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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
This is one of those passages which shows, as Walter Jackson Bate has written, that "almost every aspect of [Johnson's] thought is. . intimately connected with all the others" (vii) . Johnson is in fact reiterating a point he had made fifteen years earlier in his Preface to Shakespeare: "upon the whole, all pleasure consists of variety" (Yale VII: 67). But Johnson's psychology of literary response is also intimately connected with his psychology of everyday life.5 According to Johnson, we respond to a book in much the same way that we respond to life itself. As participants in life, "we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something new, and begin a new persuit" (Yale III: 35). As readers, "we love to expect; and, when expectation is disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting." In both cases the emphasis is not on attaining the object but on the expectation of attainment. As Johnson says in Rambler 71, "the pleasure of expecting enjoyment. . . is often greater than that of obtaining it" ( Yale IV: 9) . It is this power of expectation which must be continuously re-evoked if literature is to be kept from stagnating. In order to please, an author must satisfy our need for variety by cultivating what Johnson calls "artful intertexture."
In his criticism Johnson points to a number of works which please precisely because they achieve such "artful intertexture." Pope's Windsor Forest is one such work. In this poem, Johnson explains, Pope excels in "variety. . . and the art of interchanging description, narrative, and morality." As the reader makes his way through the poem, his "attention" is continually "excited by diversity" (Lives III: 225).
When it comes to prose style,Johnson is generally thought of as an uncompromising advocate of parallel structure and balance, but Johnson believed that Dryden's critical prefaces were delightful largely because of their stylistic variety: "none of his prefaces were ever thought tedious. They have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled; every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls in its proper place" (Lives I: 418).
However, Johnson reserves his highest accolades for Shakespeare's plays. He explains in his dedication to Lennox's Shakespear Illustrated that it is "variety" which makes Shakespeare's plays "more entertaining than those of any other Author" ( Yale VII: 49) .Johnson also stresses this point in his notes on specific plays. Macbeth has a pleasing "variety of . . . action" (VIII: 795), and Coriolanus "a very pleasing and interesting variety" of characters (VIII: 823) . Romeo and Juliet is "one of the most pleasing of our author's performances," in large part because its scenes are "busy and various" (VIII: 956) . The scenes in Othello are artfully "varied by happy interchanges" (VIII: 1048) . In Antony and Cleopatra "the variety of incidents" and "frequent changes of the scene" help to keep "curiosity always busy, and the passions always interested."6 In King Lear the Gloucester sub-plot brings an "addition of variety" which helps the play keep attention "strongly fixed" (VIII:703-04). Johnson thinks that Hamlet is an especially diverse work, even by Shakespeare's standards: [W] e must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety.... The scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity. . . New characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation . . . and every personage produces the effect intended. (VIII: 1011)
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