mmon
Prayer, in whom a hurried reader might frequently omit half a phrase
without depriving his hearers of an ounce of meaning. But you cannot
do that with Johnson. Words that add neither information nor argument
to what has gone before are exceptionally rare in him. Take his style
at its worst. "It is therefore to me a severe aggravation of a
calamity, when it is such as in the common opinion will not justify the
acerbity of exclamation, or support the solemnity of vocal grief."
Heavier writing there could scarcely be. But every word has its duty
to do. The supposed speaker has been saying that he is, like Sancho
Panza, quite unable to suffer in silence; and he adds {192} that this
makes many a misfortune harder for him to bear than it need be: for it
may arise from an injury which other people think too trifling to
justify any open expression of anger, or from an accident that may seem
to them so petty that they will not endure any serious lamentation
about it. Johnson's way of saying this is pompous and rather absurd;
but it is not verbose. So when he says that he knows nothing of Mallet
except "what is supplied by the unauthorized loquacity of common fame,"
it is possible to dislike the phrase; it is not possible to deny that
the words are as full of meaning as words can be.

The fact is that Johnson's style has the merits and defects of
scholarship. He knows, as a scholar will, how every word came upon the
paper, consequently he seldom uses language which is either empty or
inexact; but with the scholar's accuracy he has also the scholar's
pride. The dignity of literature was constantly in his mind as he
wrote; and he did not always write the better for it. Books in his day
and in his eyes were still rather solemn things to be kept above the
linguistic level of conversation. Dryden and Addison had already begun
to make the great discovery that the best prose style has no conscious
air of literature about it; but the new doctrine had not reached the
{193} mass either of writers or readers. And it never completely
reached Johnson. He himself once accidentally gave one of the best
definitions of the new style when he said of Shakespeare's comic
dialogue that it was gathered from that kind of conversation which is
"above grossness and below refinement." And at the end of his life he
even occasionally produced some good specimens of it. But, taking his
work as a whole, it must be admitted that he could r