Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory

4

Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson’s Criticism of Shakespeare

THE DEDICATED eighteenth-century scholar must be very wary of those (like me, I confess) who peer back into his period with a sensibility tuned to, or formed by, all that comes from the other side of the Kantian revolution. And so the eighteenth-century scholar normally is, with a proper sense of his professionalism and of his territorial rights. He must warn the interloper, who may be anxious to reinterpret major figures or documents, of the dangerous likelihood that the post-Kantian mind may assimilate pre-Kantian attitudes only by transforming and distorting them. Yet, despite such dangers and the warnings that accompany them, I shall proceed to exercise just such freedom—though I hope not altogether carelessly—on some critical notions of Samuel Johnson, in the hope that there are corresponding advantages for the period specialist to have this outsider’s view, despite its occasional perversions, thrust upon him. I should like to study closely certain of Johnson’s pronouncements with the (almost unscholarly) naiveté of open encounter, even as I admit that such readings are affected by the alien perspective of their source.

Let us examine three of Dr. Johnson’s central claims, all made in his “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765), together with the several, sometimes rather strangely instructive ways they tend to disagree with one another. First, the early axiom: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.”1 Here is an august contention of more than a century and a half, the “just representations” echoing the French seventeenth century, as reflected in the conservative half of Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” and the entire notion accounting for “the great style” called for by Johnson’s friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Disc`ourses.

We can note in the statement that curious juxtaposition of the rationalist’s assumptions of a general nature with the empiricist’s concern with audience reaction (the notion of pleasing many and pleasing long). Thus, although there is no questioning of the dogmatic belief in the objective existence of discoverable universals, there is also the insistence that the sanction for these universals comes, not from a priori deductions from the nature of things, but from the combined judgments of individual experiences.2 The justification of the neoclassical canon arises, then, “not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind,” but from a Hume-like confidence in the collective observations of common sense. Indeed, like the David Hume with whom he would least like to be associated, Johnson trusted that the differences among enough idiosyncratic judgments of assorted kinds (many and long: enough judgments spread over enough time) would resolve themselves, for a distanced observer, into universal wisdom, however empirically derived. Given sufficient subjects sufficiently varied, their many partial perspectives would cancel one another out, unpeeling the layers of idiosyncrasy until the core of their common humanity stood revealed as their common-sense judgment. This explains why the century is “the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever advantages [the poet] might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been lost.” And Shakespeare, unable to rely on “effects of favour and competition,” “his friendships and his enmities,” on factions or on the indulgence of vanity or gratification of malignity, can appeal only to the audience’s “desire of pleasure” and can win their praise “only as pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, [his works] have past through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at every transmission.”

In the mirror-universe of universals, like recognizes like, so that the universal subject reflects the universal object. The general nature outside us, then, is the natural object of the general human nature in us which responds to it. And, as is true even of so rigorous an empiricist as Hume, there is for Johnson no questioning of the rationalist assumption that is smuggled in, the assumption that there surely is, beneath the infinite variety of individuated nature and of the individual human responses to it, a general nature and a general core of human nature. As the particulars of nature can be shed to reveal the underlying universal that sustains them, so our particular responses can shed what is partial about them to reveal the response of a common humanity. It is this response, of course, that the critic, as disinterested observer, is to achieve; and that, with the aid of more than a century of varied responses, he is with older writers enabled to achieve. He is, in effect, to check his idiosyncrasies together with his overcoat when he enters the museum of literature, thus attaining the view of common humanity, although with recent writers this is more difficult since we do not yet have enough variety of responses for the necessary canceling out of partialities to have occurred. The empirical consequences of the School of Taste, then, have made themselves felt even though they serve only to bolster the governing claims of rationalistic universalism, whose objective status is not shaken. The advent of epistemology has not, after all, chased the dogmatic certainty of metaphysics from the scene. But such certainty now must depend upon experiential verification if we are to feel convinced. So a good deal has been given away, even if the kind of art justified by our responses is the same as that dogmatically insisted upon from the nature of things.

But whatever their sanction, whether from without or within, whether objective or commonly subjective, the universals themselves continue to be affirmed, continue to be sought after as both the metaphysical and the aesthetic object of art. Thus Johnson’s often cited praise of Shakespeare as “the poet of nature,” with nature at once defined in universal terms. Instead of characters “modified by the customs of particular places” or “by the peculiarities of studies or professions” or “by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions,” Shakespeare’s “are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.” Not particularities, peculiarities, or accidents, but the universality of common humanity. Instead of the individual, Shakespeare gives us the species.

