JOHNSON: Preface to the
edition of Shakespeare and Rambler No. 4. BOSWELL: London
However checkered a
reception-history the other facets of Samuel Johnson’s authorial métier may
have suffered over the decades and centuries, and however direly these facets
may still want for champions (in that it is still a very hard [albeit tenable
and worthy] sell to argue, for example, that Rasselas is a better moral
tale than Candide, or that The Rambler as a body of essays
qua essays is superior to The Spirit of the Age), in one
department his reputation seems to have risen and finally settled into a
position of unbudgeable if not especially prepossessing preeminence. No: I am not referring to lexicography,
firstly because in that department Johnson’s reputation has been rock-solid
from the date of the Dictionary’s publication, and secondly because
rightly or wrongly lexicography has never sufficed on its own to establish its
practitioners as writers or authors (such that we do not call the eminent
lexicographers C.T. Onions and Robert Birchfield eminent authors, and having
dismissed J. R. R. Tolkien as a lousy writer we need never dread the whisper of
a demurral from an admirer of his exemplary contributions to the Oxford
English Dictionary). I am referring, rather, to the department of literary
criticism. For although the wholesale
eclipsing and discrediting of eighteenth-century aesthetics and poetics by
Wordsworth, Coleridge, &co. made Johnson the critic seem hopelessly
retardataire throughout the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth the
seminality of his contribution to the Anglophone critical mainstream began to
be generally acknowledged, by the mid-twentieth he had been quasi-officially
installed as our language’s greatest literary critic, and nobody since has
thought it practicable (or, at any rate, worthwhile) to dislodge him from this
position. Samuel Johnson has effectively
been canonized as the Shakespeare of English literary criticism, and if even
the present writer cannot repress a faint titter of derision in face of this
epithet, this is merely because criticism is a less prestigious genre or mode
than drama and the English language is not the preeminent force in criticism that
it is in the other genre or mode, and not at all because he would ever flinch
from citing Samuel Johnson’s opinion on a literary question with the same
peremptory, four-of-a-kind flourishing insouciance that one cites a line of
Shakespeare vis-à-vis some occurrence or phenomenon of extra-literary import. So what accounts for this (relatively)
newfound preeminence of Johnson as an Anglophone literary critic, his stable
re-ensconcement as “the great Cham of” if not “literature” tout court,
then of at least that side of literature that is devoted to the analysis and
appreciation of other writing? It is
certainly not owing to that intrinsically dubious and in this case manifestly
inapplicable notion of the backward-swinging pendulum, to some
reorientation of the collective Anglophone readerly sensibility or Weltansicht
to the norms of the pre-Romantic century, for insofar as we identify the
Romantics with an exaltation of sentiment (and for all its reductiveness I
don’t see any way of avoiding such an identification), it cannot be said that
we have grown any less romantic (or Romantic-esque) in the course of the past
fifty or sixty years—indeed, we are on the whole almost certainly more
sentimental than the Romantics, as, for that matter were the Victorians (though
they, too, were on the whole less sentimental than us). No: without a doubt the resuscitation of
Johnson’s literary-critical fortunes is principally owing to a much less intrinsically
dubious and in this case manifestly form-fitting notion—viz. that of the
retrieval of the baby from the thrown-away bathwater. You see, the Romantics were against the
eighteenth century prevailingly on account of its supposed unqualified classicism,
its supposed unreflective veneration of the literature of Greek and Roman
antiquity; or, to be more precise, of the poetic norms that had been abstracted
from that literature by certain ancient critics, then prescriptively propounded
by certain of their eighteenth-century successors, and finally (supposedly)
unreflectively adopted by all of these successors’ contemporaries who fancied
themselves poets. In the Romantics’ view,
the typical eighteenth-century poet went about preparing to write, say, a
tragedy, not by rummaging through his memory in search of tragic events that he
had personally witnessed, or even by reading some already-extant tragedy
generally acknowledged to be a masterpiece (e.g., Oedipus the King a.k.a.
Rex by Sophocles), but rather by consulting some rulebook on how to
write a tragedy—either Aristotle’s Poetics or some seventeenth or
eighteenth-century Francophone rehashing thereof. And the net result of all this
rule-bound-ness was (according to the Romantics) a century occupied from wall
to wall (i.e., from ca. 1660 to ca. 1790) by paint-by-numbers literary
productions. That Samuel Johnson did not
manage to escape this blanket indictment of his century is, while ultimately
unforgivable, at least to a more than infinitesimal extent understandable. For it cannot be denied that in certain
registers and certain departments of his extra-lexicographical output Johnson
did defer (whether rightly or wrongly) to the neoclassical norms of his
time. His sole dramatic production, the
tragedy Irene, does indeed scrupulously conform to the Aristotelean (and
Boileauean) unities of time, place, and action (of which I shall have more to
say fairly soon) and for this reason (among several others) it comes across as
stiff, cold, and unconvincing. And from
beginning to end, Johnson’s prose idiom is saturated with the tropes, figures,
feints, and structures of Ciceronian rhetoric.
Those of us who love Johnson’s essays, sermons, tracts, tales, and
letters do of course argue that the prevailing gravity of his subject-matter is
benefited rather than handicapped by such receptive artificiality, but we would
never dare to misrepresent this artificiality as a more “natural” or
“spontaneous” alternative to the prose idioms of his great Romantic successors,
Hazlitt and de Quincy. Vis-à-vis
Johnson’s general outlook on literature, though, we really would be so bold as
to argue that he stole a rather impressively lengthy march on the
Romantics. Consider, for example, Wordsworth’s
self avowed “principal object” in the Lyrical Ballads, viz. “to choose incidents and situations from
common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible
in a selection of language really used by men.” It was for his attainment of this very object
(or, rather, as the “and” forces one to acknowledge, two objects) that
Johnson prized Shakespeare above all his contemporaries and successors (and all
his predecessors apart perhaps from Homer [who in any case was universally
venerated by the Romantics]). While
other dramatists (very much including the four great names of classical Greek
drama—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes) either wrote tragedies
centered exclusively on the “crimes
of men… the momentous vicissitudes of life…[and] the terrours of distress” or
comedies centered exclusively “on [mankind’s] absurdities, the lighter
occurrences [of life] and the gayeties of prosperity,” and thereby shut
themselves off from an entire hemisphere of human experience, Shakespeare, says
Johnson, persistently wrote plays that
are not in the rigorous and critical sense
either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the
real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and
sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of
combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one
is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to
his wine, and the mourner burying his friend [i.e., in which each is involved
in some “incident of common life”] ; in which the malignity of one is sometimes
defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are
done and hindered without design.
