ng such notes, common till lately
in France, as "cela n'est pas francais," "cela ne se dit pas," "il faut
ecrire"--such and such a phrase, and not the phrase used by the poet
receiving chastisement. But Johnson does conclude his plays of
Shakespeare with such remarks as: "The conduct of this play is
deficient." "The passions are directed to their true end." "In this
play are some passages which ought not to have been exhibited, as we
are told they were, to a maiden Queen." The substance of these
comments may often be just, but for us their tone is altogether wrong.
We no longer think that a critic, even if he be Johnson, should
distribute praise or blame to poets, even of much less importance than
Shakespeare, with the confident assurance of a school-master looking
over a boy's exercise. Johnson's manner, {177} then, as a critic was
against him with the nineteenth century. But so also was his matter.
The poetry he really believed in was that of what the nineteenth
century came to regard as the age of prose. Of his three great _Lives_
we feel that those of Dryden and Pope express the pleasure he
spontaneously and unconsciously felt, while that of Milton is a
reluctant tribute extorted from him by a genius he could not resist.
Among the few poets in his long list for whom the nineteenth century
cared much are Gray and Collins; and of Collins he says almost nothing
in the way of admiration, and of Gray very little. Even when he wrote
of Shakespeare, to whom he paid a tribute that will long outlive those
of blind idolatry, what he praised is not what seemed greatest to the
lovers of poetry in the next generation. A critic who found "no nice
discriminations of character in Macbeth," and defended Tate's "happy
family" ending of Lear, was not unnaturally dismissed or ignored by
those who had sat at the feet of Coleridge or Lamb.

There is still one other thing which told against him. No one
influenced the course of English literature in the nineteenth century
so much as Wordsworth. And Wordsworth was a determined reformer not
only of the matter of poetry but of its very language. {178} He
overstated his demands and did not get his ideas clear to his own mind,
as may be seen by the fact that he instinctively recoiled from applying
the whole of them in his own poetical practice. But he plainly
advocated two things as essential parts of his reform; poetry was to go
back for its subject to the primary universal facts