Such characters “act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion.” This notion of the poet providing a “system of life” in accordance with general principles would seem to require him to provide us with a tight, rationally justifiable series of causal relationships between motive and action. Hence Johnson can claim favorably, a bit later in the essay, that “Shakespeare always makes nature predominant over accident.” He excuses Shakespeare’s carelessness with “distinctions superinduced and adventitious” (“His story requires Romans or Kings, but he thinks only on men”) by giving the poet the right to overlook “the causal distinction of country and condition.” The poet, then, in service of the universal system, rather than the particular aberration, is to neglect the casual for the causal. (And I mean to dwell on this strangely anagrammatic and contradictory pair of words.)

It is just two brief paragraphs later that Johnson, defending Shakespeare’s mingling of tragic and comic as true to life, refers to our common experience (hence nature?) as a “chaos of mingled purposes and casualties.” And it is just this chaos of casualties which he praises Shakespeare, his poet of nature, for imitating. But how radically the notion of nature as his object of imitation has shifted! Now the causal has been forsaken for the casual. Far from being overlooked, the casual is, however maddening, to be cherished as all there is. Here, then, is Johnson’s second claim which I wish to consider—especially in its apparent contradiction of the first.

True, Johnson is now addressing a different issue; but the implied consequences of his argument here reverberate harshly against his earlier claims about universals. Johnson’s claim here is that the dramatic categories of tragedy and comedy are arbitrary and hence artificial impositions upon the undifferentiated materials of life which the poet must imitate. Shakespeare’s only obligation was to these materials, so that it is dully conventional of us to complain of his failure to pursue bookish distinctions among genres. But Johnson carries his argument with more vigor and extremity than is required, and its theoretical consequences—provided we take them seriously—will persist to haunt his more orthodox claims.

He speaks of the world Shakespeare was imitating as “the real state of sublunary nature,” a disorderly, purposeless mass of particulars which are surely resistant to the neat, man-made, critic-made categories of tragedy and comedy. Johnson may strike us almost like an anti-Frye critic of today speaking of “sublunary” experiential realities, in opposition to universal lunar inventions, as the proper subject of poetry. However it may be up there in the supernal world or the world of human invention—the lunar sphere—down here we must put up with

the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design. (p. 245)

Precisely—without design.3 What else could we expect of a world described as a “chaos of mingled purposes and casualties”? No wonder, then, that Johnson speaks of “endless variety.” In this mood he continually calls for endless variety or diversity, apparently forgetting about the unity which is the central quality of the causally controlled system he called for earlier. A world “without design,” a chaos in which all is casual, is obviously resistant to any attempt to impose a causal system which must rest on universal models of possible relations among its seeming particulars (only seeming particulars because in such a system there are no true particulars insisting on their particularity). But in the chaos of casualties, without design, there can be only the resistant particulars, the “endless variety” and “innumerable modes” precluding the gathering together of particulars into universals that could constitute a system. The poet who before was praised for overlooking the casual for the essential is now praised for cultivating the casual since there is no essential.

We can now consider in a rather changed light Johnson’s earlier pleasure with Shakespeare’s naturalness, a naturalness so great “that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction” (p. 242). Indeed, there would seem to be a greater merit in Shakespeare’s resistance to fiction, in the directness of his mingling with the unfictional stuff of experience. The word “merit” is applied to fiction almost ironically, the “merit of fiction” turning out to be merely meretricious. Fiction is thus mere artifice mediating unnecessarily between the poet and reality. Indeed, Johnson can treat fiction with downright contempt. Witness his pronouncement in “Milton,” where he complains of the unnaturalness and hence the insincerity of Milton’s lament in Lycidas as demonstrated by his dependence on mythological allusions: “Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” For Johnson, mythology is a likely dress for fiction, and his antagonism to the stereotyped artificialities of the one is key to his rejection of the other. We can recall his preference for Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” over Pope’s attempt at an “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day” largely on the ground that the one is derived from history and the other from mythology: “history will always take stronger hold of the attention than fable.”4 This is to say, better fact than fiction as the subject of poetry. And this too is pretty much what he does say when he expresses his pleasure over the subject of “Eloisa to Abelard” because the story is drawn from “undisputed history” (and “The heart naturally loves truth”).5

