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S. D. Gordon - "Quiet Talks on Service"

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The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes by Samuel Johnson

S >> Samuel Johnson >> The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes




Yet it must be at last confessed, that as we owe every thing to him, he
owes something to us; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception
and judgment, much is, likewise, given by custom and veneration. We fix
our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure
in him what we should in another loathe or despise. If we endured
without praising, respect for the father of our drama might excuse us;
but I have seen, in the book of some modern critick, a collection of
anomalies, which show that he has corrupted language by every mode of
depravation, but which his admirer has accumulated as a monument of
honour.

He has scenes of undoubted and perpetual excellence; but, perhaps, not
one play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary
writer, would be heard to the conclusion. I am, indeed, far from
thinking that his works were wrought to his own ideas of perfection;
when they were such as would satisfy the audience, they satisfied the
writer. It is seldom that authors, though more studious of fame than
Shakespeare, rise much above the standard of their own age; to add a
little to what is best will always be sufficient for present praise; and
those who find themselves exalted into fame, are willing to credit their
encomiasts, and to spare the labour of contending with themselves.

It does not appear, that Shakespeare thought his works worthy of
posterity, that he levied any ideal tribute upon future times, or had
any further prospect, than of present popularity and present profit.
When his plays had been acted, his hope was at an end; he solicited no
addition of honour from the reader. He, therefore, made no scruple to
repeat the same jests in many dialogues, or to entangle different plots
by the same knot of perplexity; which may be at least forgiven him, by
those who recollect that of Congreve's four comedies, two are concluded
by a marriage in a mask, by a deception, which, perhaps, never happened,
and which, whether likely or not, he did not invent.

So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired
to ease and plenty, while he was yet little _declined into the vale of
years_, before he could be disgusted with fatigue, or disabled by
infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue
those that had been already published from the depravations that
obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to
the world in their genuine state.

Of the plays which bear the name of Shakespeare in the late editions,
the greater part were not published till about seven years after his
death; and the few which appeared in his life are apparently thrust into
the world without the care of the author, and, therefore, probably
without his knowledge.

Of all the publishers, clandestine or professed, the negligence and
unskilfulness has, by the late revisers, been sufficiently shown. The
faults of all are, indeed, numerous and gross, and have not only
corrupted many passages, perhaps, beyond recovery, but have brought
others into suspicion, which are only obscured by obsolete phraseology,
or by the writer's unskilfulness and affectation. To alter is more easy
than to explain, and temerity is a more common quality than diligence.
Those who saw that they must employ conjecture to a certain degree, were
willing to indulge it a little further. Had the author published his own
works, we should have sat quietly down to disentangle his intricacies,
and clear his obscurities; but now we tear what we cannot loose, and
eject what we happen not to understand.

The faults are more than could have happened without the concurrence of
many causes. The style of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical,
perplexed, and obscure; his works were transcribed for the players by
those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were
transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied errours;
they were, perhaps, sometimes mutilated by the actors, for the sake of
shortening the speeches; and were at last printed without correction of
the press[18].

In this state they remained, not, as Dr. Warburton supposes, because
they were unregarded, but because the editor's art was not yet applied
to modern languages, and our ancestors were accustomed to so much
negligence of English printers, that they could very patiently endure
it. At last an edition was undertaken by Rowe; not because a poet was to
be published by a poet, for Rowe seems to have thought very little on
correction or explanation; but that our author's works might appear like
those of his fraternity, with the appendages of a life and
recommendatory preface. Rowe has been clamorously blamed for not
performing what he did not undertake; and it is time that justice be
done him, by confessing, that, though he seems to have had no thought of
corruption beyond the printer's errours, yet he has made many
emendations, if they were not made before, which his successors have
received without acknowledgment, and which, if they had produced them,
would have filled pages and pages with censures of the stupidity by
which the faults were committed, with displays of the absurdities which
they involved, with ostentatious expositions of the new reading, and
self-congratulations on the happiness of discovering it.

As of the other editors I have preserved the prefaces, I have likewise
borrowed the author's life from Howe, though not written with much
elegance or spirit; it relates, however, what is now to be known, and,
therefore, deserves to pass through all succeeding publications.

