Johnson on Pope

Dr. Johnson esteemed his life of Cowley the best of his Lives and perhaps it does contain some of his most significant commentary on poetry but his lengthy discourse on Pope is better for entertainment, for the sheer joy of reading it and the obvious enthusiasm with which it is written. Much of that is due to its subject, one dare estimate, for no writer can make so much of an ordinary subject as they can an extra-ordinary one and Pope provides all the subject an expansive writer such as Johnson could wish for to expand into. 

The acrimony of Pope's many literary vendettas are pursued to the limit sometimes, more personal than literary and a sport in themselves. They might serve to remind us that poets can be a proud, vain and vituperative lot when they find rivals and that there is less of this knockabout now than there was in the 1960's and 70's which might have been equally energetically engaged in then but went on unnoticed by a wider public, poetry being a backwater of significance only to itself then whereas in the C18th it had a wider audience.

Joseph Addison is an early combatant, their battleground centring on their rival versions of the Iliad rather than Blur and Oasis trading insults and then releasing singles at the same time to, presumably, both benefit from the publicity as well as see who won, which was Blur, surprisingly. Pope's Dunciad, in a similar way, seems to have been popularized by those it satirized,

in which he endeavoured to sink into contempt all the writers by whom he had been attacked, and some others whom he thought unable to defend themselves.

In all this, Johnson finds much raw material from which to derive his telling observations on both human nature and how it is manifested in literary affairs. In his Characters of Men, Pope examined the idea of 'ruling passions', including that,

No man can therefore be born, in the strict acceptation, a lover of money, for he may be born where money does not exist; nor can he be born, in a moral sense, a lover of his country, for society, poltically regulated, is a state contradistinguished from a state of nature...

Dr. Johnson takes exception to that, perhaps anticipating Karl Popper's Falsification Principle, with,

its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination or overruling principle which cannot be resisted

but I say, 'Pope, thou shouldst be living at this hour'. 

In a fracas with the laureate, Colley Cibber, apparently provoked by Pope who quite possibly assumed Cibber to be one of those he thought unable to defend themselves, his victim announces,

his resolution from that time never to bear another blow without returning it, and to tire out his adversary by perseverance if he cannot conquer him by strength.

If the later C17th and the C18th aren't nowadays overly celebrated for their verses by some of us, it is a period rich in aggravation for its own sake. Pope is to get back much of his ill will from Martha Blount, his 'favourite' to who he sent a message only for her to reply,

'What? is he not dead yet?'

 

Johnson says more than he has before about poets taking themselves at their own estimation and how,

The writer commonly believes himself. 

But,

While such ideas are formed they are felt, and self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy.

Wow! If I still copied out memorable lines into a book of quotes like I did 45 years ago, that would be straight in.

He makes a distinction between Dryden and Pope that Dryden had better passages but worked less hard on them whereas Pope was always as good as he could be, not sending anything to the press for two years in order to make sure he was happy with it,

Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and levelled by the roller.

I suspect I'm a Dryden on those terms but would rather read the critic than the poets in this example. If Johnson doesn't know, he says so which is an example we all might follow but he excels himself by having nailed the big 'what is poetry' question long before many of us tried to say with,

To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer,

 

He has also quoted Dryden as saying, 'Music is inarticulate poetry' without questioning it deeply enough. One might see what Dryden meant by 'inarticulate'. in that it is wordless, but it's no better than poetry claiming to be 'heightened' language when the likes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf write prose far more 'heightened' than much that claims to be poetry. Dryden couldn't have been expected to know how articulate Beethoven and Mozart were to be, or even Bach and Handel, but if he found the music to 1700 inarticulate he must have been tin-eared.

Apparently not knowing when to stop, but never being anything less than interesting, Johnson finishes with some close readings of epitaphs by Pope, finding it unnecessary to say in one that the subject is dead and in another lamenting that they are not named in the verses because the epitaph might not always be read on the tomb.

 

Not for the first time, a library book has to be returned but I must have my own copy. The selected Lives of the Poets is thus on order, as is the Selected Essays with its pieces from The Idler and The Rambler. Dr. Johnson will be promoted to have his own, more prominent place on the shelves with those books about him, but not by him, that I already have. The Lives have been a revelation, not so much for the lives themselves but for the industrious, well-organized mind that wrote them, the brilliant prose they are written in and the pure enjoyment of reading them. The low grade poetry magazines by the bedside are only there because I thought I ought to have a look at hem but they are largely awful. I'd be able to reach out and pick up a volume of Dr. Johnson confident of being able to open it anywhere and find him good value. Then, and only then, will we see about Rasellass. It might be any good.