The basic error, the one he attributes to Milton, is bookishness, the seeing of nature—in the words he quotes from Dryden—“through the spectacles of books.” This is why, for Johnson, Milton’s “images and descriptions of the scenes and operations of Nature do not seem to be always copied from original form, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation.”6 And it is why Shakespeare is so ideally the poet of nature. Refusing to allow “the books of one age [to] gain such authority, as to stand in the place of nature to another … Shakespeare, whether life or nature be his subject, shews plainly, that he has seen with his own eyes” (p. 266). This echoes Johnson’s earlier claim that Shakespeare “caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him” (p. 243).7 Here is a preview of the spirit of Wordsworth, and of his words that speak of keeping his eye on the object. It is a similar response to a similar rejection of artifice as mediator.8

In Johnson it can become a rejection of the neatness of universalizing systems too. His famous comparison between the small proprieties of Addison’s Cato and the magnificent monstrosities of Shakespeare (“Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare, of men”) leads him to denigrate, in Cato, the “splendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners” (another contemptuous treatment of the sense of fiction). The metaphor by which his comparison proceeds is positively Gothic and reminds us of Johnson’s young friend Edmund Burke on the sublime.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished unto brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals. (p. 261)

Although the sense of the passage is common in the century and some of the language is reminiscent of a critic as early as Addison himself,9 we have seen enough of the theoretical context in Johnson out of which this passage emerges to be persuaded of its profoundly nominalistic tendencies. In its heterodoxy the passage rejects the sense of universal order, emphasizing—along with the “endless diversity” of Shakespeare’s forest—the equal role and equal necessity of the weeds and brambles with the myrtles and roses, of the impurities and meaner minerals with the gold and diamonds. Here is the metaphorical equivalent of the “chaos of mingled purposes and casualties” in which “many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.” It is the revelation of such uncontrolled diversity which the limiting conventions of fiction—all that which is of art, artificial—are designed to inhibit. And Johnson’s occasional addiction to a radical naturalism leads him to reject such inhibitions of history’s unrestrained dedication to the casual.

Just about all definitions of poetry since Aristotle had rested on a distinction between poetry and history (as empirical reality), between the “ought” and the “is” or “was,” the causal and the casual; yet Johnson at times blandly takes on history’s casual truths as the poet’s. That he is running afoul of the Aristotelian tradition of poetry-as-making as well as the neo-Platonic tradition of the poetic fable as mask for the true and the good seems not to disturb Johnson in these passages—perhaps because he is so firmly committed to just such notions in his own more orthodox passages elsewhere. For the Platonist, of course, experiential reality (Sir Philip Sidney’s “brazen” world) is just not good enough—which is why the poet creates the fable, the fiction (to return to that key word), that invokes the “golden” world. This is consistent with the formula of the conservative Scaliger that calls upon the poet “to imitate the Truth by fiction.” This is Truth with a capital “T” and to serve it is the highest function poetry can hope for. But history’s truth (or rather lower-case truths, endlessly multiplied and related) are a far lesser sort, though they seem to be all that concern Johnson in these passages.

Yet when Johnson complains about Shakespeare’s failure to write with a moral purpose because he is “so much more careful to please than to instruct,” he seems to be complaining precisely about what he has been praising Shakespeare for doing. For the moral order he now wishes to see operating in the plays could operate only if the casual, disorderly realities were forsaken for a rational, universal system of possible relations. Fact would have to be forsaken for a fiction in the service of the higher Truth. Nevertheless Johnson, apparently reverting to the universalism we found in him at the start, charges that Shakespeare “makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance” (p. 249). How different a sort of universe and how different a function for poetry this call for poetic justice assumes, if we recall his description of “the real state of sublunary nature” of only a few pages back. Johnson can say here, rather stiffly, “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place,” and with these words returns us to the confident universalism we just saw him challenging so profoundly. But in his “Milton” Johnson gives his own powerful answer to the moralism of this passage, an answer far more in keeping with the tone we have been developing in the “Preface.” “Dryden, petulantly and indecently, denies the heroism of Adam because he was overcome; but there is no reason why the hero should not be unfortunate except established practice, since success and virtue do not go necessarily together” (“Milton,” p. 458). “Except established practice”: here poetic justice is reduced from the imperious demands of the moral universal to the conventions, the fictions, of earlier books which threaten to take the place of nature. Success and virtue not going together is here claimed to be the way of the experiential world which the poet may well imitate, and with no obligation—it would follow—to make a “just distribution of good or evil” such as Johnson demanded of Shakespeare.10