The nation had been for many years content enough with Mr. Rowe's
performance, when Mr. Pope made them acquainted with the true state of
Shakespeare's text, showed that it was extremely corrupt, and gave
reason to hope that there were means of reforming it. He collated the
old copies, which none had thought to examine before, and restored many
lines to their integrity; but, by a very compendious criticism, he
rejected whatever he disliked, and thought more of amputation than of
cure.

I know not why he is commended by Dr. Warburton for distinguishing the
genuine from the spurious plays. In this choice he exerted no judgment
of his own; the plays which he received were given by Hemings and
Condel, the first editors; and those which he rejected, though,
according to the licentiousness of the press in those times, they were
printed during Shakespeare's life, with his name, had been omitted by
his friends, and were never added to his works before the edition of
1664, from which they were copied by the later printers.

This was a work which Pope seems to have thought unworthy of his
abilities, being not able to suppress his contempt of _the dull duty of
an editor_. He understood but half his undertaking. The duty of a
collator is, indeed, dull, yet, like other tedious tasks, is very
necessary; but an emendatory critick would ill discharge his duty,
without qualities very different from dulness. In perusing a corrupted
piece, he must have before him all possibilities of meaning, with all
possibilities of expression. Such must be his comprehension of thought,
and such his copiousness of language. Out of many readings possible, he
must be able to select that which best suits with the state, opinions,
and modes of language prevailing in every age, and with his author's
particular cast of thought, and turn of expression. Such must be his
knowledge, and such his taste. Conjectural criticism demands more than
humanity possesses, and he that exercises it with most praise, has very
frequent need of indulgence. Let us now be told no more of the dull duty
of an editor.

Confidence is the common consequence of success. They whose excellence
of any kind has been loudly celebrated, are ready to conclude that their
powers are universal. Pope's edition fell below his own expectations,
and he was so much offended when he was found to have left any thing for
others to do, that he passed the latter part of his life in a state of
hostility with verbal criticism.

I have retained all his notes, that no fragment of so great a writer may
be lost; his preface, valuable alike for elegance of composition and
justness of remark, and containing a general criticism on his author, so
extensive that little can be added, and so exact that little can be
disputed, every editor has an interest to suppress, but that every
reader would demand its insertion.

Pope was succeeded by Theobald, a man of narrow comprehension, and small
acquisitions, with no native and intrinsick splendour of genius, with
little of the artificial light of learning, but zealous for minute
accuracy, and not negligent in pursuing it. He collated the ancient
copies, and rectified many errours. A man so anxiously scrupulous might
have been expected to do more, but what little he did was commonly
right.

In his reports of copies and editions he is not to be trusted without
examination. He speaks sometimes indefinitely of copies, when he has
only one. In his enumeration of editions, he mentions the two first
folios as of high, and the third folio as of middle authority; but the
truth is, that the first is equivalent to all others, and that the rest
only deviate from it by the printer's negligence. Whoever has any of the
folios has all, excepting those diversities which mere reiteration of
editions will produce[19]. I collated them all, at the beginning, but
afterwards used only the first.

Of his notes I have generally retained those which he retained himself
in his second edition, except when they were confuted by subsequent
annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes
adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in
which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant
excrescence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant
exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his
contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some
places shown him, as he would have shown himself, for the reader's
diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some notes may justify or
excuse the contraction of the rest.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant
and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has
escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking. So
willingly does the world support those who solicit favour against those
who command reverence; and so easily is he praised whom no man can envy.

Our author fell then into the hands of Sir Thomas Hanmer, the Oxford
editor, a man, in my opinion, eminently qualified by nature for such
studies. He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory criticism,
that intuition by which the poet's intention is immediately discovered,
and that dexterity of intellect which despatches its work by the easiest
means. He had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with customs,
opinions, and traditions, seems to have been large; and he is often
learned without show. He seldom passes what he does not understand,
without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and sometimes hastily
makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to
reduce to grammar what he could not be sure that his author intended to
be grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of
words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was
all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the
audience.

Hanmer's care of the metre has been too violently censured. He found the
measure reformed in so many passages by the silent labours of some
editors, with the silent acquiescence of the rest, that he thought
himself allowed to extend a little further the license, which had
already been carried so far without reprehension; and, of his
corrections in general, it must be confessed, that they are often just,
and made commonly with the least possible violation of the text.