And into the mouths of the
characters thus involved in this endlessly varying real state of sublunary
nature Shakespeare (says Johnson) appropriately put not the “easy, elevated and harmonious…diction”
of poets (specifically that of Joseph Addison’s impeccably neoclassical tragedy
Cato) but “the language of men.” So, in short, in Johnson’s view Shakespeare
was to be praised first and foremost for doing the two things that Wordsworth most
prided himself on being (supposedly) the first person to do. Above and beyond this, vis-à-vis the
eighteenth century as a bastion of rulebound artificiality, Johnson defended
and even championed Shakespeare’s flouting of two of the three Aristotelean unities—viz.
the unities of time and place. According
to Aristotle and his modern disciples, the action of a tragedy had to take the
form of something that could be enacted in stopwatch-measurable conformity with
the amount of time that elapsed during its performance, and in a space no
larger than that occupied by the stage on which the play was actually
performed. It had, in other words, to be
a kind of analogue to the footage recorded by a convenience-store closed-circuit
television camera over the course of, say, 180 minutes. To treat the action otherwise, to have, say,
the first act set in Alexandria in January and the next in Rome in March, was
to disrupt the illusion of uninterrupted performativity, the illusion that one
was watching something that was actually happening here and now. But to such suffocatingly pedantic corsetry,
Johnson raised an almost criminally obvious objection: viz., “that when the play opens the spectator
[neither] really imagines himself at Alexandria, [nor] believes that his walk
to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, [nor] that he lives in the days of
Antony and Cleopatra… [that] the spectators are always in their
senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a
stage, and that the players are only players.” Any emotion the spectators might feel
in witnessing a theatrical performance arose (and ought to arise), according to
Johnson, from a sense of the verisimilitude not of the overall causal framework
of the action, but of the specific situations enacted: “The reflection that
strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that
they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed.” Just because we do not mistake Desdemona’s
bedroom in the final scene of Othello for an actual bedroom in an actual
house on the actual island of Cyprus does not mean that we cannot be moved by
this scene, because the evils to which Desdemona is exposed are evils to which
we ourselves may be exposed, and her horror and desperation at these evils are
expressed in language (e.g., “Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!”) that we
(who speak “the language of men,” including women) could imagine
ourselves using in the same ghastly situation. (Indeed. Johnson described the experience of merely
reading the scene for the preparation of his edition of Shakespeare as
“dreadful” and “not to be endured,” and declared that he was “glad to have
ended [his] revisal [i.e., editing] of it.”)
To this desideratum of immediate, local verisimilitude of speech and
action Johnson added a second restriction on poetic license, one that was
equally foreign to the norms of the ancients and their latter-day imitators: “a
work of fiction” should “exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by
accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and
qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.” It was on the basis of a total disregard of
this norm that the genre known as heroic romance, the dominant narrative
fictive genre of the Middle Ages, with its “incredibilities,” its “machines and
expedients” such as “giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites” and
“knights to bring her back from captivity” had thriven; and Johnson welcomed this
genre’s recent cession in popularity to the new genre of the novel (or, as he
preferred to call it “the comedy of romance,” presumably because like the
dramatic comedy it dealt with events of private rather than historical
importance, but like the romance it employed narrative prose rather than dramatic
verse), with its derivation of subject-matter from “general converse, and
accurate observation of the living world.”
It should be mentioned here that Johnson’s impatience with the
implausible machinery of the heroic romance did not fail to depress his
estimation of certain of Shakespeare’s plays that did not scruple to avail
themselves of that machinery. On Cymbeline
in particular his verdict was especially harsh.
In short, as I have so far digested him, Johnson seems to be arguing for
a judicious combination of tactical verisimilitude and strategic
fabulousness–locally, in its treatment of specific incidents that elapse over
the course of no more than several minutes, the drama should try as best it can
to make them mistakable for actual, observable conversations, melees, and so
forth; but globally, it should allow the audience’s imagination to supply the
context of the scenario as a whole and to fill in the gaps between the episodes
via which this scenario attempts its own realization. And I imagine that on the evidence of this
digestion, the reader will have begun to see why Johnson the critic has come to
be regarded as a mind not “of an age but for all time.” For although the specific means used towards
staying it have varied widely over the years and decades, Johnson’s recommended artistic
course between the extremes of literal mimesis and unbridled whimsicality has
for at least the past two centuries been the standard course pursued by dramatists,
novelists, and poets (along with their more lately born brethren the
moviemakers), and taken for granted by their readers and viewers. We have come to acknowledge consciously that a
certain amount of cozenage in art is unavoidable, that certain things must be
excluded from it so that other things of greater importance can be included in
it. In this regard we moderns—Johnsonians
all—are immeasurably more enlightened than the ancient critics, who found it
easy to nitpick over violations of the unities of time and place only because
they were blind to a thousand other more egregious implausibilities in their
favorite plays.
But for all this broad
agreement between him and us, not every tenet of Johnson’s aesthetics and
poetics has slipped quietly into the mainstream of the twentieth-cum-twenty
first century literary Ansicht: for, to modify without quite mixing
metaphors, though Johnson may have more than one foot planted on the side of
the river dividing us from those sword-wearing, long-waistcoated, hatbox
coat-cuffed neo-classicists, to most
latter-day critics’ minds he retains at least a toe-hold or two on the other
side, in the unmistakably then and there-cum-non here and now. Ironically yet conveniently, the firmest such
perceived toe-hold is to be found in the very essay—Rambler No. 4—in
which Johnson defends contemporary literary realism most vigorously and
cogently, and indeed, a mere carriage return-plus-.5” indentation from the
above-quoted passages about how wonderful it is that we’ve finally gotten rid
of all those tiresomely improbable knights and giants and replaced them with
delightfully probable people of the sort one encounters in the real world,
which passages are actually nothing but a buildup to a Mixalotian but
that sets the prevailingly polemical tone and agenda of the remainder of the
essay as follows:
But
the fear of not being approved as just copiers of human manners, is not the
most important concern that an author of this sort [i.e., a novelist] ought to
have before him. These books [i.e.,
novels] are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the the idle, to
whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds
unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not
fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not
informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and
partial account.