The reduction of moral universal to fictional convention returns us to what is theoretically crucial about Johnson’s defense of Shakespeare’s violation of the purity of genres, his collapsing of tragedy and comedy. Actual human experience is out there in all its chaotic, casual contingency, beckoning the poet to follow it without mediation; and the conventions of art threaten, by their arbitrary habit of dividing and limiting, to inhibit the poet from capturing the endless variety or diversity of life. Yet the only justification for the genres appears to be limited capacities of narrower poetic sensibilities to pursue more than one sort of experience.

Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualties the ancient poets, according to the laws which custom had prescribed, selected some the crimes of men, and some their absurdities; some the momentous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occurrences; some the terrours of distress, and some the gayeties of prosperity. Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy … considered as so little allied, that I do not recollect among the Greeks or Romans a single writer who attempted both. (p. 245)

How arbitrary it all seems, and how nominal. We have “the names of tragedy and comedy,” suggesting entities of no substance. The laws governing genres are prescribed by no more than custom, custom developed to suit the convenience of insufficiently ambitious writers. It is therefore clear that, if a Shakespeare violates such customs and writes “contrary to the rules of criticism,” we must choose him rather than the rules since “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.” And, we have seen, Shakespeare has more of nature in his work than criticism would normally allow. We are a long way here from Pope’s dogmatic confidence about the rules: “The rules of old discover’d, not devis’d, / Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz’d.” For we have moved from the objective, the metaphysically sanctioned, to the nominally conventional.

This is the heart of the difference between what lies behind the first of Johnson’s claims and the second. The generalizing insisted on by the first, whatever its deceptive basis in a pseudo-empiricism, postulates universal structures as objective realities; the second posits an irreducible chaos of errant particulars, upon which all attempts at classification become arbitrary and deluding superimpositions. Is the lunar transcendentally real and the sublunary a delusion? Or is the sublunary all we can know, with the lunar an unreachable fiction, at least for the poet in his proper function? What is at stake is both a metaphysic and an aesthetic, both a definition of nature and a definition of the function of art. Since the mimetic workings of poetry are not in question, the issue must concern the nature of that reality which is the object of imitation. Which is to say that the issue is metaphysical. Either there is an objective structure or there is not; the role of particulars, as well as the existence of universals, must follow accordingly. Consequently, the poet must either bypass the peculiar properties of the particular in order to imitate its universality or he must dwell on its peculiarities since there is no going beyond them. We all know about Johnson’s properly neoclassical impatience with numbering the streaks on the tulip, but we must remember also his praise of Shakespeare as “an exact surveyor of the inanimate world; his descriptions have always some peculiarities, gathered by contemplating things as they really exist” (p. 266). Again the preview of Wordsworth’s injunction about keeping the eye on the object.11

It would of course be foolish to press the Johnson of these (almost post-Kantian?) naturalistic claims too strongly. I have pushed him as hard as I have only because the other, safer one has been so much more commonly with us. The fact that he can so blithely utter an eighteenth-century commonplace right after a suspiciously revolutionary suggestion indicates how secure he remained in his orthodoxy—so secure that he could not see how profoundly some of his own subterranean tendencies threatened it. We have seen him juxtapose contrary, if not contradictory, meanings and tones to words like “fiction” or the “casual”; or follow his momentarily radical empiricism with his steadfast didacticism. Notice how easily he moves as he argues (pp. 245–46): “… there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.” Then, without pause, “The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing” (p. 245). He can then shift his argument from the nature of things to the nature of the audience. The “mingled drama” can instruct as much as the pure genre and it can please more by appealing to the audience’s love of variety (“all pleasure consists in variety”—a strong statement for a stalwart representative of a tradition almost wholly focused on unity). Yet Johnson can properly insist on justifying the combining of tragic with comic elements by asking only that they “cooperate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation.” Has he already forgotten that the major initial thrust of his argument for mixing genres rested on a denial of any general system, rested rather on the need for poetry to reproduce the sublunary state that is without design?12

