life with life’s other experiences that have nothing to do with writing.

The Deaths of the Poets

Such strategies of form enable Johnson to “chase the dead” (in Hilary Mantel’s haunting phrase).Footnote ¹⁰ Johnson resurrects within his late eighteenth-century present the ghosts of a 150-year poetical past. He actualizes this past in the fictional imagination of the living, just as Johnson’s death filled with a sense of life the imagination of his own most famous biographer. The artistic moral of the Lives arises from the succession of poetical deaths, and perhaps the subject is not far removed from Johnson’s immediate consciousness four years before his own death in 1784. “That Individuals die, his Will ordains; | The propagated Species still remains,” writes Dryden in his translation of the speech on the nature of change over time made by Theseus at the conclusion to “Palamon and Arcite,” his version of book 3 of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.”Footnote ¹¹ In such transitions as occur between “Savage” and “Swift,” we see how the poetical species carries on, but also how an individual life in poetry is end-stopped by death, with epitaph-like finality. The theme recalls an ethical tenet of Rambler 78: “the remembrance of death ought to predominate in our minds, as an habitual and settled principle, always operating, though not always perceived … [for] the great incentive to virtue is the reflection that we must die” (Works iv, pp. 47, 50).

The dying of the poets sees mortals as the individuals of a propagated species. Striking in Johnson’s catalogue of life-endings is how often it is the arbitrariness, or irony, or even the comedy of the going that Johnson brings out. The life of a poet is a special case of life, but death is the great leveller, the baseline of universal nature. Johnson paints the portraits of individuals whose corporeal selves are bound by time. As time passes, the poets’ independent being transforms into memories anchored in the minds of the living by their surviving writings. They are reclaimed for the present by personal recollection, by anecdotes and stories told by friends or friends of friends. Their biographies record hopes, disappointments, lives lived fully and lives lived through to no particular eminence.Footnote ¹² The random remains of any life, a knock-on effect, often, of Johnson’s partial information, provide in the event an intense experience of the always unknowably complete person lost forever. Poets propagate poets but are caught out by death in the act of living; their departure from life is no different from that of those philosophically unprepared. We know from Montaigne that “To Study Philosophy is to Learn How to Die,” but in practice there may be no time: “when I consider my age, and the broken state of my body,” Johnson had written in his diaries of 1773, “I have great reason to fear lest Death should lay hold on me, while I am yet only designing to live” (Works i, p. 160).

The Lives builds on this irony: It is one of the great comic and satiric documents of English literature created in defiance of the sufferings it narrates. Its cadence is wry acceptance, and a sharp awareness of the ridiculousness of heroic endeavor in the literary or critical arts. It is laden with tones of moral responsibility, but also resonant with critical laughter. We have seen that the appetite for ridicule duly deserved is evident in Johnson’s scornful mockery of the pastorals of Hammond, or the aristocratic poeticizing of Lord Halifax. But alongside it in the Lives is the tragic counterpoint to what David Ferry calls “unsentimental pity.” This capacity – I have called it compassion – is evident especially, though not exclusively, in the “Lives” of the few poets known personally to Johnson. The “Life of Savage” offers an apology for a colorful but deeply flawed individual who had forged a friendship that Johnson never repudiated. The “Life of Collins,” meanwhile, its subject another early acquaintance, exhibits an account of what human sympathy for suffering might be. The descriptions of Collins’s progressive loss of his mental faculties and the pathos of his heroic attempts to retrieve them, and then to fail to retrieve them, and then to accept that he had failed, are among the most poignant moments in the Lives. They remind us of how emotional a literary critic – inside the carapace of sense and astuteness – Johnson actually is. Consciousness of this palliative, redemptive, consolatory sympathy shines through at such moments and conveys the emotional interiority that Johnson reveals in his private confessionals and letters.

We have seen that Johnson’s demand for emotion is crucial to many of his most famous or notorious judgments – on the coldness and lack of sublimity of the Metaphysical poets who were “not successful in representing or moving the affections” (Lives, vol. i, p. 200), on the contrivances of pastoral, the inanity of mythology or the empty rhetorical gesturings of Dryden’s plays. Johnson’s general judgment on Dryden, at the conclusion to the “Life,” makes some careful discriminations within the poetry of feeling:

Dryden’s plays allude to love, but Dryden does not express love with the warmth and intimacy Johnson valued. The hesitation here – “I am not certain whether” – is telling. How far this registers a negative criticism of Dryden, as distinct from a poetical character impartially appraised, is difficult to fix. Johnson brings the question back to the enduring mystery that we are to ourselves: It is “we” (Johnson, the reader of Johnson, and Dryden) who “do not always know our own motives.” If the effect of the plays is to suffocate authentic emotion in extremity and bombast, the reason behind this is an open question Johnson refuses to close. “[A]ctions are visible, though motives are secret,” Johnson writes in the “Life of Cowley” (Lives, vol. i, p. 198).

Johnson’s sympathies are ultimately with those ideas that “slumber in the heart.” In his regard for a truth ascertainable within literary experience through a capacity for feeling, we have seen how the Lives counts as a History of Poetry and how poetry advances towards, though never finally achieves, the “stability of truth” (Works vii, p. 62). This progress occurs up to the point where a refinement of the diction and meter initiated by Waller and Denham, then mightily reinforced by Dryden and finally perfected and polished by Pope, becomes over-refinement. The luxuriance of metrical and verbal accomplishment carried aesthetic and moral implications. Johnson considered Pope’s “Homer” as balanced on the cusp – the moment at which Nature gives way to Art. But Johnson excuses Pope because it is the first duty of a writer to be read, and his public at the time required of him what his great translation supplied:

Johnson saw how far the “luxurious” (a kind of decadence in poetry) had set in when he took a celebrated but lesser work, such as Addison’s Cato, as his test. This does nothing to subtract from his faith that original genius is irrepressible. Johnson found in The Seasons of Thomson a fresh observation of the natural world.

