n particular, are more pompous and
unwieldy than what he writes in his own person. This want of relaxation
and variety of manner has, I think, after the first effects of novelty and
surprise were over, been prejudicial to the matter. It takes from the
general power, not only to please, but to instruct. The monotony of style
produces an apparent monotony of ideas. What is really striking and
valuable, is lost in the vain ostentation and circumlocution of the
expression; for when we find the same pains and pomp of diction bestowed
upon the most trifling as upon the most important parts of a sentence or
discourse, we grow tired of distinguishing between pretension and reality,
and are disposed to confound the tinsel and bombast of the phraseology
with want of weight in the thoughts. Thus, from the imposing and oracular
nature of the style, people are tempted at first to imagine that our
author's speculations are all wisdom and profundity: till having found out
their mistake in some instances, they suppose that there is nothing but
common-place in them, concealed under verbiage and pedantry; and in both
they are wrong. The fault of Dr. Johnson's style is, that it reduces all
things to the same artificial and unmeaning level. It destroys all shades
of difference, the association between words and things. It is a perpetual
paradox and innovation. He condescends to the familiar till we are ashamed
of our interest in it: he expands the little till it looks big. "If he
were to write a fable of little fishes," as Goldsmith said of him, "he
would make them speak like great whales." We can no more distinguish the
most familiar objects in his descriptions of them, than we can a
well-known face under a huge painted mask. The structure of his sentences,
which was his own invention, and which has been generally imitated since
his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to
another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end
of a verse; the close of the period follows as mechanically as the
oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound; each
sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself
like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza. Dr. Johnson
is also a complete balance-master in the topics of morality. He never
encourages hope, but he counteracts it by fear; he never elicits a truth,
but he suggests some objection in answer to it.