Now, from the point of
view of a cultivated post-nineteenth century reader this passage cannot avoid
coming across as insufferably ill-informed, priggish, and presumptuous at first
blush. After all, nowadays nobody thinks
of a novel as something pitched by default at naïve, impressionable children;
to the contrary, in our view a great novel is exactly the sort of book an
unimpressionable, fixed-principled, experience-informed mind is best suited to
read and should most enjoy reading. What
is more, although the core of our present-day narrative canon for worldly-wise
oldsters is composed of novels written in the period of the novel’s full
maturity—i.e., say, since ca. 1850 (and e.g., Bleak House, Moby Dick,
War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, A la recherche, Ulysses,
and Gravitys Rainbow), its inner periphery does include a pair of texts
from Johnson’s age, the golden age of the novel qua novelty—namely,
Fielding’s Tom Jones and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, texts that
Johnson is on record as having read in whole or part (though of the two only Tom
Jones was extant at the time of Rambler No. 4’s penning).
Having pejoratively
infantilized the new genre’s readership, Johnson goes on to inculcate a kind of
characterological prescription for the sort of novel that is least likely to
lead that readership’s vacant, tabularasal little heads astray on to the
path of mischance and mischief:
In
narratives, where historical veracity has no place [i.e., proper fictions, not
narratives “based on a true story”] I cannot discover why there should not be
exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above
probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never imitate, but the highest
and purest that humanity can reach, which exercised in such trials as the
various revolutions of things shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some
calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can
perform. Vice, for vice is necessary to
be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the
dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind. Wherever it appears, it should raise hatred
by the malignity of its practices, and contempt by the meanness of its
stratagems; for while it is supported by either parts [i.e., talents or
abilities] or spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred.
In short, to the
twentieth-cum-twenty-first-century reader-cum-critic, [1] it can easily look as though in the last three-quarters of Rambler No. 4,
Johnson performs a complete and decidedly unprepossessing retrenchment of the
positions espoused in its first quarter (positions that, as we have seen, blend
seamlessly with positions later espoused in the preface to Shakespeare); as
though having built up the novel into the first sensible, realistic,
adult-worthy literary genre the world has yet known, he perversely sets about
first dumbing it down to the level of a fairy tale and then recommends dumbing
it down even further to the level of the dumbest sort of fairy tale, one in
which only the good witch has the magic wand and the bad witch looks both
completely awful and completely doomed from the very beginning. Or, to put it in other terms, the
twentieth-cum-twenty-first century reader or critic cannot help regarding the
late Rambler No. 4 Johnson as a precursor of the likes of those
much-reviled 1980s bluenoses, Mary Whitehouse and Tipper Gore, a self-appointed
cultural gatekeeper who supposes that we are not mature enough to handle the
truth in all its messy and occasionally frightening and distasteful fullness
and must therefore be presented with a censored and incomplete and hence
patently unrealistic view of the world from which all the unpleasant elements
have been brutally excised by the bleep, the black bar, or the
airbrush—implements that without any detectable legitimate warrant this
gatekeeper has taken it upon himself to wield with veto-proof peremptoriness. And in this view of late-No. 4 Rambler
Johnson the twentieth-cum-twenty-first century reader or critic is partly
correct. He or she is correct in
assuming that late-No. 4 Johnson really did think he knew better than those
impressionable tots and footmen and serving-maids and sedan-chairmen what they should
be reading. But he or she is incorrect in
assuming that late-No. 4 Johnson predicated the constructing of an
impressionable reader-safe novel on any sort of qualification—let alone
abrogation or retraction—of the aesthetic realism advocated by early-No. 4
Johnson: to the contrary, late-No. 4 Johnson’s prescriptions constitute a
reaffirmation, a refinement, and an elaboration of the tenets set forth by early-No.
4 Johnson (hence, further, a worthy propaedeutic to the tenets set forth in the
preface to Shakespeare). Now it so
happens that my main Ziel, telos, or aim in this
quasi-lecture-cum-mini-curriculum is to persuade the reader that late No.-4
Johnson was entirely within his rights to assume that he knew better than his
impressionable contemporaries what those impressionable contemporaries should
be reading, and by extrapolation that a correspondingly well-seasoned
reader-critic of our own time (and no, I don’t mean the present writer
specifically) would be correspondingly within his or her rights to decide what
we (and yes, I do include the present writer in this collectivity)
impressionable readers should be reading (and listening to and watching). But I cannot arrive at this Ziel autc.
without ceasing to treat Johnson’s oeuvre as a closed system—without,
indeed and in particular, enlisting the aid of James Boswell; moreover, I ought
not even attempt to approach this Ziel autc. without first demonstrating
that late-Rambler Johnson’s literary aesthetic is sufficiently
realism-oriented, for there is assuredly no point in trying to make a case that
a certain person is qualified to be an arbiter of something (be it literature
or socks) if his principal idea on that something is fundamentally bonkers (if
he thinks that novels should be dumbed-down, airbrushed fairy tales or that
socks should only ever be worn on the hands).
So towards that intermediate Ziel autc. let us make a second pass
of our hermeneutic Dust Devil over Rambler No. 4 in search of any or all bits
of prose that through juxtaposition therewith may serve to acquit the passages
already quoted of the charge of pie-in-the-sky Pollyannaism. I reckon the most exculpatory such bit to be
the following:
The
chief advantage which these fictions [i.e. (yet again), novels] have over real
life is, that their authors are at liberty, tho’ not to invent, yet to select
objects, and to cull from the mass of mankind, those individuals upon which the
attention ought most to be employ’d; as a diamond, though it cannot be made,
may be polished by art, and placed in such a situation, as to display that
lustre which before was buried among common stones.
It
is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but
it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for
imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so
often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness. If the world be promiscuously described, I
cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as
safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shows all
that presents itself without discrimination.
