Lecture 10

The Age of Johnson

Plan:

1. Samuel Johnson

2. Thomas Gray

3. Robert Burns

4. William Blake

The Age of Johnson

The period coming after Pope and Swift (both of whom died in the mid-1740's) and preceding the Romantic poets in the 1790's is often called the Age of Johnson, since Johnson was a versatile writer and dominant personality whose career spanned most of those years. But it would be truer to say that no single writer epitomizes the age, which is more easily described as a highly varied transition between he Augustan and Romantic periods than as a unified whole.

The 1740's were the time of greatest experiment and change. Even while Pope's last poems were appearing, a number of younger writ­ers rebelled against his standards and methods. They published odes and other lyric forms that represented a direct challenge to the epigrammatic couplets and moralized sentiments of Pope and his contemporaries. Pope had regarded his art as a craft that could be learned by disciplined labor. Poets like William Collins, in his Ode on the Poetical Character, and Thomas Gray, in The Bard, proclaimed poetry to be an inspiration that resembled divine cre­ation. Some years later, in 1759, Edward Young summed up the new ideals in Conjectures on Original Composition, in which he called for originality rather than Augustan versification of "what oft was thought." Young denied that poetry could be rationally interpreted: "There is something in poetry beyond prose reason; there are mys­teries in it not to be explained, but admired." The actual results of these poets, however, were often slender and disappointing. As the young William Blake would sarcastically observe, they called on the Muses for inspiration but seldom got it: "The languid strings do scarcely move! /The sound is forced, the notes are few!" And in fact the best poems of the period, before the great lyrics of Burns and Blake in the 1790's, were the most old-fashioned and conservative: Thomas Gray's Elegy, Oliver Goldsmith's Deserted Village, and Samuel Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes and shorter pieces.

A more successful experiment took place in prose fiction, which made rapid advances in the 1740's and produced two masterpieces, Samuel Richardson's tragic Clarissa and Henry Fielding's comic Tom Jones. Thereafter, however, the novel too lost momentum, despite Tobias Smollett's lively narratives and Laurence Sterne's witty Tristram Shandy, which made fun of the usual conventions of novel writing. So in spite of its early promise, this form of literature too fell into decline, until it was revived in the early nineteenth cen­tury by ]ane Austen and Walter Scott.

Much of the best writing in the second half of the eighteenth cen­tury was done outside the usual boundaries of "literature." If the years between 1740 and 1790 witnessed the appearance of no really great poet or playwright, they saw the works of the greatest British philosopher, David Hume; the greatest political writer and orator, Edmund Burke; the greatest biographer, James Boswell; the greatest historian, Edward Gibbon; and (some would argue) the greatest liter­ary critic, Samuel Johnson. The work of each of these writers tes­tifies to a special concern with real life. Many people looked down on imaginary fictions, regarding them as trivial and escapist, and preferred to read what modern scholars have called "the literature of experience." But they enjoyed this kind of writing precisely because it was imaginative as well as factually accurate. When Burke studied the details of British administration in India or America, he made them live through the power of his moral indignation. When Gibbon pored over ancient coins and documents to reconstruct the history of Rome, he did so with the passion of a man who had dedicated his life to explaining why a great empire should decline and fall. England too had gained a great empire and hoped to rule it wisely. Burke and Gibbon, like Hume who served as a diplomat and Johnson who wrote nobly against ill-considered war, were deeply committed to making their learning and powers of expression useful to the life of their country.