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Burke as one of the great conservative forces of the eighteenth century. These two men, Burke and Johnson, take their places as the great humanists of the period-types of the humanism which turned to the total experience of mankind in the past for guidance in the troubled present; which accepted established institutions as the necessary basis for all social progress; which recognized a body of doctrine built up out of human experience as the surest guide to practice in the present; which valued the trained judgment and discipline of mind and character as the only basis of right living; and which distrusted innovation and the various naturalistic nostrums of the day. Burke's position in the humanistic tradition has long been clear; it is the aim of this study to bring into relief the qualifications which Johnson possessed to attain so high a position beside his friend.

CHAPTER II

An Account of Dr. Johnson's Reading

T

HE most salient fact to strike the attention of anyone

who considers the nature of Johnson's contribution to critical thought is his position as the last of a long line of classical scholars, who received their initial impulse in the revival of learning and represented unbroken the neo-classic tradition during the three centuries of its rise and its gradual decline in the latter part of the eighteenth century. For this reason it is essential, before we can enter upon any study of his critical ideas and their application to literature, that we know something of his background of scholarship and the extent to which he accepted the great body of critical doctrine which had been built up before his time. No man can be studied quite free from his environment, least of all such a one as Johnson, who contains in himself so much of the past and upon that past has built the foundation of his thinking and his faith.

With the great humanists who followed in the wake of the revival of learning Johnson found himself in thoroughly congenial company. The immense impulse given to critical and textual scholarship by the rediscovery of classical literature had not yet exhausted itself by the time he was forming his scholarly tastes. The work of the sixteenth-century scholars . not only laid the foundation of all subsequent criticism of the neo-classic type, but remained the basis of the great number of textual and exegetical commentaries which followed them. The Renaissance scholar-in-us had come to be known as a man of great learning in many branches of knowledge, who

by sheer weight of self-assumed authority asserted his judgments in literary and textual criticism, and was prepared to defend them against all comers. None too gentle in his methods, by force of self-assertion and the dogmatism characteristic of all who suddenly find absolute power granted them, he created for himself a dictatorship over the domain of letters from which he received the traditional homage that the laymen of every age are ready to pay to men of apparently universal knowledge. The mighty Julius Caesar Scaliger, for example, the prototype of all literary dictators, displayed the immense range of his reading in his Poetics, and this book, though continually attacked and defended, long remained the final word on the subject of literary criticism. Other scholars, men distinguished in many lines of activity, such as Hugo Grotius, the distinguished Dutch jurist, who proved himself a profound theologian and the best exegete of the day and found time to become one of the best modern masters of Latin verse, and Erasmus, the most important figure in the literature of Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, are representative of the polymath, the leviathan of learning, dominating contemporary thought by means of his superior intellectual attainments. With the rise of neo-classicism in England, this tradition was carried over into that country also; and Ben Jonson and Dryden are the seventeenth-century examples of the man of learning who by his own accomplishment in letters gained the privilege of dictating how a performance should be judged and of laying down the laws of successful literary effort. They sat their time in the seat of authority above the listening senate, and in turn passed on the sceptre to Addison and Pope, whence it descended to Dr. Johnson, the great Cham of literature, in whose possession its glory blazed and died.

In the respect for learning on a great variety of subjects, and in its willingness to yield its judgment to men of recog

nized authority in the field of criticism, the eighteenth century was not far behind its predecessors. It too was a century of learning; the tradition of Bentley remained, and such scholars as Porson and Dr. Parr and Bishop Lowth were not unworthy of the great past. But Johnson's qualifications to be a literary dictator were greater than theirs, for his impressive reputation as moralist and critic and his fame as a conversationalist had made him the accepted authority on matters of public taste, even to a degree on matters of national policy and statesmanship.1 His learning was not exclusively literary, and Boswell records for us that he was versed in law, in medicine, even in agriculture, proving the effort he made to pursue his studies in many lines, with perhaps in view, as his ideal of the gentleman-scholar, the type of l'honnête homme, qui ne se pique de rien, who flourished in seventeenth-century France. He indeed is reported to have declared: "Perfect good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners." Johnson may not have conformed in outward appearance to this type, but his humanism reached out toward it as a wholly realizable ideal.

A review of the sale catalogue of his library, published after his death, reveals the immense range of his reading in all sorts of subjects. While not primarily a scientist, he possessed some knowledge of astronomy, and he had improvised in his lodgings a small chemical laboratory by means of which he contrived to fight his enemy, solitude. But he remained essentially the man of letters, and as he was the last of the great classical critics, so by position and attainments he was fitted to become the last example in England of the literary aristarch, before whose tribunal contemporary literature must receive its sentence of praise or blame.

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It is possible to point out with some definiteness to what extent he actually presided over the deliberations of literary councils. Arthur Murphy tells how in the days of his extreme poverty the denizens of Grub Street used to assemble before breakfast in levée at his bedside, where they received his advice in regard to their literary work.1 Here Kit Smart, no more fond of clean linen than his benefactor, and Richard Savage may have established their claims on the good nature which did not fail them in more prosperous days. After he passed out into a more comfortable existence his house became a kind of academy; and indeed he has been called a sort of public oracle, whom everyone thought he had a right to visit and consult. So also the society of the tavern, where “I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions I find my delight," sharpened his conversational powers and prepared him for the rôle he was to play in the famous Club, in which he was to unite in friendship such notables as Burke and Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. It was a wonderfully brilliant group of men who called Johnson friend; it would be difficult to discover one more brilliant in the whole range of literary history. The lively and witty society of the Thrales, which included such accomplished wits and scholars as Dr. Burney and the Italian Baretti, also did much to keep the intellectual fires burning in the latter years of his life. Altogether Johnson gathered about him the best of the intellectual life of the day, and varied and interesting must have been the topics tossed about among these gladiators in their meetings. Only the Magny dinners, typical of another and very different age and expressive of the intellectual life of the great Frenchmen, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Taine, and Renan, come to one's mind as worthy to be placed beside them. The comparison between Johnson and his forerunners in the art of literary dictatorship cannot be pushed home too 1. Bos. I, 247, 307, n. 22 2. Ibid. II, 118. 3. Ibid. II, 451, n. 3.

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