Observe first of all, I beg
you, that Johnson postulates one limitation of the novelist’s art that places
him or her well to the realward of the fairy tale-teller: he or she categorically
is not “at liberty to invent objects.”
In other words, every person, place, thing, and state of mind described or
represented by the novelist must be something of a kind that actually exists,
and behave exactly as a person, place, thing, or state of mind of that kind
actually behaves. The novelist’s
license, as an artist, Johnson goes on to say, is confined to selecting
the objects that he or she will describe or represent; his or her art is
essentially and preeminently that of an editor in a quasi-cinematic sense. (It will be noted that this view anticipates
Johnson’s rejection of the dramatic unities in the Shakespeare preface, for in
flouting these unities the dramatist likewise selects and edits, splicing out
great swathes of space and time in order to bring together places and events
that are both mutually distant and mutually implicative.) The
alternative to a selective or editorial approach to novel-writing, namely a
“promiscuously” descriptive one that “shows all that presents itself without
discrimination” is bound to result in a text that is in the first place
superfluous (“I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account”), because
the human world itself already affords us plenty of promiscuous experience, and
dangerous, because that world itself is dangerous. “So you’re saying that Johnson is saying that
reading a journalistically realistic account of a holdup at gunpoint is as
dangerous as actually being held up at gunpoint.” No, I’m saying that Johnson is saying that reading
a journalistically realistic account of a holdup at gunpoint is as dangerous as
actually watching someone else being held up at gunpoint, as “turning the eye
immediately upon” such an event. “And
exactly how could that be dangerous, provided the spectator was unmistakably
out of harm’s way—say, concealed behind a bulletproof partition?” It could be dangerous if, say, the gunman
happened to be particularly witty and good-looking and made off with the loot
without actually having to shoot anybody, in that from all these particulars
you might conclude (as you would be all too inclined to do, this being the only
holdup at gunpoint you had ever witnessed), that gun-armed robbers weren’t such
awful people as they were made out to be, or even that holding somebody up at
gunpoint wasn’t a genuinely awful thing to do.
In demanding that “vice” as depicted in novels “should always disgust”
and that “the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, [not] be so united
with it, as to reconcile it to the mind,” Johnson is merely espousing on the
aesthetic plane what is a perfectly mainstream twenty-first century notion, a
notion that all of us accept under the auspices of various jargonic
designations—transference, peer pressure, the Stockholm Syndrome, etc.—viz.,
the notion that we can only be as well or badly behaved as the company we keep,
and that if we wish to behave better rather than worse than we do now, we must
associate with people who are better rather than worse behaved than we now
are. And as in life we select our moral
betters not from the pantheons of such chimerical entities as angels and
superheroes but rather from the available stock of actually extant men and
women, in novels we should not be presented with figures who are “angelically”
virtuous, virtuous “above probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never
imitate,” but merely with “the highest and purest [virtue] that humanity can
reach.” In neither case—in his
presentation of either virtue or vice—is the novelist expected to violate the
norm of realism any more than we violate the laws of physical probability in
managing to avoid the company of actual hucksters, pimps, and cutpurses.
Of course, here in the
early third millennium this avoidance is often treated as just such a physical
near-impossibility. I do not mean, of
course, that very many of us third-millennials actually end up consorting with
known or self-avowed hucksters, pimps, or cutpurses, but that we are fond of
supposing that everyone we know (including ourselves) has pronounced
hucksterish, pimpish, and cutpursish tendencies, tendencies that we not only
condone but embrace, snugly smug as we are in our conviction that they are
automatically and universally counterbalanced by contrary tendencies towards
philanthropy, puppy-dog succoring, and the like. “There is good and bad,” quoth one of our
leading saints, Sir Paul, “in all of us.”
Hence, in the name of realism people have come on principle to demand
literary and cinematic characters who are “deeply flawed,” yet at the same time
“deeply empathetic” (or “emotional”), characters who are shown committing
exactly one morally reprehensible act for every morally praiseworthy one (“One
minute the guy’s blowing some other guy’s head off with a sawed-off shotgun,
the next he’s reading his four-year-old daughter to sleep from The Little
Engine That Could—oh, the Oscarworthy verisimilitude!”) as if in compulsive
compliance with some alchemic superstition.
A similar—albeit much
more sophisticated—theory of the human moral composition and its claims on
literary mimesis enjoyed some currency in Johnson’s day, and in Rambler
No. 4 the Great Cham exacts few column-inches in endowing it with a second
evacuative cavity:
Some
have advanced, without due attention to the consequences of this notion, that
certain virtues have their correspondent faults, and therefore that to exhibit
either apart is to deviate from probability.
Thus men are observed by Swift [actually Pope] to be “grateful in the
same degree as they are resentful.” This
principle, with others of the same kind, supposes man to act from a brute
impulse, and persue a certain degree of inclination, without any choice of the
object; for, otherwise, though it should be allowed that gratitude and
resentment arise from the same constitution of the passions, it follows not
that they will be equally indulged when reason is consulted; yet unless that
consequence be admitted, this sagacious maxim becomes an empty sound, without
any relation to practice or to life.
Here, Johnson adds a
sorely exigent layer of phenomenal reality to the bicameral theory of
individual morality, the layer of deliberation.
While it is entirely possible that the same basic psychological
disposition to the world could incline a person to feel grateful on one
occasion and resentful on the next, it need not be his feeling at any given
moment that immediately determines his behavior at that selfsame moment, for he
may choose to behave either gratefully or resentfully (or indeed neither)
depending on which attitude he concludes is more just or appropriate after an
interval (which may of course be brief to the point of instantaneousness) of
deliberation, after considering whether he has any just or reasonable cause to
feel grateful or resentful. There needs
no ghost of an eighteenth-century literary critic to tell us this: each of us
can recall moments when we were on the verge of throwing a resentful tantrum or
crying a river of grateful tears in reaction to something somebody else said or
did for or to us, only to do neither or the opposite because we suddenly
realized our resentment or gratitude was unwarranted. Of course (again with the of course!),
many, most, or perhaps even all twenty-first century readers will balk at the
notion that it is reason that they are consulting during the
just-mentioned brief interval, believing as they do that reason is the
antithesis of emotion and hence fit for employment only by purebred
Vulcans and homicidal supercomputers; but the sort of reason Johnson has in
mind is hardly incompatible with emotional vitality—to the contrary, it may
cohabit with the most passionate emotional investment, an investment in, say,
not wishing to cause another person useless and unmerited pain (a wish that we
fail to fulfill when we are resentful of someone who has not injured us, or
ungrateful to someone who has helped us).
