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

Johnson also finds many works which fail to achieve an "artful intertexture" and thus succumb to tediousness. If Prior's Solomon is tedious because it lacks dialogue, other works are tedious because they contain almost nothing except dialogue. Milton's Paradise Regained is one such work. Johnson writes that Paradise Regained is "every-where instructive," and contains many "exalted precepts of wisdom" (Lives I: 188) . However, he thinks the poem is more instructive than pleasurable: "the basis of Paradise Regained is narrow; a dialogue without action can never please like an union of the narrative and dramatick powers." Milton reverses Prior's imbalance: Solomon contains 2652 lines of narration with almost no dialogue; Paradise Regained contains 2070 lines of dialogue with almost no action. In both cases the lack of variety causes the reader to lose momentum.

Butler's Hudibras is another instructive poem made tedious by a superabundance of dialogue. In Hudibras, Butler not only champions Johnson's beloved Royalists but also adds much to "the general stock of practical knowledge." However, Butler's poem is less pleasing than it might have been because there is too much talk and not enough action:

I believe every reader regrets the paucity of events, and complains that in the poem of Hudibras, as in the history of Thucydides, there is more said than done. The scenes are too seldom changed, and the attention is tired with long conversation. (Lives I: 211) Cowley's Davideis is full of "wit and learning," but the reader of Cowley's poem is "never delighted" (Lives I: 55). When Cowley decided to leave this poem unfinished, Johnson deadpans, "posterity lost more instruction than delight" (I: 54) . Why does The Davideis fail to please? Johnson says it is because Cowley's abortive epic contains little that can "reconcile impatience or attract curiosity" (I: 51). The poet expends all of his energy on a "tedious" accumulation of conceits and digressions. He describes everything at excessive length. When he describes the Angel Gabriel, for instance, he cannot "let us go till he [has] related where Gabriel first got his skin, and then his mantle, then his lace, and then his scarfe" (I: 53, emphasis added).

Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel supports "the king's friends," i. e. the Tories, and attacks "the faction which, by lord Shaftesbury's incitement, set the duke of Monmouth at its head," i.e. the Whigs (Lives I: 373) . Few poems could have been more gratifying to Johnson's own Tory political views. And yet strong political affinity does not keep Johnson from recognizing a certain tediousness in the poem:

The subject had likewise another inconvenience: it admitted little imagery or description, and a long poem of mere sentiments [opinions] easily becomes tedious; though all the parts are forcible and every line kindles new rapture, the reader, if not relieved by the interposition of something that soothes the fancy, grows weary of admiration, and defers the rest. (I: 437)