s, and in the vast majority of matters all times are
ordinary, Johnson is the man. The Prime Minister is not the whole of
the body politic, of course: and there are purposes for which we need
people with more turn than Johnson for starting and pressing new ideas:
but these will come best from below the gangway; and they will be none
the worse in the end for having had to undergo the formidable criticism
of a Prime Minister whose first article of faith is that the King's
government must be carried on. The {171} slow-moving centrality of
Johnson's mind, not to be diverted by any far-looking whimsies from the
daily problem of how life was to be lived, is not the least important
of the qualities that have given him his unique position in the respect
and affection of the English race.

CHAPTER V

JOHNSON'S WORKS

In his lifetime Johnson was chiefly thought of as a great writer.
To-day we think of him chiefly as a great man. That is the measure of
Boswell's genius: no other biographer of a great writer has
unconsciously and unintentionally thrown his hero's own works into the
shade. Scott will always have a hundred times as many readers as
Lockhart, and Macaulay as Trevelyan. But in this, as in some other
ways, Boswell's involuntary greatness has upset the balance of truth.
Johnson's writings are now much less read than they deserve to be. For
this there are a variety of causes. Fourteen years before he died,
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth; and fourteen years after
his death Wordsworth and Coleridge published the volume which, more
perhaps than any {172} other, started English literature on its great
voyage into seas unsailed and unimagined by Johnson. The triumph of
the Romantic movement inevitably brought with it the depreciation of
the prophet of common sense in literature and in life. The great
forces in the literature of the next seventy or eighty years were: in
poetry, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats; in prose,
Scott, and then later on, Carlyle and Ruskin; every single one of them
providing a wine by no means to be put into Johnsonian bottles.

Johnson, even more than other men in the eighteenth century, was
abstract and general in his habit of mind and expression. The men of
the new age were just the opposite; they were concrete and particular,
lovers of detail and circumstance. The note of his writings had been
common sense and rugged veracity; the dominant notes of