THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

[p. 332]
sullen desire of independence’. It is in the essays on Dryden, Swift, Addison, Thomson, and Pope, however, that
Johnson offers definitions of the leading characteristics of his age, of his immediate literary inheritance, and of his
own taste. ‘Genius’, the power which ‘constitutes a poet’, he notes in his study of Pope, is ‘that quality without which
judgement is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates’. It is a
definition which could very properly be applied to Johnson’s own idiosyncratic genius.
Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson appeared in 1791. It projects the image of Johnson as the doyen of his age,
generous, honest, compassionate, censorious, and devout; it avidly reports the words and the deeds of a public man,
confident in his values and forthright in his opinions; but it also attempts to show a more troubled private man, one
prone to self examination and vexed by both religious gloom and divine hope. Some fifty years later the biography
was to provide Thomas Carlyle with much of the material he required to claim Johnson as ‘the Hero as Man of
Letters’, a new kind of hero who stood apart from the narrow confines of his time and who informed an essentially
romantic awareness of the long sweep of cultural history. Johnson the humbly born outsider, the struggling young
writer, the setter-aside of aristocratic patrons, and the maker of his own way in the world was to emerge, somewhat
incongruously, as the challenger of what was seen as the smug, tidy, enclosed, and elitist values of an age that had set
too much store by the power of human reason. To Carlyle, Johnson was not the summer-up of the virtues of his time,
but the heroic redeemer of its faults. The decades that immediately succeeded Johnson’s death in 1784 were to witness
cataclysmic political and cultural change in Europe. The Revolution in France was to turn the world upside down
again. It was to bring about not only a series of radical reassessments of the British constitutional settlement of 1688,
but, perhaps more significantly, a profound re-estimate of a rational world-order and of a culture which drew its
inspiration from a perception of divine symmetry.
[end of Chapter 5]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 333]
6
The Literature of the Romantic Period 1780-1830
‘MY temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to
affect’, Edward Gibbon noted of himself in his Memoirs of My Life and Writings (posthumously printed in 1827).
Nevertheless, when Gibbon (1737-94) recalled his first sight of the city of Rome some twenty-five years after the
event, he admitted to having been troubled by strong emotions which had agitated his mind and which had led to a
sleepless night and to ‘several days of intoxication’ before he could bring himself ‘to descend to a cool and minute
investigation’ of the historic objects that he had come to Rome to study. Gibbon, the greatest English historian of the
eighteenth century and the supremely reasonable and sceptical product of the European Enlightenment, felt obliged to
confess to the kind of ‘enthusiasm’ which he scorned. His emotional excitement on seeing Rome may also suggest the
degree to which he was the product of a culture which had come, not simply to appreciate the significance of
‘sensibility’, but actively to indulge it.
To one enthusiastic later visitor to Italy, Shelley, Gibbon seemed in retrospect to be the possessor of a ‘cold and
unimpassioned spirit’. To another, Byron, swayed by the kaleidoscopic beauty of Italy and by the massive splendour of
the Alps, Gibbon was one of the tutelary spirits of Lake Geneva, one who, with Voltaire and Rousseau, had ‘sought
and found, by dangerous roads, | A path to perpetuity of fame’. Gibbon’s ‘dangerous road’ had led him in his
monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), to question both a providential reading of history
and the assumption that modern Europe was singularly blessed in its inherited forms of government and religion. The
principles on which his history is built may look back to the culture of the intellectual salons of pre-revolutionary
Paris and to the world of the aristocratic Grand Tour, but they also hark forward to the ideals of republican
restructuring which would haunt the nineteenth-century European mind. Although Gibbon would certainly have been
unhappy at Byron’s linking his name to those of the ‘intolerant bigot’, Voltaire, and to the self absorbed social
optimist, Rousseau, the influence of his iconoclastic rationality was to be