THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

oth for the relative pessimism of the philosopher Imlac’s conclusion that ‘Human life is everywhere a state in which
much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed’, and for the Princess Nekayah’s insistence that in viewing the
‘contrarieties of pleasure’ it is vital, when faced with ‘the blessings set before you’, to ‘make your choice, and be
content’. Her sagacity is spiced with an appropriately oriental metaphor: ‘No man can taste the fruits of autumn while
he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and
from the mouth of the Nile.’ Despite the pithy proverbiality of its wisdom, the tale ends with a conclusion ‘in which
nothing is concluded’ and its last short sentences lead back to the point at which the story began.
Johnson’s syntactical skill at both granting and gradually withdrawing assent to an argument, a proposition, or an
aspect of character has both impressed and irked readers of his essays and his criticism. He can be dogmatic, but he
can also present an impression of intellectual equilibrium by conditioning or undoing an initial proposition through a
series of dependent clauses or a clever use of parallelism and antithesis. His mastery of lexicographical skills, evident
in the range and originality of his compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1755), also informs his stylistic
play with definitions, his learned use of Latinate vocabulary, and his somewhat ponderous pleasure in the
polysyllabic. The periodical essays published in the 200 issues of his own journal, The Rambler, between 1750 and
1752 introduce a wryly humorous, discursive, informed, moral narrator as opposed to the essentially middle-brow
entertainer of The Spectator. Where Addison generalizes, Johnson seeks to give the impression of speaking from
painfully acquired personal experience. The Rambler considers aspects of literature, biography, religion, philosophy,
and ethics (notably in number 185 which debates the opposition of vengeance and the Christian duty of forgiveness).
The Idler papers, contributed to the Universal Chronicle between 1758 and 1760, adopt a persona who is ostensibly
both more genial and more facetious, but here too there is a steady underpull of sobriety. ‘It would add much to
human happiness’, the Idler remarks in his seventy-third paper, ‘if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which
the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, if that pain which never can end in pleasure could be driven totally
away, that the mind might perform its functions without incumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon
the present.’
Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare, which he finally published in 1765, offered the public a substantial critical
Preface, a carefully revised text, and extensive
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explanatory notes to each of the plays. If the emendations of, and revisions to, Shakespeare’s text have not always
elicited the assent of subsequent editors, the Preface and the notes remain landmarks in the development of textual
and critical study. Johnson not only extended a scholarly tradition which had been established in the century, but gave
readers a new standard of interpretation, one received, according to Boswell, ‘with high approbation by the publick’.
The Preface’s criticism is two-pronged; it seeks to consolidate Shakespeare’s reputation as a national classic by
rejecting the criticisms of those who had seen him as defective in both learning and dramatic tact, and to project an
image of him as ‘the poet of nature’ who ‘holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life’. In
developing this supra-classical and patriotic thesis, Johnson singles out for praise elements, such as Shakespeare’s
admixture of tragedy and comedy and his failure to adhere to the ‘unities’ which had earlier been disparaged by neoclassical
critics. Johnson’s ex cathedra judgements, both flattering and fault-finding, fall thick and fast. His critical
annotations offer a more sporadic, and more suddenly illuminating, form of comment. He may often be prescriptive in
his treatment of awkwardnesses, embarrassments, or anomalies in Shakespeare s texts, but he unfailingly detects both
particular problems and particular felicities. He balances an acknowledgement of the ‘mean, childish, and vulgar’
passages of Love’s Labour’s Lost against a full appreciation of the play’s distinctively Shakespearian ‘sparks of
genius’; he weighs the redeeming wit of the ‘unimitated, unimitable’ Falstaff against his sins; he complains of ‘too
much bustle’ in the first act of Coriolanus and too little in the last; and he notes of the ‘artful involutions of distinct
interests’ in King Lear that they ‘fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope’.
Johnson’s last great undertaking, the Lives of the Poets, appeared from 1779 to 1781 as ‘Prefaces, Biographical
and Critical’ to a new edition of English poets deemed by the book-trade to have achieved classic status. Johnson
provided fifty-two such prefaces, all but two of which deal with poets of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The model for the longer essays came partly from his own early Life of Richard Savage, a study which combines a
sympathetic appreciation of the struggles of a young outsider with an irritation at Savage’s inclination to be ‘petulent
and contemptuous’. The Lives of the Poets intermix extended passages of literary criticism, biographical information
(much of it acquired at first hand), and a limited delineation of a cultural context. Johnson expresses himself with an
epigrammatic authority which can reveal an acute observation and an equally distinct intolerance. In the life of
Cowley, for example, he famously defines the wit of the ‘Metaphysical’ poets which had so vexed him: ‘The most
heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and
allusions.’ His otherwise adulatory and systematic study of the canonical status of Milton can still complain about the
poet's ‘acrimonious and surly’ politics, a republicanism which was founded ‘in an envious hatred of greatness, and a