a special task committed to them, the establishment of English prose; and as capable of being warped and narrowed in their judgments of poetry by this exclusive task. Such is the common course and law of progress; one thing is done at a time, and other things are sacrificed to it. We must be thankful for the thing done, if it is valuable, and we must put up with the temporary sacrifice of other things to this one. The other things will have their turn sooner or later. Above all, a nation with profound poetical instincts, like the English nation, may be trusted to work itself right again in poetry after periods of mistaken poetical practice. Even in the midst of an age of such practice, and with his style frequently showing the bad influence of it, Gray was saved, we may say, and remains a poet whose work has high and pure worth, simply by his knowing the Greeks thoroughly, more thoroughly than any English poet had known them since Milton. Milton was a survivor from the great age of poetry; Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift were mighty workers for the age of prose. Gray, a poet in the midst of the age of prose, a poet, moreover, of by no means the highest force and of scanty productiveness, nevertheless claims a place among the six chief personages of Johnson's Lives, because it was impossible for an English poet, even in that age, who knew the great Greek masters intimately, not to respond to their good influence, and to be rescued from the false poetical practice of his contemporaries. Of such avail to a nation are deep poetical instincts even in an age of prose. How much more may they be trusted to assert themselves after the age of prose has ended, and to remedy any poetical mischief done by it! And meanwhile the work of the hour, the necessary and appointed work, has been done, and we have got our prose. Let us always bear in mind, therefore, that the century so well represented by Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift, and of which the literary history is so powerfully written by Johnson in his Lives, is a century of prose, a century of which the great work in literature was the formation of English prose. Johnson was himself a labourer in this great and needful work, and was ruled by its influences. His blame of genuine poets like Milton and Gray, his overpraise of artificial poets like Pope, are to be taken as the utterances of a man who worked for an age of prose, who was ruled by its influences, and could not but be ruled by them. Of poetry he speaks as a man whose sense for that with which he is dealing is in some degree imperfect. Yet even on poetry Johnson's utterances are valuable, because they are the utterances of a great and original man. That indeed he was; and to be conducted by such a man through an important century cannot but do us good, even though our guide may in some places be less competent than in others. Johnson was the man of an age of prose. Furthermore, Johnson was a strong force of conservatism and concentration, in an epoch which by its natural tendencies seemed to be moving towards expansion and freedom. But he was a great man, and great men are always instructive. The more we study him, the higher will be our esteem for the power of his mind, the width of his interests, the largeness of his knowledge, the freshness, fearlessness, and strength of his judgments. The higher, too, will be our esteem for his character. His well-known lines on Levett's death, beautiful and touching lines, are still more beautiful and touching because they recall a whole history of Johnson's goodness, tenderness, and charity. Human dignity, on the other hand, he maintained, we all know how well, through the whole long and arduous struggle of his life, from his undergraduate days at Oxford, down to the Jam moriturus of his closing hour. His faults and strangenesses are on the surface, and catch every eye. But on the whole we have in him a fine and admirable type, worthy to be kept in view for ever, of "the ancient and inbred integrity, piety, good-nature and good-humour of the English people." It was right that a Life of Johnson himself should stand as an introduction to the present volume, and I long ago conceived the wish that it should be the Life contributed by Lord Macaulay to the Encyclopædia Britannica. That Life is a work which shows Macaulay at his very best; a work written when his style was matured, and when his resources were in all their fulness. The subject, too, was one which he knew thoroughly, and for which he felt cordial sympathy; indeed by his mental habit Macaulay himself belonged, in many respects, to the eighteenth century rather than to our own. But the permission to use in this manner a choice work of Lord Macaulay's was no light favour to ask. However, in my zeal for the present volume I boldly asked it, and by the proprietors of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Messrs. Black, it has been most kindly and generously accorded. I cannot sufficiently express my sense of obligation to them for their consent, and to Mr. Trevelyan for his acquiescence in it. They have enabled me to fulfil a longcherished desire, to tell the story of a whole important age of English literature in one compendious volume, — itself, at the same time, a piece of English literature of the very first class. Such a work the reader has in his hands in the present volume; its editor may well be fearful of injuring it by a single superfluous line, a single unacceptable word. |