Immortal Memories | Page 4

been reprinted again
and again for the curious. I recall many other sources of information
about the great man and his wonderful talk--by Miss Hawkins, Miss
Reynolds, Miss Hannah More for example--and many of you who have
Dr. Birkbeck Hill's Johnson Miscellanies have these in a pleasantly
acceptable form.
My second point is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from
all this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable
epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr.
Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room for
some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question of
poetry unanimity is ever hard to seek; so many mistake rhetoric for
poetry. Only twice at the most, it seems to me, does Dr. Johnson reach
anything in the shape of real inspiration in his many poems, {15}
although it must be admitted that earlier generations admired them
greatly. To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron,
and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a
poet, were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almost
invariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read The Vanity of
Human Wishes with "a choking sensation in the throat," and declared
that he had more pleasure in reading that and Johnson's other long
poem, London, than any other poetic compositions he could mention.
But then I think it was always the sentiment in verse, and not its quality,
that attracted Scott. Byron also declared that The Vanity of Human
Wishes was "a great poem." Certainly these poems are quotable poems.
Who does not recall the line about "surveying mankind from China to
Peru," or think, as Johnson taught us, to:--
Mark what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron, and
the jail.
Or remember his epitaph on one who:--
Left a name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorn a
tale.

One line--"Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage" has done duty
again and again. I might quote a hundred such examples to show
Johnson, whatever his qualities as a poet, is very much alive indeed in
his verse. It is, however, as a great prose writer, that I prefer to consider
him. Here he is certainly one of the most permanent forces in our
literature. Rasselas, for example, while never ranking with us moderns
quite so high as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in Cranford, is a
never failing delight. So far from being a dead book, is there a young
man or a young woman setting out in the world of to-day, aspiring to
an all-round literary cultivation, who is not required to know it? It has
been republished continually. What novelist of our time would not give
much to have so splendid a public recognition as was provided when
Lord Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, after the Abyssinian Expedition,
pictured in the House of Commons "the elephants of Asia dragging the
artillery of Europe over the mountains of Rasselas."
Equally in evidence are those wonderful Lives of The Poets which
Johnson did not complete until he was seventy-two years of age,
literary efforts which have always seemed to me to be an encouraging
demonstration that we should never allow ourselves to grow old. Many
of these 'Lives' are very beautiful. They are all suggestive. Only the
other day I read them again in the fine new edition that was prepared by
that staunch Johnsonian, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. The greatest English critic
of these latter days, Mr. Matthew Arnold, showed his appreciation by
making a selection from them for popular use. From age to age every
man with the smallest profession of interest in literature will study
them. Of how many books can this be said?
Greatest of all was Johnson as a writer in his least premeditated work,
his Prayers and Meditations. They take rank in my mind with the very
best things of their kind, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, The
Confessions of Rousseau, and similar books. They are healthier than
any of their rivals. William Cowper, that always fascinating poet and
beautiful letter writer, more than once disparaged Johnson in this
connexion. Cowper said that he would like to have "dusted Johnson's
jacket until his pension rattled in his pocket," for what he had said
about Milton. He read some extracts, after Johnson's death, from the

Meditations, and wrote contemptuously of them. {18} But if Cowper
had always possessed, in addition to his fascinating other-worldliness
the healthy worldliness of Dr. Johnson, perhaps we should all have
been the happier. To me that collection of Prayers and Meditations
seems one of the most helpful books that I