art, life itself
raised as it were to a higher denomination, a power of spirit--

"Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce."

It is the measure of the distance we have travelled away from Johnson
that even plain people to-day, if they care for poetry at all, find
much more in it than a piece of cunning craftsmanship. It is always
that no doubt: but for us to-day it is also something far higher: a
symbol of eternity. And more than a symbol, a sacrament: for it not
only {207} suggests but reveals: it _is_ the truth which it signifies;
itself a part, as all those who have ever profoundly felt its influence
are assured, of the eternal order of things to which it points.

Plainly, then, some of the things which now seem to us to be of the
very innermost essence of poetry are not things which can be weighed in
any scales known to Johnson. Yet in spite of his limitations he is
certainly one of the masters of English criticism. The great critic
may be said to be one who leaves the subject-matter of his criticism
more respected and better understood than he found it. Johnson's
principal subjects were the English language, the plays of Shakespeare,
and the poets from Cowley to his own day. There can be no question of
the services he rendered to the English language. His Dictionary, as
was inevitable, had many faults, especially of etymology: but its
publication marks an epoch in the history of English. It was a kind of
challenge to the world. Other nations had till then inclined to look
upon our language and literature as barbarous: and we had not been very
sure ourselves that we had any right to a place on the Parnassus of the
nations. Great men in Italy and France had thought those {208}
languages worth the labours of a lifetime. In England before Johnson's
Dictionary, nothing had been done to claim for English an equal place
with Italian or French in the future of the literature and civilization
of the world. What companies of learned men had taken generations to
do for foreign countries had now been done for England in a few years
by the industry, and abilities of a single scholar. Englishmen who
took a pride in their language might now do so with understanding:
foreigners who wished to learn English could now learn in the method
and spirit of a scholar, no longer merely as travellers or tradesmen.
The two folio volumes of the Dictionary were the visible evidence that
English had taken its place i