What makes such consultation reasonable, or, more idiomatically rational,
is not some supposed independence of emotion, but rather the mere fact that it
involves certain cognitive operations—comparing the present moment with others
in one’s own past experience or in the past experience of others, analyzing
concepts (Is So-and-So strongly guilty of a full-blown “snub” or weakly guilty
of a mere “oversight”) and so forth. And
to the extent that we admit that some people are much more skilled at or
habituated to performing such operations, or base them on much more solid
principles, than others, we must concede that Johnson’s recommendation of
morally lopsided characters—of characters who are much more good than bad or
much more bad than good—cannot be said to flout the realistic remit.
But something too much of
this for now. I have made the intrinsic
case for the realism-friendliness of Johnson’s poetics of novel-writing as best
as (so I flatter myself) it can be made; now I must make the case for Johnson’s
conviction that adherence to his aesthetics-cum-poetics will necessarily be
more beneficent, more productive of morally worthy behavior in readers, than
adherence to rival aesthetices-cum-poetices, and in particular to the Manichean
poetics of equipoised vice and virtue.
For in the end, the conclusion that a virtuous hero-centered novel need
be no less realistic than a rapscallion-centered one can be more than “an empty
sound, without any relation to practice or to life,” can have any bearing on
the sort of novel a would-be novelist chooses or is supposed to write, only so
long as readers are held to be “impressionable” enough to respond to characters
in a novel just (or at least as much) as they would to characters of the same
type in real life. Received opinion in
our so-called culture holds that only children are ever that impressionable,
and that their impressionableness decreases with age to the point of
nonexistence at the magical chronological milestone of 17. This milestone is of course one year shy of
our official age of majority, but it is, as they say, close enough for
government work. The calcification of
the last traces of impressionability by fiction is essentially held by us to be
coextensive with the attainment of adulthood.
At the age of eight we may (it is said) be forgiven for thinking that
the horrible man with the chainsaw is out to get not only the silly people in
the movie but also our mommy and daddy and us; at the age of eighteen we are
supposed to know better, and to be able to spectate on the simulated chainsaw-butchering
of thousands of people in succession with all the snifter-circulating
detachment that we might bestow on a mathematical proof of the derivation of
five from the addition of two and two, or a biopic of the present king of
France as played by the Easter Bunny. As
adults, we are supposed to know that movies and other fictive representations
have absolutely nothing in common with the real world, and to be utterly
impervious to suggestion by them. And
far be it from me to impugn the enlightenment, the matoority, the
irrevocable désabusement, of a single actual living number of my fellow
post-millennial over-18s! In the
interest of keeping their reputations for uncorruptedness (note that I do not
say incorruptibility) intact, I shall take my cautionary example from
Johnson’s own time and indeed Johnson’s own circle. Ladies and gentlemen—or, rather, fellow yobs
and yobesses—I present to you James Boswell from the age of eighteen onwards. Few young men of his time loved a realistic
fiction, a “comedy of romance,” more than James Boswell, and in his native city
of Edinburgh London London Walpole London
I..sallied
forth to the Piazzas in rich flow of animal spirits and burning with fierce
desire. I met two very pretty little
girls who asked me to take them with me.
“My dear girls, said I, “I am a poor fellow. I can give you no money. But if you choose to have a glass of wine and
my company and let us be gay and obliging to each other without money, I am
your man.” They agreed with great good
humour. So back to the Shakespeare
[tavern] I went. “Waiter,” said I, “ I
have got here a couple of human beings; I don’t know how they’ll do.” “I’ll look, your Honour,” cried he, and with
inimitable effrontery stared them in the face and then cried, “They’ll do very
well.” “What,” said I, “are they good
fellow-creatures? Bring them up,
then.” We were shown into a good room
and had a bottle of sherry before us in
a minute. I surveyed my seraglio and
found them both good subjects for amorous play.
I toyed with them and drank about and sung Youth’s the Season and
thought myself Captain Macheath, and then I solaced my existence with them, one
after the other, according to their seniority.
I was quite raised, as the phrase is: thought I was in a London
This is certainly a
squalid enough scene, but what is most striking about it for our proverbial
present purposes is not the squalor itself, but the means by which the recorder
of the scene seeks to redeem himself from that squalor. A self-aestheticizing rake of fifty or a
hundred years earlier—say, a Rochester—would have peppered his description of
one of his whoremongering sprees with classical allusions intended not to
ennoble the debaucherous acts he had been engaged in but rather to accentuate
their ignobility via the incongruously elevated pedigree of the names he was
associating with them, and thereby inoculate himself against any more than
transient association with his impromptu co-coitionists. “In calling that poxy doxy what I rogered
against a tree in St. James’s last night ‘Lesbia,’ and myself her ‘Catullus’,”
our Restoration rake would have quotht to himself, “I put her in her place and
keep myself in mine, ’cos after all she’s no Lesbia [N-swiving-B, you 21st-century
lot, in my day, the word for girl-on-girl cravings was “Sapphism” not
“Lesbianism”], whereas I bloody well am a Catullus, simply on account of being
a poet and knowing who Catullus and Lesbia were. So there!”
