e novelists of
our own, about the danger of detailed enumeration by which description
so often loses all its power: for "of the greatest things the parts are
little." Now he is incidentally laying down the true ideal of the
translator: to "exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of
diction as the author would have given them, had his language been
English." Now he is discoursing at length on what it was Wordsworth's
misfortune never fully to understand, the immense power of association
upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and noblest emotions fail of
their effect if expressed in words ordinarily connected with trivial,
vulgar, or ignoble actions, and therefore necessarily arousing in the
reader a state of mind unfit for the reception of greatness. Or again
he will speak of the value of surprise in literature; "the pleasures of
the mind imply something sudden and unexpected." Or he will enlarge,
as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of
similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls
"exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of
representative metres and onomatopoeic words. No one will pretend that
all he says in these general excursions is final: but it is always the
work of a man who had {230} read a great deal and had applied a very
vigorous mind to what he had read. For all these reasons the _Lives of
the Poets_ will always be eagerly read by those who wish to understand
a great man and a great period of English literature. But they will be
read still more for their pleasantness, humanity and wisdom.

CHAPTER VI

THE FRIENDS OF JOHNSON

Johnson thought human life in general, and his own in particular, an
unhappy business. Boswell once urged, in reply to his melancholy, that
in fact life was lived upon the supposition of happiness: houses are
built, gardens laid out, places of amusement erected and filled with
company, and these things would not be done if people did not expect to
enjoy themselves. As so often happens in these arguments Boswell
appears to us to be substantially right. But the only reply he drew
from Johnson was, "Alas, sir, these are all only struggles for
happiness." And he went on to give a curious illustration of his
rooted conviction that every man knew himself to be unhappy if he
stopped to {231} think about it. "When I first entered Ranelagh it
gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind such