Johnson on Milton

Dr. Johnson's Lives provide what he knows of the biography of the poet before assessing the work which he does thoroughly and with unsparing attention. Early in his commentary on Milton, though, he seems to anticipate C20th philosophy,

the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar if grammarians discuss them.

Isn't that what happened to questions of ontology when the likes of Wittgenstein discussed them. It's what ultimately happens when language is the only way of investigating any subject. The language becomes the subject of the investigation.

And he finds similar non-sequiturs or cul-de-sacs in Paradise Lost where Milton cannot help but describe 'incorporeal spirits' in physical terms. For some people God really was an old man in a white robe with long hair and a white beard and Milton is unable to bring into being the other occupants of the heavens without their physical manifestation either.

The main impression of Milton we are left with, though, is of a difficult man. His associate, Marvell, has left that impression, too, although he doesn't make it into Johnson's account. Marriage, we are told,

afforded not much of his happiness. The first wife left him in disgust and was brought back only by terror; the second, indeed, seems to have been more of a favourite, but her life was short. The third, as Philips relates, opprssed his children in his lifetime and cheated them at his death.

The disgust of his first wife, Mary, was caused by his Puritanism, the lady,

seems not much to have delighted in the pleasures of spare diet and hard study.

 

In this account he is a malcontent, an instinctive rebel perhaps not unlike the protagonists of his most famous poem. He is defined more by what he objects to than what he celebrates,

we know rather what he was not than what he was.

The blindness would have little to improve his temper, memorizing as much as he could of the poem before summoning someone to copy them down. He preferred Paradise Regained, the idea suggested to him by Ellwood,

Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgement of his own works, Dr. Johnson suggests, going on to say those those that were the hardest work would be those they rate most highly. I don't think so, though. Those that come most easily seem to me the best, arriving almost fully formed and only needing to be written down. Those that are hard work weren't quite there to begin with and that usually shows. No amount of editing and amendment can make them as good in the same way that no amount of practice can make a workmanlike performer into a gifted one.

He later offers a definition of poetry as,

the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.

which predates what Keats was to make his Grecian Urn say. about Beauty and Truth. It's not the worst attempt at saying what poetry is ever seen but I'm not buying it wholesale. What I like about Dr. Johnson's approach is that pleasure is never far away in his critical apparatus and if we aren't doing it for pleasure I don't know why we'd be doing it at all.

Again, a bit ahead of his time, as well as with a long perspective on what went before, Johnson accepts that 'poetry may subsist without rhyme' but 'the subject' needs must 'support itself', which he seems to think it often doesn't unless held together by rhyme but he's good enough to credit that,

I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer, for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is.

The great thing about him is that, having forensically identified all the misgivings he can have in the work, he still admires it, which is how it should be. Woe betide those in who he finds as many faults but nothing to compensate for them. Milton, he says, owes less to his predecessors than most,

The highest praise of genius is original invention.

He admires him for having been his own man and done his own thing and,

his work is not the greatest of heroic poems only because it is not the first.

 

Next up in this selection is nearly 100 pages on Dryden. I'll have to see about that. Reading ought to be for pleasure but if I'm ever going to achieve any better appreciation of C18th poetry then 95 pages on Dryden and 111 on Pope in the company of Dr. Johnson might be the best chance I'll have.

It's a sign of the shifts in fashion that Davenant is a figure of some significance in the C17th and into the 18th but in the early pages on Dryden, it is asked by him 'whether a poet can judge well of his own productions'. Perhaps it can be decided somehow objectively but,

in those parts where fancy predominates, self-love may easily deceive.

Johnson suggests nothing can be 'pronounced good till it has been found to please', by which he means 'please others'. What he didn't go on to say was that what pleased others 200-300 years ago might not still please us now but that's another question.

Dr. Johnson's writing is 'of its time', he can't help that, but he's astute, clear-sighted and a brilliant critic. There's considerably less empty sophistry and 'rhubarb, rhubarb' in these essays than in much writing on poetry that there is now, and it's at greater length..

The next book is delayed in the post and might not be arriving and so with it not being obvious where to go next, it's now or never with Dryden and Pope. I'll read the critic for pleasure if not the poets and, you never know, he might convince me.