n the literary polity of Europe. They
were the fit precursors of the triumphant progress soon to be made by
Burke and Scott and Byron. The other great service which Johnson
rendered to our language by his Dictionary and its Preface could only
have been rendered by a man so superior to the narrowness of
scholarship as Johnson. No doubt as a single individual in a private
position he was not exposed to such temptations to law-giving arrogance
as the French Academicians. But nevertheless it is to his credit that
he frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209}
life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of
the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the
seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile
immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was
to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be
punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both
his melancholy and his common sense taught him that "language is the
work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be
derived." He knew that words coming from human mouths must follow the
law of life: "when they are not gaining strength they are losing it."
His business was not the vain folly of trying to bind the future in
fetters: it was to record the present use and past history of words as
accurately as he could ascertain them, and, by showing Englishmen what
their heritage was and whence they had received it, to make them proud
of its past and jealous of its future. The pedant wishes to apply a
code of Median rigidity to correct the barbarous freedom of a language
to which scholarship has never applied itself. Johnson gave our
savages laws and made them citizens of a constitutional state: but,
however venerable the laws and however little to be {210} changed
without grave reason, he knew that, if the literary polity of England
lived and grew, new needs would arise, old customs become obsolete, and
the laws of language, like all others, would have to be changed to meet
the new conditions. But the urgent business at that moment was to
codify the floating and uncertain rules which a student of English
found it difficult to collect and impossible to reconcile. Johnson
might often be wrong: but after him there was at least an authority to
appeal to: and that, as he himself felt, was a great step forward: for
it is