Lives of the Poets, vol 1 | Page 2

worse, on the opposite side.
They accuse him of narrow-minded prejudice, and of bigoted
attachment to powers that be with a rancour little befitting the liberality
of which they make such vaunting professions. Johnson had a really
benevolent heart, but despised and detested the affectation of a
sentimental and universal philanthropy, which neglects the practical
charities of home and kindred, in its wild and excursive flights after
distant and romantic objects. He was no tyrant, even in theory, but he
dreaded, and, therefore, sought to expose, the lurking designs of those
who opposed constituted authorities, because they hated subjection;
and who, when they gained power themselves, proved the
well-grounded nature of the fears entertained respecting their sincerity.
Johnson was a firm English character, and his surly expressions were
often philanthropy in disguise. They have little studied his real
disposition, who impute his occasional austerity of manner to
misanthropy at heart. The man who is smooth to all alike, is frequently
the friend of none, and those who entertain no aversions, have, perhaps,
few of the warmer emotions of friendship.
In dwelling thus long on a part of Johnson's character, on which we
have elsewhere[2] avowed that we could not speak with perfect

pleasure, we are not attempting to vindicate him in all his violent
reproaches of those whom he politically disliked. We would, however,
wish to deprecate unmitigated condemnation, and also to ask, whether
the conduct of those whom he denounced, was not, in its turn, so harsh
and arbitrary, as almost to justify the utmost severity of censure. Were
they not men who would "scarcely believe in the substance of their
liberty, if they did not see it cast a shadow of slavery over others."
With respect to Johnson's powers as a critic, we confess that he had but
little natural taste for poetry, as such; for that poetry of emotion which
produces in its cultivators and admirers an intensity of excitement, to
which language can scarcely afford an utterance, to which art can give
no body, and which spreads a dream and a glory around us. All this
Johnson felt not, and, therefore, understood not; for he wanted that
deep feeling which is the only sure and unerring test of poetic
excellence. He sought the didactic in poetry, and wished for reasoning
in numbers. Hence his undivided admiration of Pope and the French
school, who cultivated exclusively the poetry of idea, where each moral
problem is worked out with detailed, and often tedious, analysis; where
all intense emotion is frittered away by a ratiocinative process. Johnson,
we repeat, had no natural perception nor relish for the high and
excursive range of poetic fancy, and the age at which he composed his
criticisms on the English poets, was far advanced beyond that when
purely imaginative poetry usually affords delight. Hence, no doubt,
proceeded his capricious strictures on the odes of Gray to which we,
with painful candour, advert. In criticism and in poetry, for indignation
only poured forth the torrent of his song, he kept steadily in view the
interests of morality and virtue: these he would not compromise for the
glitter of genius, and for their maintenance of these, the main objects of
his own life and labour, he praised many an author whom other more
courtly critics have thought it not cruelty to ridicule. He sums up his
eulogium on a poet with the reflection, that he left
No line which, dying, he could wish to blot.
Johnson has also not escaped animadversion for entitling his collection
The Lives of the English Poets, when he has taken so confined a range.

It must be remembered, that he only professed, in the first instance, to
prefix lives to the works which the booksellers chose to publish; he was,
therefore, confined to a task, at which he more than once expressed his
repugnance to Boswell. It should also, in fairness to his memory, be
borne in mind, that he wrote, as he confesses in his preface, from
scanty materials, and on various authors. It was very easy, therefore, for
each successive biographer, who devoted his time to the collection of
memoirs for some single individual, to point out inaccuracies in
Johnson's general statements; and very natural, also for one who had
contracted an affection for the subject of his labours, by continually
having him present in his thoughts, to carp at all those who were not as
alive to the merits, and as blind to the defects of his idol as himself. But
Johnson, feeling a manly consciousness of ability, which he affected
not to hide, was not dazzled by the lustre of brilliant talents, and was
far too honest to veil from public view the faults and failings of the
sons of genius. This he did not from a sour