The ins and outs and inbetweens of these varied and undulating moments in Johnson could occupy us much longer, but with little additional profit, I believe. What I have been finding in his criticism, as I find it in his poetry and in his life, is a fundamental allegiance—a willed commitment—to those dogmatic beliefs whose universalism and objectivity gave such comfort, such assurances of order and sanity, to his predecessors and contemporaries; this allegiance together with a fearful suspicion of alien forces, inhospitable to the anthropomorphic tendencies of human reason and incapable of being absorbed by them. These forces are defiant of order and make us anxious about whether the general structure in which we have reposed our confidence really belongs to the universe or to our own fictional needs to shape a universe out of our wishful thinking. Clearly it is the Johnson of affirmation who is dominant, who barely acknowledges the existence of doubt. But the other, half unadmitted, shows his hand (or his sleight-of-hand), though damaging the consistency of the discourse. He is the one, of course, who has interested me as the alien intruder upon his period; and he is the one who so clearly foreshadows what lies just ahead in metaphysics and literary theory.

The all-or-none polarity in some of these contradictory impulses is reflected in the theoretical extremes that see the poem either as partaking wholly of the order of art, of total system, or as forsaking all system for a living reality seen as “without design.” In the first case nature (like the poem imitating it) is made into the order of the artful; in the second the poem (as art escaping from its own nature) is made into the disorder of “sublunary nature,” nature in its raw, un-neoclassical, anaesthetic naturalness. If the first sees poetry exclusively as artful unity (with little concern about the breadth and resistance of materials unified), the second sees art exclusively as unartful variety (with little concern about art’s need to create some perceptible system after all). Although, clearly, Johnson is so steeped in the tradition of unity that he is in little danger of being captured by the consequences of his more extravagant statements that appear to call for unmitigated variety, those statements seem to stand—in their antagonism to art and to the restrictions of conventional fictionality—as blatant examples of what has been called the fallacy of imitative form.

But there is that in Johnson’s “Preface” which mediates with brilliance and, once more, with prophetic light between the implied extremes of aesthetics and anti-aesthetics. This is the third area of claims with which, by way of epilogue, I mean to close. They occur in the well-known defense of Shakespeare’s neglect of the unities. Again the arguments themselves were by this time standard, one crucial argument coming as early as Sidney; but their theoretical significance, especially as they reflect on the others that have busied us here, is of great concern in Johnson.

Johnson’s defense of Shakespeare, which involves his attack on the unities of time and place, finds him insisting both on the distinction between art and immediate reality and on their profound and intimate relationship. It was the case, after all, that the rationale for such unities as Castelvetro and, after him, the French proposed rested on a confounding of art and life, through a strange commingling of the physical circumstances of the audience in the theater and the fictional time and place represented on the stage. Since the audience has not moved and since very little time has elapsed during their stay in the theater, they will not find credible any gaps of time or shifts of place on the stage. The time-and-place circumstances in the play should come as close as possible to reproducing those of its audience. Thus the theater of delusion must rest, theoretically, on our capacity to confound the play with reality, our reality—which is to say it must rest on our incapacity for fiction and its illusion. And this attitude sounds not altogether dissimilar to what we have seen of Johnson in his second, anti-aesthetic disposition. At the same time it must be granted that, whatever their theoretical foundation, these unities demanded the sort of artificial contrivances that seemed most annoying to Johnson’s realistic temper. And it was perhaps on these grounds that Johnson found himself forced to oppose them. When Johnson opposes these unities, then, it is not surprising that we find him turning on himself, moving to a defense of illusion, and, with it, of fiction and its artful accompaniments.

When Sidney denied the charge that the poet was a liar, he did it by arguing for the illusionary or fictional aspect of poetry as a feigning or a “figuring forth.” In thus detaching the poet from fact (“for the Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lyeth”), Sidney uses the make-believe of fictional place on the stage to make his point: “What child is there, that coming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great Letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?”13 Here is the basis for Johnson’s famous, but similar, attack on the theater of delusion, “that place cannot change itself … that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis”:

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this, may imagine more. (p. 254)

The argument for the theater of conscious illusion clearly rests on the argument for its fictitiousness. And on this matter we again find Johnson turning himself around (pp. 255–56): “The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction [my italics]; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.” Like Sidney, Johnson emphasizes the hypothetical, iffy nature of drama: it is not “that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed.” It is not what we feel, but what we would feel if we “were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done.” “It is credited with all the credit due to a drama … a just picture of a real original.” But credited only so far. For, always self-conscious of our role as spectators, we know “that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.” The fiction does not quite tease us out of thought, not ever, “from the first act to the last.” We should not violate the spirit of the frame by expecting to be shaded by trees or cooled by fountains represented in a painting, Johnson warns, much in the spirit of one who would ask that we not rush onstage to rescue Desdemona toward the close of Othello.

