time and plainly {184} influenced most of the
writers of his own and the following generation, even men so great as
Gibbon and the young Ruskin, and women so brilliant as Fanny Burney.
Then a reaction came and it was generally denounced as pompous, empty
and verbose. After the Revolution people gave up wearing wigs, and
with the passing of wigs and buckle-shoes there came a dislike of the
dignified deportment of the eighteenth century in weightier matters
than costume. Now Johnson, whatever he did at other times, was
commonly inclined to put on his wig before he took up his pen. His
elaborate and antithetical phrases are apt to go into pairs like people
in a Court procession, and seem at first sight to belong altogether to
what we should call an artificial as well as a ceremonious age. His
style is the exact opposite of Dryden's, of which he said that, having
"no prominent or discriminative characters," it "could not easily be
imitated either seriously or ludicrously." Johnson's could be, and
often was, imitated in both spirits. Even in his lifetime, when it was
most admired, it was already parodied. Goldsmith was talking once of
the art of writing fables, and of the necessity, if your fable be about
"little fishes," of making them talk like "little fishes"; Johnson
laughed: upon which Goldsmith said, "Why, Dr. Johnson, {185} this is
not so easy as you seem to think: for if you were to make little fishes
talk, they would talk like whales." That was the weak spot in Johnson
on which the wits and critics seized at once: there is a good deal of
misplaced magniloquence in his writings. When the sage in _Rasselas_
says, "I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and
the happy commerce of domestic tenderness," we now feel at once that
the simple and natural thought gains nothing and loses much by this
heavy pomp of abstract eloquence. So when Johnson wants to say in the
eleventh _Idler_ that it is wrong and absurd to let our spirits depend
on the weather, he makes his reader laugh or yawn, rather than listen,
by the ill-timed elaboration of his phrases: "to call upon the sun for
peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm
us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly." So much
must be admitted. Johnson is often turgid and pompous, often grandiose
with an artificial and undesired grandiloquence. No one, however, who
has read his prose works will pretend that