For Boswell, in contrast, whoremongering is worthy of aestheticization
in its own terms; it requires no high-burlesque refiguration as a tryst between
a god and a nymph or a swain and his inamorata; nor for him does aestheticizing
require him to distance himself from, to repudiate, the act of debauchery qua
act. (Indeed, he is quite content to
call what he has done “debauchery.” ) To
be alone with two or more women of easy virtue in an ordinary London tavern is
enough to make one feel that one is echoing, participating in, or fulfilling a
great literary work, because ordinary London taverns and ordinary London whores
are good enough for that great work’s hero, the great Macheath, who like Frank
Wedekind’s Lulu “feels no need to represent himself as anything other than what
he is”—viz. an ordinary (albeit exceptionally intrepid) highwayman. But why should what was good enough for
Macheath have been much more than good enough for Boswell? What in the living heck was it about this
twopenny-halfpenny presumptive nobody Macheath (the name “Macheath” means “Son
of the Heath” [i.e., Hampstead Heath] and hence bespeaks a parentage too humble
to be worth remembering) that made him an appealing so-called role model for
the likes of James Boswell, kinsman of the Stuart monarchs and future Laird of
Auchinleck? The answer to this question
is, I believe, contained in the genre of scenario that occasioned the
self-Macheathization. We do not, after
all (well, perhaps not “after all” for those who have not read the London
Journal from cover to cover, and who will consequently have to take my word for
this) ever find Boswell recording, say, “I..sallied forth to the Piazzas in
rich flow of animal spirits and burning with fierce desire for money. I met a very well-dressed gentleman at whose
breast I pointed my pistol whilst exclaiming, ‘Hand over to me every last
farthing in your possession!’” He does
not, in other words, take an interest in imitating every genre of act that
Macheath is capable of committing. All
we really have to go on in specifying this genre is the name of the song that
Boswell elects to sing out of the dozen or so appropriated to Macheath. And what does this selection tell us genre-wise? The key word in the above-quoted passage,
vis-à-vis cinching the answer to the question just asked, is “seraglio.” You see, “Youth’s the Season” hails from a
scene in which Macheath is sitting in a tavern where he is surrounded by seven
women of the town, who all coo over if him as if they think he’s the cat’s
pajamas as inhabited by the bee’s knees.
Boswell’s designation of his own mere brace of doxies as a “seraglio”
proves that it was the sheer populousness of Macheath’s feminine retinue that
appealed most to Boswell, and that it was this that he was striving to reconstruct
in hooking up with two girls at the same time.
In Boswell’s eyes Macheath was evidently most admirable in his capacity as
a kind of Christendom-inhabiting (albeit not exactly Christian) analogue to the
Turkish sultan with his infinitely expandable collection of wives. One should be on guard against poo-pooing the
allure, the aura, the glamour of such a figure too precipitately. For according to the admittedly dim and selective
lights of my knowledge of the so-called western canon, a figure of precisely
this sort was in 1728 without precedent in either ancient or modern Occidental
literature. To be sure, in classical and
classically derived literature there are numerous examples of men who inspired
boundless passion in specific women: for example, Ulysses in Circe, or Adonis
in Venus (who, while she may indeed
stand in like Chaka Khan for “every woman” in her capacity of the goddess of
love, is obliged to be enjoyed as an individual). And in modern literature one need look no
further than Shakespeare for scads of examples.
But none of these figures is ever represented as attractive to women in
general: while Juliet, for example, may regard Romeo as the handsomest man who ever
lived, for all we know not a single other scrotumless human in Verona would
have given him the time of day or forborne to kick him out of bed for eating
biscotti. The nearest thing to an
equivalent or precedent that I can recall is the Don Juan of Moliere’s play,
which (as near as I can recall) had never been a big hit north of the
Sleeve. And in any case, Don Juan is at
best a serial chick-magnet who can cuddle and carouse with only one woman at a
time, and who—perhaps even more unappealingly—is constantly obliged to work for
the regard and consent of his prospective conquests. The idea that a man might simultaneously attract
multiple women into his orbit by simply sitting still and being himself: this,
I would wager, is something entirely new in the western masculine Vorstellungsschaft. Of course, if one looks too closely at
it, the plausibility of the conceit evaporates: the women in Macheath’s
seraglio are not his wives, bound by law to coit with him and him alone, but
prostitutes, free and indeed bound to coit with every Tom, Dick, or Harry who
has a shilling to offer in return for the service; their devotion to Macheath
is obviously either false or doomed. But
the verisimilitude of so many of the elements of the ambient diagesis helps the
conceit to retain its speciousness, its semblance of coherence: the setting, is
after all, a plausible simulacrum of a London tavern; Newgate is a real London
prison; Lockit, Peachum, and indeed Macheath himself in his central function as
a highwayman are figures of a sort one might actually see in or in the
propinquity of that prison—why not dream that the plausibility of the whole is
capable of being miasmically imparted to the exceptional implausibility of a
single part? And when (ahem!) erecting
parallels to this situation in one’s own life, why not hope against hope that
the sordid actual particulars of the scenario at hand will likewise hoist it
aloft into the realm of the numinous?
Might not these two girls who have consented to share my company in the
absence of any prospect of remuneration other than a glass or two of wine prove
as devoted to me as Macheath’s “seraglio” was to him? Well, it is certainly worth a try, or rather,
two tries—after which, well, mightn’t I as well regard my own double-charged potency
as sufficient proof?
Something too much of this. I hope that it has done something in the way
of fine-tuning and fleshing out Johnson’s admonitions on morally mixed
characters—of giving some appetite-inducing heft and concreteness to his rather
attenuatedly abstract “graces of gaiety.”
Young Boswell’s case vis-à-vis Macheath suggests that in order for a
literary character to exert any sort of influence on a reader’s behavior, he or
she must possess qualities that are not only intrinsically engaging but that are
also lacking in both the reader’s own life and in the world of the established
literary canon—that he or she must both fill a niche and fulfill a wish, a wish
that need be none too refined or elaborate; and further that the aspects of such
a character’s moral makeup that do not impinge on that niche or that wish are
essentially the equivalent of inactive ingredients in a medication: if they are
missing or defective (read: insufficiently realistic), the medicine will not go
down, but when they are present and integral (read: sufficiently realistic)
they effect no change in the organism. “This is all shaping up to look rather more
like a case in refutation of Johnson’s thesis than a case in illustration of
it.” You mean, I suppose, on account of
all the bad Macheathean things Boswell didn’t do and indeed was never
even tempted to do? “Yes, on account of
those, but also on account of the fact that the one Macheathean thing Boswell
did do—namely, enjoy mutually consensual coition with two prostitutes—is
arguably neither vicious nor sinful.”
You won’t prevail upon me to take the merest first baby-step into that
particular moral maze, sir. And indeed I
shan’t have to take it, because in the present setting it really doesn’t matter
what you or I think of whoremongering; in the present setting it is indeed
enough to know that Boswell himself sternly disapproved of whoremongering to
surmise that he might have done better to spend fewer of his teenage hours
spectating on the antics of Macheath &co.
