COWPER'S JUDGMENT OF JOHNSON'S WORK.

213 captiousness, their hardness, their awkward humour, their affected raillery, and capricious contempt, seemed like the burst of discordant sounds upon fairy dreams. If the splendour of Collins could not save him from such rudenesses, what, I thought, must inferior powers expect? Another witness to a similar feeling, expressed, not after the lapse of years, but promptly, at the time, was Cowper. He revolted especially at Johnson's treatment of Milton, and expresses a meek man's warmest indignation at the critic's injustice. It is in one of the letters in that inimitable epistolary collection, the most natural and agreeable in our literature,--Cowper's Letters,-that he writes in these words, after noticing how he has smeared his canvas in the portraiture of Milton as a man: "As a poet, Johnson has treated Milton with severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the most beautiful feathers out of his Muse's wings and trampled them under his great foot. I am convinced he has no ear for poetical numbers, or that it was stopped by prejudice against the harmony of Milton's. Was there ever anything so delightful as the music of 'Paradise Lost'? It is like that of a fine organ, has the fullest and the deepest tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance of a Dorian flute,-variety without end, and never equalled. Yet the doctor has little or nothing to say upon this copious theme, but talks something about the unfitness of the English language for blank verse, and how apt it is, in the mouth of some readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh, I could thrash his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket!" To this playful vengeance of the gentle Cowper, let me add the belief that Johnson's eulogy of the Paradise Lost" bears the marks of having been extorted from him, chiefly, I presume, out of deference to Addison's celebrated critical papers on that poem in "The Spectator." He had no sympathy with the highest poetic genius that was contemporary with him. The fine powers of Gray, the elaborate finish of whose poetry, it might be thought, would have pleased him, were disparaged in a style disreputable to a candid critic. The high, aspiring imagination of the unfortunate Collins won no better treatment; and this is lamentable to think of, when we remember how his tender nature suffered for the want of sympathy, the fever of his visionary tremulous spirit turned in the anguish of disappointment to insanity, and his fitful career, closing in the succession of a moody melancholy, a few lucid intervals, and paroxysms of a maniac's violence, when his shrieks were heard in the most appalling manner echoing through the cloisters of Winchester Cathedral.

In all that was wrought by the pen of Dr. Johnson, or all that rolled from his tongue, there is no evidence of his having any apprehension of

a high effort of a pure imagination, whether of the earlier great poets or his contemporaries. When he assumed the office of the great critic of English poetry, he ventured on a duty for which he was physically, intellectually, and morally unfit. Physically, because his shortsightedness amounted to a species of blindness, obliging him to hold communion with the visible world through the secondary medium of books. If I remember rightly, he was hard of hearing; he certainly was stone-deaf to the finest metres of English verse,—that sweet music which rises up to the imagination when reading poetry to our silent selves, catching the flow of the verse and beautiful sounds, though in silence as still as a midnight thought. Unless poetry beat stoutly and rattled loudly on the drum of Dr. Johnson's ear, he proclaimed there was no melody in it, as he said of blank verse (spirits of Shakspeare and Milton, what a thought!) that it was verse only to the eye. How far Dr. Johnson's education influenced his character it is not necessary to ask; but there was one of his teachers whose influence may have had some connection with the Johnsonian grandiloquence: this was a man that published a spelling-book and dedicated it to the Universe. Intellectually Dr. Johnson was disqualified for the guardianship of the memory of the poets, because, whatever were his powers of argumentation, no particle of imagination or fancy entered into his constitution. He was perpetually striving to disenchant poetry of all its magic, to strip it of the radiant vestments of its imaginative philosophy, "sky-robes spun out of Iris woof," and wrap it in the coarse, home-spun cloak of his logic. Morally, Johnson was unfit for the lofty task, without, of course, meaning to impeach the uprightness of his character or his piety. It has been said, with great truth, that, as the poet must write in the spirit of self-sacrifice, so the reader of poetry who would rightly feel and enjoy it must in like manner pass out of himself into it. He must forget himself and his own prejudices and predilections and associations, and give himself up to the work he is reading, and try to take his stand on the author's point of view. So that the obstacle which checks the spread of true, genial poetry-of such poetry as carries us out of the purlieus of our own habitual notions into fresh fields of the imagination -is still the spirit of selfishness,-man's unwillingness to abandon his old inveterate preconceptions. Now, taking this principle, the truth of which must be felt by all,-can there be a moment's hesitation as to Johnson's moral unfitness for poetical criticism ? If the principle hold good as to the reader of poetry, how much more as to him who sets himself up for a judge to guide and even command the reading of others! To forget himself and his own prejudices and predilections and associ

