men became intoxicated
never turned the heads of men impervious to abstract theories and
incapable of dropping substances for shadows. There are evils in each
temperament; but it is as well that some men should carry into politics
that rooted contempt for whining which lay so deep in Johnson's nature.
He scorned the sickliness of the Rousseau school as, in spite of his
constitutional melancholy, he scorned valetudinarianism whether of the
bodily or the spiritual order. He saw evil enough in the world to be
heartily, at times too roughly, impatient of all fine ladies who made a
luxury of grief or of demagogues who shrieked about theoretical
grievances which did not sensibly affect the happiness of one man in a
thousand. The lady would not have time to nurse her sorrows if she had
been a washerwoman; the grievances with which the demagogues yelled
themselves hoarse could hardly be distinguished amidst the sorrows of
the vast majority condemned to keep starvation at bay by unceasing
labour. His incapacity for speculation makes his pamphlets worthless
beside Burke's philosophical discourses; but the treatment, if wrong and
defective on the theoretical side, is never contemptible. Here, as
elsewhere, he judges by his intuitive aversions. He rejects too hastily
whatever seems insipid or ill-flavoured to his spiritual appetite. Like
all the shrewd and sensible part of mankind he condemns as mere
moonshine what may be really the first faint dawn of a new daylight. But
then his intuitions are noble, and his fundamental belief is the vital
importance of order, of religion, and of morality, coupled with a
profound conviction, surely not erroneous, that the chief sources of
human suffering lie far deeper than any of the remedies proposed by
constitution-mongers and fluent theorists. The literary version of these
prejudices or principles is given most explicitly in the 'Lives of the
Poets'--the book which is now the most readable of Johnson's
performances, and which most frequently recalls his conversational
style. Indeed, it is a thoroughly admirable book, and but for one or two
defects might enjoy a much more decided popularity. It is full of shrewd
sense and righteous as well as keen estimates of men and things. The
'Life of Savage,' written in earlier times, is the best existing
portrait of that large class of authors who, in Johnson's phrase, 'hung
loose upon society' in the days of the Georges. The Lives of Pope,
Dryden, and ot