Johnson’s appreciation of Thomson (and criticism of Gray) is echoed in the next generation by Wordsworth. Wordsworth never did confess his debts to the Lives but complained of what Johnson had omitted, or eccentrically included.Footnote ¹³ This was not the only peremptorily hostile reaction that Johnson’s great work was to suffer. There is much to suggest Johnson was swimming against the tide of a younger generation. To many the Lives appeared as the last gasp of taste and principles that could no longer be defended. Pungently graphic evidence to this effect exists in the two brilliant satirical prints that James Gillray made of the Lives and its author. Gillray ridicules the overrated critical authority and narrow prejudice he perceives in Johnson. He is “Old Wisdom Blinking at the Stars” (1782). He is “Dr. Pomposo” (1783).Footnote ¹⁴ The aesthetic blindness thereby imputed to Johnson recalls his literal shortsightedness. A weakness of vision is sometimes argued to have made him insensitive to the visual arts, just as his alleged hearing impairments are supposed to have cut the pleasures of music out of his life. I won’t here go into the false inferences drawn from such well-canvassed physical disabilities.Footnote ¹⁵ Enough to suggest how resistance to critical verdicts pronounced in the Lives is most potent when indirect. The challenge to Johnson’s authority rests on the image of one whose defects were inherent and ineradicable, located deep in his very being, body and personality. His defective judgments, in that they were inevitable, seem then so satisfactorily explained that they require no refutation to be proved wrong. F. R. Leavis is one of many who have posed their challenge on terms that refuse to face Johnson squarely on his.

The rhythms of Johnson’s writing in the early style of the Rambler are often remarked; they are perhaps a symptom of the influence of the heroic couplet or the stylistic susceptibility of Johnson’s prose to the syntax of Latin. The tempo of the Lives is however audible at a level different from Johnson’s balanced clauses and rhetorically orchestrated paragraphs. Each successive “Life” is read beside adjacent narratives or is thematically linked to ones quite distant to which it is tied by a running agenda of critical and moral subject matter. As shifts in any conversation about poetry and people, these links may include a return to matters earlier discussed but temporarily laid aside. This would for example include common issues faced by poets in the making of poetry, the role of blank verse in the work of different poets or such matters as the logical rules of propriety in allegory.Footnote ¹⁶ Johnson charts the different ways and varying success with which poets tackle the same or different forms and genres, and different poets’ responses to the same or different sets of political and historical conditions or their subjection to the same or different kinds of poetic conventions.

The “minor” “Lives” may seem pointless commentaries on works that nobody reads any more (as T. S. Eliot complained). Matthew Arnold gave similar reasons for wanting to make a selection for educational purposes:

But Johnson’s portraits of poets that Arnold thought “quite insignificant” play their part in the rhythm of the Lives; they are not in the event incidental and may include compelling passages it is easy to overlook. Thus, the choice Johnsonian satire of Halifax or Hammond, and the critical laughter this inspires, could not have appeared had they not been on Johnson’s list of prescribed subject matter. Minor “Lives” of minor poets these may be; but they do not produce minor writing. The Lives illustrates how the poets of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century realized their greatness, or failed to do so, wasted their God-given gifts or discovered they didn’t have any.

Ends and Beginnings

The lives of all the poets come to a close in the varied and unpredictable modes of their dying. But the poets’ surprisingly unpredictable starts in life, and particularly their education, mark the cycle of ends and beginnings. Johnson’s extended meditation on the moral task of what we make of ourselves means he gives credit to whoever helped make the poets the people they turned out to be. The old schoolmaster from Lichfield is therefore careful to note the educational benefits enjoyed by such a mover and shaker as Joseph Addison: “Not to name the school or the masters of men illustrious for literature,” he urges in the “Life of Addison,” “is a kind of historical fraud” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 1). This abiding interest in beginnings is one that the Johnson of the Lives shares with the author of Rasselas where the Prince of Abyssinia contemplates his escape from the not-so-Happy Valley of his youthful confinement. “Abraham Cowley,” we learn, “was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer” (Lives, vol. i, p. 191).

Such matter-of-fact opening statements will often prepare the ground for a narrative of social mobility consequent on a life in poetry, and they remind us of Johnson’s own progress in life. So Collins “came to London a literary adventurer, with many projects in his head, and very little money in his pocket” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 120). “Matthew Prior [in common with Johnson] is one of those that have burst out from an obscure original to great eminence” (Lives, vol. i, p. 48). Johnson puts on record the ordinariness of beginnings (such as Collins’s, Cowley’s or Prior’s) to suggest a democratic republic of letters having no longer use for inherited privilege and the patronage of the great. In more general terms, and while alluding to Johnson’s ambition to write a “History of the Revival of Learning in Europe,” the editors of the Yale edition of the Rambler note his “deep sympathetic kinship with human effort” and that “this close interest in the earlier stages of any achievement, is one of the principal characteristics of Johnson’s mind” (Works iii, p. xxxiii). In its alternations of ends and beginnings, the Lives populates the dynamic society of which Johnson was a member; the work calls into being an historically imagined community of actual people who turned out to be poets; it is the late-life mental and emotional home of a man who found solitude unbearable.