To be sure, the above-quoted passage from the London Journal
gives no hint of the just-now-mentioned disapproval, but this is because it is
too tightly implicated in the idiotopic aestheticizing moment. Bereft of its very first sentence, in which
Boswell concedes that “animal spirits” and “fierce desire” were the principal
impetuses to his “sallying forth to the Piazzas,” the passage would lead one to
believe that it was a record of spontaneous mutual affection arising among three
totally financially disinterested parties and terminating in no consequence
more dire than mutual gratification. In
his later journals, Boswell by contrast consistently writes of his bouts of
whoring in a thoroughly self-flagellatory tone, devoting a minimum but
adequately unflattering amount of his attention to his co-coitionists, and
attributing his out-seeking of them to some outright Jekyll-and-Hyde-esque
transformation of his personal essence, a transformation generally attributed
in turn to overindulgence in the daemon alcohol. “Fair enough, but surely you can’t prove
that The Beggar’s Opera was the efficient cause of Boswell’s
whoremongery, that had he never read the play or seen a performance of it he
never would have coited with a single so-called lady of the night.” Indeed I can’t, for the cussedly unbudgeable
reason that both Boswell’s first reading or viewing of The Beggar’s Opera
and his first visit to a so-called lady of the night antedate the period when
he began regularly keeping a journal, and so we do not know which even happened
first. But never mind that, for your
chicken-and-egg demurral is as far beside the point as your earlier demurral
centering on the conjectural innocuousness of prostitution. The point is that Boswell never wanted to be
a whoremonger, and there is absolutely no doubt that The Beggar’s Opera made
it easy for him to talk himself into believing that he was not mongering whores
when he was doing just that. To clarify
this whole matter, allow me to draw not for the first time (i.e., in this
we***g albeit not in this essay) on the work of the famous American philosopher
Harry G. Frankfurt, in this case on his distinction between first and
second-order volitions. First-order
volitions, according to Frankfurt , are desires that come to us unbidden and over
which we have no control; second-order volitions are desires by which we seek
to govern our first-order volitions; they are “what we want our will to be,”
and in fully-fledged persons it is they and not first-order volitions that ideally
govern conduct. A person may on occasion
or even frequently act on first-order volitions that are in conflict with his
second-order volitions, but he will always subsequently regret having done so,
because it is by his second-order volitions alone that he gauges his own
conduct. Like most men Boswell had
second-order volitions to be loved by women in general and to avoid venereal
disease, volitions that while often difficult to reconcile with each other in
practice are not intrinsically mutually contradictory (this because enjoying
the attention of women does not automatically entail copulating with them);
like most men, too, he was subject to a first-order volition to copulate with
any specific woman who was willing and available, a volition that is statistically
if contingently irreconcilable with both of the preceding first-order
volitions. The example of Macheath led
young Boswell falsely to believe that this first-order volition was not at odds
with those second-order volitions, and thereby to indulge regretlessly for a
time in behaviors that he deemed unwise and indeed vicious.
Something too much of this,
the last of the present essay’s exhaustible thises (The third time is a
charm, nest pah?). It is time at last to
demonstrate the numerical equivalence (or at least near-equivalence) of the conclusion
to be drawn from the present Boswellian-Johnsonian syllabus and the Chinese
price of tea that is the conjectural present reader’s own disposition to
literary artifacts; to demonstrate to him or her that he or she should be as
wary of the influence of such artifacts as Samuel Johnson thought the readers
of novels should be and as James Boswell apodictically should have been. Firstly to this end then: Boswell’s case
demonstrates, as Rambler No. 4 Johnson’s arguments on their own do not
do, that it is foolish to relegate susceptibility to literary representations
to life’s earliest phases, to conjecture that it is something that one more or
less inevitably grows out of along with a belief in Santa Claus (or, yes, the
Easter Bunny) or that money grows on trees—this because the errors and sins
that such representations persuade one to commit are not always of a sort to
which only a child who has not attained the age of discretion is liable. By The Beggar’s Opera the average
five-year-old scion of an eighteenth-century land-owning family may have been
tempted to take up thievery because he was unaware of the place of thievery in
what Johnson called “the system of life”: unaware that the nature of their
occupation prevented thieves from walking about openly in public; that being a
professional thief is incompatible with being an upstanding landed proprietor
and justice of the peace like his old man, whom he admires and aspires to be,
and so on. An average eighteen-year-old
scion of an eighteenth-century landowning family has long since been immunized
against this temptation, but he remains vulnerable to certain others because
not all the social phenomena represented in The Beggar’s Opera are as
demonstrably inimical to the lifestyle of a country squire, or as inalienable
from the lifestyle of a highwayman, as thievery is. Most men—including alike most thieves and
most country squires–desire the admiration of women. The odds of obtaining such admiration from a
prostitute may have been low but they were not non-existent, and the temptation
to try those odds was always a live one, given that consorting with prostitutes
was a practice common to all ranks and classes of men. And what was good and bad for the
eighteenth-century prospective country squire must likewise be good and bad, mutatis
mutandis, for his twenty-first century counterpart, for the twenty-first
century man or woman who either already has or may reasonably expect to have
some (I admit it in this so-called day and age it is devilishly hard to write
the following words with a straight face) socially respectable and responsible position
to fill. To be sure, the mutatis
to be mutandi’d are both numerous and in need of radical mutation. For example, it is difficult nowadays to make
prostitution seem glamorous as a scene and end in itself. A few 70s blaxploitation movies aside, the
pimp has lately been a universally reviled figure, an abusive, petty,
avaricious scoundrel held up to the reader or viewer’s hatred and scorn from
beginning to end; while the prostitute’s client, the so-called John, is
invariably portrayed as the ultimate loser, a pathetic homunculus who turns to
commercial sex only because he is so charmless and physically repulsive that
not a single woman on the face of the earth will consent to coit with him for
free. Only is the hooker herself is ever
seen in a flattering light, but never qua enthusiastic or even resigned plyer
of her métier; she is always seen to have turned to prostitution only as a last
resort beyond the last resort, and to be saving up every last penny towards her
enfranchisement from the loathsome trade–an enfranchisement that the viewer
cannot believe will be long in coming, as she is always portrayed by
Hollywood’s current highest-grossing female lead. On the other hand, certain sectors of the
criminal demimonde that were formerly too remote from the reader’s or viewer’s
lifeworld to incite literal mimesis and were therefore depicted with a mixture
of denigrative realism and idealizing romanticism are now shown in a realistic
yet flattering light; and the folkways of these sectors are adopted as moral
and spiritual signposts even by people whose (again one can scarcely forbear
sniggering) station in society might seem to preclude such adoption. I am thinking here of the world of the
Italian-American mafia as depicted in certain sorts of motion-pictural
productions, the first of which was The Godfather and in whose company I
include not only that movie’s two sequels but also such non-Coppolan entities
as Goodfellas and The Sopranos.
