read with interest, profit
and admiration. After all poetry is an art as well as an inspiration:
it may almost be said to be a business as well as a pleasure. There is
still, when all has been said, that indispensable alloy of prose in its
composition without which it crumbles into fragments, or evaporates
into mere mist. The critical questions which Horace and Boileau and
Pope discuss do not include the highest: but they include much that no
poet can put aside as beneath him. In this field Johnson ranks among
the masters of criticism. His mind did not travel outside its limits,
but to the work to be done within them it brought knowledge,
reflection, vigour and acuteness. His reading had shown him how the
writing of verses, the construction of sentences, the {226} effective
use of words, had advanced from the uncouthness and extravagance of the
Elizabethans and Jacobeans to the amazing brevity, finish and dexterity
of Pope. It is good for us to see it too with his eyes. We are apt to
see only the beauty and truth that were lost in the process, and the
mechanical clockwork that followed upon its completion. These he could
not see: but we are in no danger of forgetting them, while we are in
danger of forgetting that Pope's achievement gave us the most quotable
verse that ever was written, and that his brilliancy and wit quickened
the powers of expression of a whole nation. To understand this is well
worth while: and Johnson helps us to understand it. Nor will the fact
of his thinking that Pope improved upon Homer and that his translation
is a model of melody, do us any harm: for we are not likely to follow
him in either opinion.

As literary criticism the greatest of the _Lives_ are those of Cowley,
Dryden and Pope. But Johnson is not to be altogether despised even
where he is plainly inadequate. Some of his strictures upon the poets
whom he did not understand are sound enough in themselves: there is
little to say against them except that they stand alone. The defect in
his criticism of _Lycidas_ is not that he attacks the mythological
confusion of the poem--which is in fact {227} its weakness, not its
strength; but that he gives no hint of sensibility to its haunting
beauty of phrase, of melody, of association, of passionate feeling, not
perhaps for its nominal subject, but for the brief life of human
friendship, for the mingled tragedy of love and fame and death. So
again with Collins and Gray. Johnson