JOHNSON'S UNFITNESS FOR POETICAL CRITICISM. 215

ations, to take his stand on the author's point of view, were impossibilities for a nature constituted like Johnson's. It dwelt in the impenetrable centre of his own habitual notions,—in the thick fog of literary bigotry, taking his stand in himself as the central point, and therefore, for the most part, beholding things in wrong proportions and in false lights. His poetic sympathies were few and contracted; and, instead of that catholic taste which is at once the true critic's power and his exceeding great reward, he was bitter and bigoted in his judgments and rugged in his feelings. What is the entire warp and woof of Boswell's curious biography of him but a tissue of unbroken dogmatism? Perhaps there never was a virtuous man with so much of selfishness. His appetite for argument was as voracious as his physical appetite. I will not say it was meat and drink to him, because his dogmatism was intermitted, and then only, in the act of eating. Argumentative triumph was his ambition, his passion; and it would be edifying to observe into how many opinions, strange for a wise and good man, he was led by this overweening self-love, the adoration of his own opinions and tastes. It made him often the advocate even of shallow judgments magnified and mystified by swelling words, and sometimes of dangerous opinions; for instance, his absolute doctrine in these words:" Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical," because, among other sophistical reasons, "the essence of poetry is invention;-such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few." Contemplative piety cannot be poetical! the topics of devotion are few! Why, what in the world had become of the good man's Bible? Mark how Johnson's perpetual intrusion of his own personality, in some shape or other, made him censorious and scornful, qualities fatal to all genial love of poetry. By it, and the added incense of flattery which his satellites were for ever burning beneath his nostrils, the idea of self became an absorbing one. Look at the account of him in social life, seizing upon almost any opinion for the sake of opposition and disputation, with a dangerous recklessness of truth, as if it was a thing that could be safely so tampered with; insulting Garrick, ridiculing poor Goldsmith, treading upon Boswell as if he were, in rough sport, rubbing his huge foot upon a spaniel's back, and then, after monopolizing nearly all the talk to himself, with an inimitable self-complacency exclaiming, "What a fine conversation we have had!"—an exclamation which, considering the monstrous disproportion, was about as appropriate as if, on turning down the last leaf of

one of the longest of these lectures, I were to say to you, "What a fine conversation we have had!"

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Now, if an admirer of Dr. Johnson should be disposed to think that I have thrown off the bridle of my tongue, let it be remembered what authority his work on the poets has exercised. Let it be borne in mind how he has scattered his harsh and scornful judgments, pronouncing Milton's exquisite "Masque of Comus a drama inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive; his sonnets, "the best only not bad;" "Lycidas," "vulgar and disgusting;" and undoing his reluctant eulogy of the "Paradise Lost" by declaring its perusal a duty rather than a pleasure, and that we retire harassed and overburdened, besides condemning its diction as harsh and barbarous, and waging perpetual war against what has been well styled eminently the English metre: how he could find in Milton's republicanism nothing but a selfish lawlessness; and how, after the lapse of more than a hundred years, he could venture to say of such a man as Milton, that, omitting public prayer, he omitted all. Let it be remembered, too, that the arch-critic could discover in Gray's fine odes nothing more than what he superciliously calls" a kind of strutting dignity,—a glittering accumulation of ungraceful ornaments, image magnified by affectation, and language laboured into harshness; and that he dismissed the true poetry of the hapless Collins with the contemptuous opinion that it may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure. These were judgments, too, coming from one who claimed to be himself a poet, esteeming the highsounding declamation of his "London" and "Vanity of Human Wishes" as poetry, and priding himself upon his hundred lines a day. For all the wrong-unconscious wrong and wilful wrong—that Johnson has done the poets I might take a malicious vengeance in a retaliative censoriousness on some of his own poems. Indeed, I had written something of the sort; but some admirer of Johnson's might say that is ill-natured and has nothing to do with the matter. I think myself it would have something to do with it: but let it pass.

About the same time the "Lives of the Poets" was published, another work was also given to the world, which, though at first coldly received, and by Johnson treated with contempt, was destined to render good service to the cause of English literature. Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" has been esteemed by high authorities as one of the chief agencies in reviving a genuine feeling for true poetry in the public mind. The traditionary minstrelsy, ancient ballads, and historical songs were collected, restored, and remodelled, and thus redeemed from

their obscurity. It was a poetry which, to its own early generation, had ministered to an important public use by softening, and perhaps chastening, the rudeness of a martial and unlettered people. It was now to serve a widely-different purpose:-to help in restoring nature where it had been displaced by artifice, to give life again to what had grown cold, and to invigorate a poetry which was sickly from excessive refinement.

But this poetry, which Dr. Percy brought in his collection to the acquaintance of scholars and men of reading, had a life elsewhere. It was composed of winged words that had taken their flight from one generation to another. Its home was not so much in books as in floating tradition preserved by affectionate memory. It was a music in the air; for it might be heard sung by reapers in the field one harvest after another, by women lightening with its oft-repeated strains their household labours, by mothers singing over their children, or in some single chanting to a fireside group. It was a poetry dwelling chiefly in the North of Britain, secluded from Southern refinements. There was, for instance, a Scottish gardener's wife, who had an inexhaustible store of the ballads; some simple, solemn ditties, which when she chanted them could bring tears down an old man's cheeks, and others spirit-stirring, at sound of which the fire flashed in the dark eyes of her listening child. That deep dark-eyed Scottish bairn was Robert Burns. His ear was attuned in childhood to the old minstrelsy; the sounds sunk into his spirit to come forth again in after-years, his imagination giving them a more glorious poetry than they had ever echoed to before. The obligation of the poet to his other parent was careful religious instruction, which, if it did not furnish safeguards against, sad excesses of his impetuous passions in after-life, at least saved him from ever sinking into the recklessness of a reprobate. He has recorded also a debt of his infant and boyish days to an old woman domesticated under the same humble roof, remarkable, he says, for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition, and having the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantrips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. "The household life of Burns's parents is represented in the imperishable portraiture of the 'Cotter's Saturday Night;' and the origin of those stanzas finely exhibits the continued presence of early salutary influences amid the tumultuous passions of the poet's heart." There was, he said, something peculiarly venerable to his thoughts in the phrase "Let us worship God," used by a decent, sober head of a family introducing family wor