Of course, there were plenty of movies and TV shows about the mob before
The Godfather, but in these the gangsters were essentially depicted
along the lines of Macheath and his fellow cutpurses in The Beggar’s Opera,
as loveable rogues whose walk of life the viewer had no expectation would ever
cross his own. Much as one admires Frank
Sinatra’s bird-pulling prowess in Guys and Dolls, one would never dream
of exchanging professions with him. With
The Godfather, the mobster becomes for the first time a figure who is
seen to possess both substantial power in the world and significant insight
into its workings. The message of such
opera (sic) is no longer that the petty, insignificant criminal underworld evinces
certain instructive if ultimately trivial resemblances to the grand,
significant governmental overworld, but that the underworld is ultimately
grander and more significant than the overworld, whose pseudo-potentates are
merely putting on a show of being in charge while being jerked about like
marionettes by their infinitely awe-inspiring gangland masters. The locus classicus of this phenomenon
is Godfather II’s treatment of the Cuban revolution, wherein a sagacious
Mafioso twigs the imminent overthrow of the Batista regime while a clueless
U.S. senator blithely tipples and gambles in the Mob’s casinos as if it’s still
1929. The Mafioso in today’s Kulturslandschaft
is both the paragon of and a panderer to the sociological type that David Riesman,
at the dead center of the twentieth century, termed the “inside dopester,” a
person who craves information on the hidden machinations of power not so much
behind the official closed doors as behind the unofficial closed doors that lie
behind them—sometimes as a mere voyeuristic gossip-monger, sometimes as an
active coveter of real power. If he is
the former gossip-mongering subtype, he will console himself for all the
fetching and carrying and bowing and scraping he is obliged to do in his place
of employment with the thought that his nominal superiors are mere toadies and
nonentities in their own right, if the power-coveting type he will embolden
himself with the thought that if he merely manages to cut through all the
namby-pamby bullshit procedurals and ceremonials with sufficient ruthlessness, his
nominal superiors will soon be fetching and carrying for and bowing and
scraping to him. Of course, in the
present system of life none of this will fly, because at bottom the namby-pamby
bullshit ceremonials and procedurals of this system are no less exigent to its
maintenance than their eighteenth-century counterparts were to the maintenance
of its predecessor. But as in The
Beggar’s Opera, the photographic realism of the matte background painting—of
the representation of social and historical context—serves to conceal the
impracticability of the local mise en scène: there really was a Cuban revolution in 1959,
the casinos were really mob-owned, George Raft really did perform in them, and
so on. And so those members of the TV
and movie-viewing public whose first-order volitions to be an asshole are not
kept in check by second-order volitions to be a nice guy do their utmost to
actualize a gangsterish ethos within the actual, present namby-pambyish system of
life: they make a point of mercilessly bullying those (e.g., retail service
workers) who fall into their power, however nominally and briefly; and they
recompense every real or perceived slight, however slight, with torrents of
abuse and vindictive snubbage. But even
nice-guyward tending second-order volitionally endowed people are likely to
have this second order volition trumped by a rival and by no means analytically
reprehensible second-order volition to be, as they say, in the loop, to be an
inside dopester in the above-mentioned weaker voyeuristic sense. They are likely, in other words, to feel
demoralized at the reflection that in fulfilling the requirements of their jobs
and treating others fairly they have shown themselves to be simps, goody-goodies,
and squares unworthy of access to the inner sanctum, the holiest of holies; and
hence, although not succumbing to the would-be Mafioso’s ethos themselves, to
cut the would-be Mafiosi in their personal lifeworlds far too much slack. And it is by the hope of re-moralizing those
that I am brought full circle to Samuel Johnson’s prescription of characters
who embody “virtue not angelical, nor above probability,” yet for all that “the
highest and purest that humanity can reach.”
And now that I am arrived here, I am reminded by Johnson’s notion of
barely sub-angelic virtue of a certain fictional character in recent popular-cultural
history who fills that notion with a form-fitting literality that Johnson could
not have expected or indeed wished of any personage in the hyper-anti-romantic
novels of his own day. The reader is
doubtless familiar with a wildly successful so-called arthouse movie filmed and
initially released in the late 1980s, Wim Wenders’s Himmel über Berlin Los Angeles
[1] For example, John Richetti: “The
contradiction between Johnson’s admiration for realism in literature and his
fear of its ambiguous moral effects is worked out in [Rambler No. 4], by
his insistence that although ‘the greatest excellency in art’ is to ‘imitate
nature,’ authors must decide which parts of nature are ‘most proper for
imitation.’ […] Add to the almost irresistible power they can exert Johnson’s
recognition of the new appeal of the novel beyond an educated elite to its
primary and dangerously impressionable audience—such books are ‘written chiefly
to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of
conduct, and introductions into life,’ and much of this essay highlights the
potential moral hazards of the new novel (a recurring concern, by the way,
among moralists throughout the century). And yet, in literary
criticism from his later years, Johnson is consistently on the side of
the natural in literature—what we would call realism—often ridiculing what seem
to him ludicrous fictions and poetic conventions (such as those found in
pastoral poetry). He praises Shakespeare in his preface to his edition of
the dramatic works, for example, as the poet of nature: ‘his drama is the
mirror of life.’ Shakespeare, says Johnson, ‘has no heroes; his scenes
are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should
himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.” “Fiction” (Chapter 23) of Samuel Johnson
in Context, edited by Jack Lynch (Cambridge