ar
of a merciless common sense. Let those who, with a good living writer,
fancy his criticism merely a lifeless application of mechanical rules,
read again the famous passage in the preface where he dismisses the
claim of the unities of place and time to be necessary to the proper
illusion of drama. Never did critic show himself freer of the easy
slavery to traditional rules which afflicts or consoles sluggish minds.
In Johnson's pages at any rate, there is "always an appeal open," as he
says, "from criticism to nature." And, though all his prejudices,
except those of the Anti-Gallican, must have carried him to the side of
the unities, he goes straight to the truth of experience, obtains there
a decisive answer, and records it in a few pages of masterly reasoning.
The first breath of the facts, as known to every one who has visited a
theatre, is brought to demolish the airy castles of pedantry: and it is
shown that unity is required not for the sake of deceiving {213} the
spectators, which is impossible, but for the sake of bringing order
into chaos, art into nature, and the immensity of life within limits
that can be compassed by the powers of the human mind. The unity of
action, which assists the mind, is therefore vital: the unities of time
and place, which are apparently meant to deceive it, are empty
impostures. For "the truth is that the spectators are always in their
senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is
only a stage and the players only players": "the delight proceeds from
our consciousness of fiction: if we thought murders and treasons real
they would please no more."

But this is simply one specially famous passage in an essay which is
full of matter from the first page to the last. It says little, of
course, of the sublime poetry of Shakespeare, and it cannot anticipate
that criticism of the imagination which Goethe and Coleridge have
taught us to expect from every writer about Shakespeare. The day for
that was not yet: and as Johnson, himself among the first to suggest
the historical and comparative point of view in criticism, says in this
very preface, "every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must
be compared with the state of the age in which he lived and with his
own particular opportunities." {214} He had a different task, and he
performed it so admirably that what he says can never be out of date.
It had not then become superfluous to insist on the greatne