All this is, clearly, Johnson’s consciousness of “our consciousness of fiction,” such as we have not seen in him earlier. The poem may be—nay, must be—like reality, but the imitation is not to be confounded with its object; nor is the mimetic process, as the making of art, to be underestimated. Thus it is that, in this mood, Johnson, while willing to forgo the unities of time and place, insists on the unity of action. Nothing else may be “essential to the fable,” but this unity is. When the other unities are further condemned because, “by circumscribing the extent of the drama, [they] lessen its variety” (a familiar argument drawn from the Johnson of several pages back), he conveniently ignores the fact that even the unity of action is a circumscribing and limiting affair. Some inhibiting of unlimited variety, after all, is what unity is all about. This concession to the unity of action marks the advance of these claims of Johnson over the second we considered.

Elsewhere too he reverts to his realistic framework as he persists in having Shakespeare’s unity of action an especially free and even various one. Johnson acknowledges Shakespeare’s failure to have

an intrigue regularly perplexed and regularly unravelled; he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is seldom the order of real events, and Shakespeare is the poet of nature: But his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle, and an end; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion follows by easy consequence. (p. 253)

But is this, we might ask, “the order of real events”? Should not Shakespeare, as the poet of nature, be exempted even from such mild impositions upon the variety with which he pursued the infinitely various order of real events? Still, Johnson has by now advanced beyond the applicability of these damaging questions. He can conclude his acknowledgment of Shakespeare’s meager unity: “… the general system makes gradual advances, and the end of the play is the end of expectation.”

So we are back to a “general system” after all. But it is no longer, in this context, the general system with which we began. Johnson may not have been able to rest in the unrestricted variety implied by the realism of his most anti-bookish, anti-systematic moments, but neither is his only alternative an externally imposed general system. It is now the system created by the poet as his fictional unity of the endless variety found in “the real state of sublunary nature,” a unity freed of all artifice but that required to be “a just picture of a real original.” If the first claims of Johnson we considered, all-universalizing as they were, seemed exclusively dedicated to an existentially blind unity; if the second, in their particularization, seemed anarchically dedicated to variety; these third seem to point ahead to the organicist’s call for unity in variety, for a discordia concors.

It was in this spirit, I believe, that Johnson earlier spoke of what so moved him about the strangely realistic genius of Shakespeare: “Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful” (pp. 243–44). In this spirit too, in his “Cowley,” Johnson improves upon Pope’s definition of wit, rather considering it as that “which is at once natural and new, that which though not obvious is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just … that, which he that never found it, wonders how he missed.…”14 In such passages, the later English poet-critic whom Johnson reminds me of is not Wordsworth, but Coleridge, who, in the Biographia Literaria (chap. XIV), described Wordsworth’s imaginative task and his own in their plan for the Lyrical Ballads in much the same way: “the two cardinal points of poetry,” from which the description develops, are “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.” Are we so far from Johnson? “Approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful”; the natural and the new; the “just picture” and the “real original”; fiction and the endless diversity. More than theoretical inconsistency, there is in Johnson a rich, many-directioned mind standing at a critical crossroad. Not quite fulfillment, nor yet quite prophecy, but somehow something of both.

If nature’s universal structure has become questionable in the heavy drag of “the real state of sublunary nature,” man need not surrender to the imitation of experiential chaos. Through an organizing act of mind, man can impose his own system, thus opening the prospect of unity in variety. Here lies the romantic imagination and with it Coleridge. But if Coleridge looked as I have here, he may have found how much of his path had been cleared by a few casual master strokes by that arch-neoclassicist himself, Samuel Johnson. Here indeed is the fulfillment of my initial warning and prophecy of these, my post-Kantian distortions.

This paper was originally delivered at the Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference of the University of California, held 31 October-1 November 1969, at the Clark Library.

His characters are so much Nature herself, that ’tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image; each picture like a mock-rainbow is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakespeare is as much an individual, as those in life itself.…

How Shakespeare forces his critic to discover his liberality!