"The most fatal of all faults": Samuel Johnson on Prior's Solomon and the need for variety

Johnson gives two reasons why Prior's poem fails to please. The first has to do with Prior's versification. In the Life of Milton Johnson explains why he believes rhyme is vital in English verse:

The musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together: this co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds, and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. (I: 192)

Here Johnson imagines that rhyme will prevent one line from "mingling" its sounds with the next, but in Solomon rhyme does not serve this function, for Prior has admitted what Johnson calls "broken" or "interrupted" lines:

In his preface to Solomon he proposes some improvements [to the heroic couplet], by extending the sense from one couplet to another, with a variety of pauses. This he has attempted, but without success; his interrupted lines are unpleasing, and his sense as less distinct is less striking. (II: 209)

Anyone who glances back at the excerpts from Solomon which I have quoted above will see what Johnson has in mind. Whereas Johnson's couplets are generally end-stopped, Prior more frequently carries the sense across a rhyme. In general, the results are not particularly satisfying. Enjambment robs the rhymes of much of their emphasis, and Prior loses the succinctness and detachability of the couplet without gaining the flow of blank verse. His sense is indeed "less distinct," and his couplets are certainly less memorable: when was the last time you heard someone quote a couplet from Solomon?

However, Johnson insists that the most devastating weakness of Solomon has to do not with versification, but with organization and disposition. In The Life of Dryden Johnson explains that "Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention" (I: 454). Johnson thinks that Prior's Solomon fails to do this. Prior "perceived. . . many excellences" in his poem, but he "did not discover that it wanted that without which all others are of small avail, the power of engaging and alluring curiosity" (II: 206). Johnson insists that the wisdom of Solomon is vitiated first and foremost by tediousness:

The tediousness of this poem proceeds not from the uniformity of the subject, for it is sufficiently diversified, but from the continued tenour of the narration; in which Solomon relates the successive vicissitudes of his own mind, without the intervention of any other speaker or the mention of any other agent, unless it be Abra: the reader is only to learn what he thought, and to be told that he thought wrong. The event of every experiment is foreseen, and therefore the process is not much regarded.2

It is this same-ishness or predictability, more than anything else, which ultimately sinks Prior's poem. That Johnson was able to discover and admit this flaw in a poem which expresses so many of his own views is remarkable. It shows the radical honesty of his judgment and indicates that he distinguished carefully between ideological and aesthetic excellence.