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

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1997 by Davis, Matthew M

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Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.... every couplet when produced is new, and novelty is the great source of pleasure. Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he first wrote it, or contracted his work till his ebullitions of invention had subsided. And even if he should controul his desire of immediate renown, and keep his work nine years unpublished, he will still be the author, and still in danger of deceiving himself.4 Since Johnson believes that tediousness is difficult for authors to detect, it is not surprising that the adjective "tedious" comes up again and again in his criticism, particularly in the Lives of the English Poets. Prior's Henry and Emma is "a dull and tedious dialogue" (II: 202-03). Rowe's Golden Verses are "tedious" (II: 77) . Blackmore's King Arthuris "tedious and disgusting," but John Dennis's criticism of the poem is even "more tedious and disgusting than the work which it condemns" (II: 238). The king's speech in Dryden's Annus Mirabilis is "rather tedious" (I: 434). "Of the ancient poets, every reader feels the mythology tedious and oppressive" (I: 213).

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In each of these cases, and in many other cases which it would be tedious to enumerate,Johnson avoids subjective statements. He does not say, "I find X tedious." He says either "X is tedious," or else, in the last instance, "every reader feels that X is tedious." In other words, he presents his verdicts not as idiosyncratic and subjective responses but as objective and universally-accepted judgments. This method of presentation gives Johnson's opinions an aura of authority and inevitability: the declaration "X is tedious" is rhetorically stronger than the statement "I think X is tedious." But Johnson's reasons for expressing himself in this fashion are not (I think) primarily rhetorical. Rather, this aspect of his style grows out of his belief in the fundamental sameness of human nature.

If every mind is fundamentally different, then we should expect a variety of reactions to any set of words put down on paper. But if all minds are essentially similar, then we should expect substantial agreement. Johnson believes that the latter proposition is true. He believes, as I have already suggested in my brief discussion of Newtonian metaphors, that there are laws of human psychology just as there are laws of physics. Intellectual fashions come and go, but beneath these ephemeral influences there exist certain "general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated" ( Yale VII: 62) . In The Life of Butler Johnson traces the literary phenomenon of tediousness back to these "general passions and principles" which agitate the mind: The great source of pleasure is variety. Uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of excellence. We love to expect; and, when expectation is disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting. For this impatience of the present, whoever would please must make provision. The skillful writer iritat, mulcet [agitates, then soothes]; makes a due distribution of the still and animated parts. It is for want of this artful intertexture and those necessary changes that the whole of a book may be tedious, though all the parts are praised. (I: 212)

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

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1997 by Davis, Matthew M

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