Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709 - 1791

In the Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson wrote: “It is no pleasure...to observe how much paper is wasted in confutation….The tide of seeming knowledge which is poured over one generation retires and leaves another naked and barren.” Even after decades of research, however, it seems that practically every book on Johnson must begin unpleasantly, rehearsing the generally accepted but erroneous view that makes Johnson out to be “a generalizing, canon-building, language-fixing, neoclassical tyrant who had no time for detail or inferiority” (1)—a view held not just by the practically-minded Becky Sharps of the world, but also by eminent intellectuals like Terry Eagleton. The dispatch with which Freya Johnston shoulders these misconceptions out of the way is emblematic of her method throughout the book, which spends little time confuting, and much reading Johnson against a richly-articulated sense of specific questions about eighteenth-century literature. Johnson emerges from this scrutiny as an author whose intellectual honesty drove him to explore his uncertainties in detail, including the minute particulars of everyday life, with far greater care than the generally accepted view of him has admitted.

Had Johnston proceeded less ably, instead of an exclusive Johnson interested only in canon-building and the sublime, she would have discovered an inclusive Johnson, whose interest in little things, especially those domestic details he so enjoyed in his role as a “Hercules among the distaff,” would have revised him by way of exoneration. But instead of casting exclusion and inclusion as Whiggish opposites—one privileged, the other struggling to return from the margins of representation—and Johnson as a feeling, forward-thinking author, Johnston simply attends to the details of his style. As a result, she discovers complicated syntactical and rhetorical relationships between the minuteness of his inquires and the grandeur of his generalizations. Like many writers during the eighteenth century, she claims, Johnson committed himself to competing and contradictory ideals: on the one hand to the precepts of classical rhetoric, especially its emphasis on propriety and decorum as exemplified in the bonus orator, and on the other to the precepts of Christianity, especially its emphasis on condescension and humility as exemplified in the Incarnation.

While none of these commitments or ideas is explored here for the first time, the originality of Johnston’s argument lies in the way she reconfigures these allegiances as a tension. Her four long chapters document this tension in many works of eighteenth-century literature. She attempts “to understand the impulses to exclude and to include some kinds of material from and in literature not as irreconcilable…but as a set of literary and ethical affiliations informing the lowest and highest writing of the period” (38-39). This tension encompasses both “great” works and “trivial” ones, giving Johnston a novel approach to Johnson as a successful writer of both kinds. Crucial to her examination of the affiliations between high art and low, and thus to reinterpreting the traditional boundaries of eighteenth-century studies, are the previously mentioned ideas of propriety and decorum, humility and condescension. But of equal interest, especially to contemporary critical inquiry, is the important methodological question that she raises: in what ways is it legitimate to interpret a text so as to discover something deliberately excluded from it?

In her first chapter, Johnston carefully establishes the way eighteenth-century authors, with an emphasis on Boswell and Johnson, approached the question of representing particular details. The period, she discovers, was vexed less by the problem of sublimity, than by the problem of bathos; by framing this descent elegantly, the period attempted to justify its serious attention to small things. This vexing ideal of elegance looms large in the book’s vision of the eighteenth-century literary landscape, and subsumes under the venerable question of “the general and the particular” the genres of biography and mock heroic, representations of character, and even the rhetorical catalogue. Like that of his contemporaries Pope, Fielding, and Goldsmith, Johnson’s “brand of inclusiveness was perplexed, “and “his sympathies were fiercely divided between centre and margin” (64).

Johnston’s second chapter examines the many prefaces and dedications that Johnson penned. Johnson never dedicated his own work, yet often undertook the task anonymously for books written by friends and acquaintances. Careful reading of these prefaces uncovers another tension in Johnson’s writing, which entertains itself with boundless expectations of its future performances, and solaces itself with the pragmatic limitations of the finished text. For Johnson, this tension demands humility from the author, especially when, as in the case of many of these works being prefaced or dedicated, the subject is trifling or ephemeral. Instead of viewing these works as the forgotten casualties of print culture, Johnston claims that the seriousness with which Johnson performed them “reveals a modulation from classical to Judeao-Christian values, since equally implicit in these exchanges between great and little is a series of biblical emphases which underpins Johnson’s…renovation of lowly subjects” (102-03). If such remarks are not exclusively or even unequivocally true of Johnson, they do demonstrate that he is one of the great masters of this kind of tentative, skeptical, and yet curiously authoritative writing.

The third chapter, ostensibly on the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland but actually ranging much further afield, displays some of the most careful and intellectual reading of the entire book. Here, Johnston’s attention to textual detail is exemplary, and her ear for the classical and biblical substance of Johnson’s allusions is perpetually on display. Likewise, her understanding of classical rhetoric informs much of the chapter; parts of it are practically a history of (and primer on) the use of litotes in English. The prevalence of this figure in Johnson’s writing leads Johnston to examine his logical “fuzziness,” arguing that as a result his powers of description “need not resolve…into wholehearted truths or falsehoods, exclusions or inclusions, sense or nonsense” (146). As a result of its ambivalences, this fuzziness becomes better able to capture representative human and cultural subtleties. About the Scots, for instance, whose status as colonized other or colonial subject is itself the subject of recent critical debates, Johnston notes that the frequent use of litotes in the Journey establishes Johnson’s ambivalent and even self-contradicting responses.

The final chapter, on biography, is the book’s most sustained look at condescension. Johnston argues that in the Lives of the Poets, Johnson most fully enunciates and embraces “an overarching preference for a Christian scale of values, one that subordinates ancient critical maxims to his own moral allegiances” (185). Johnson’s puzzling attention to minor poets like Watts and Blackmore is explained as the result of this preference and Johnston brilliantly argues that they act as “corrective readings,” as the minute particulars of the literary life against whose details the great achievements of Milton and Pope are measured. She concludes by reading one of Johnson’s last performances, the elegiac “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet.” While Johnston may be too quick to read this poem as plain, unostentatious verse, she nevertheless explicates with characteristic verve a rich sense of its occasion and an equally well-researched sense of its context among competing stories of Levet’s character and relationship to Johnson.

As the title suggests, this is not just a book about Samuel Johnson, but about his relationship to an eighteenth-century art of the bathos; and not just about that art, but its inheritance of classical and medieval rhetoric, its modulation of those schemata under various cultural pressures, and its entailments on later European literature. The overwhelming strength of the book is its scrupulous attention to philological facts of all persuasions. Johnston’s argument perhaps does not fully answer some of the questions that it raises, like the methodological question about excluded materials, and neither does it offer a new récit_ whose grandness consists in its claims to overhaul via “suggestion” the current understanding of the eighteenth century. Instead, Johnston performs numerous explications de texte that are both rigorous and invigorating, resulting in equally numerous incremental shifts in the understanding of Johnson and eighteenth-century literature. Her portrait of the great man reveals at nearly every turn how undecided Johnson could be, and how often that indecision came to the fore in his writings, both great and small, across his long career. Thus, Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking reminds us that the Great Cham was an ordinary man—which is no small accomplishment.