But, by inserting his emendations, whether invented or borrowed, into
the page, without any notice of varying copies, he has appropriated the
labour of his predecessors, and made his own edition of little
authority. His confidence indeed, both in himself and others, was too
great; he supposes all to be right that was done by Pope and Theobald;
he seems not to suspect a critick of fallibility; and it was but
reasonable that he should claim what he so liberally granted.

As he never writes without careful inquiry and diligent consideration, I
have received all his notes, and believe that every reader will wish for
more.

Of the last editor it is more difficult to speak. Respect is due to high
place, tenderness to living reputation, and veneration to genius and
learning; but he cannot be justly offended at that liberty of which he
has himself so frequently given an example, nor very solicitous what is
thought of notes, which he ought never to have considered as part of his
serious employments, and which, I suppose, since the ardour of
composition is remitted, he no longer numbers among his happy effusions.

The original and predominant errour of his commentary is acquiescence in
his first thoughts; that precipitation which is produced by
consciousness of quick discernment; and that confidence which presumes
to do, by surveying the surface, what labour only can perform, by
penetrating the bottom. His notes exhibit sometimes perverse
interpretations, and sometimes improbable conjectures; he at one time
gives the author more profundity of meaning than the sentence admits,
and at another discovers absurdities, where the sense is plain to every
other reader. But his emendations are likewise often happy and just; and
his interpretation of obscure passages learned and sagacious.

Of his notes, I have commonly rejected, those against which the general
voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own incongruity
immediately condemns, and which, I suppose, the author himself would
desire to be forgotten. Of the rest, to part I have given the highest
approbation, by inserting the offered reading in the text; part I have
left to the judgment of the reader, as doubtful, though specious; and
part I have censured without reserve, but, I am sure, without bitterness
of malice, and, I hope, without wantonness of insult.

It is no pleasure to me, in revising my volumes, to observe how much
paper is wasted in confutation. Whoever considers the revolutions of
learning, and the various questions of greater or less importance, upon
which wit and reason have exercised their powers, must lament the
unsuccessfulness of inquiry, and the slow advances of truth, when he
reflects that great part of the labour of every writer is only the
destruction of those that went before him. The first care of the builder
of a new system, is to demolish the fabricks which are standing. The
chief desire of him that comments an author, is to show how much other
commentators have corrupted and obscured him. The opinions prevalent in
one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and
rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus
the human mind is kept in motion without progress. Thus sometimes truth
and errour, and sometimes contrarieties of errour, take each other's
place by reciprocal invasion. The tide of seeming knowledge, which is
poured over one generation, retires and leaves another naked and barren;
the sudden meteors of intelligence, which for awhile appear to shoot
their beams into the regions of obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their
lustre, and leave mortals again to grope their way.

These elevations and depressions of renown, and the contradictions to
which all improvers of knowledge must for ever be exposed, since they
are not escaped by the highest and brightest of mankind, may, surely, be
endured with patience by criticks and annotators, who can rank
themselves but as the satellites of their authors. How canst thou beg
for life, says Homer's hero to his captive, when thou knowest that thou
art now to suffer only what must another day be suffered by Achilles?

Dr. Warburton had a name sufficient to confer celebrity on those who
could exalt themselves into antagonists, and his notes have raised a
clamour too loud to be distinct. His chief assailants are the authors of
The Canons of Criticism, and of The Revisal of Shakespeare's Text; of
whom one ridicules his errours with airy petulance, suitable enough to
the levity of the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy
malignity, as if he were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary.
The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter,
and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to
leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with
his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid
that "girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny
battle;" when the other crosses my imagination, I remember the prodigy
in Macbeth:

A falcon tow'ring in his pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd.

Let me, however, do them justice. One is a wit, and one a scholar[20].
They have both shown acuteness sufficient in the discovery of faults,
and have both advanced some probable interpretations of obscure
passages; but when they aspire to conjecture and emendation, it appears
how falsely we all estimate our own abilities, and the little which they
have been able to perform might have taught them more candour to the
endeavours of others.

Before Dr. Warburton's edition, Critical Observations on Shakespeare had
been published by Mr. Upton[21], a man skilled in languages, and
acquainted with books, but who seems to have had no great vigour of
genius or nicety of taste. Many of his explanations are curious and
useful, but he, likewise, though he professed to oppose the licentious
confidence of editors, and adhere to the old copies, is unable to
restrain the rage of emendation, though his ardour is ill seconded by
his skill. Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a
successful experiment, swells into a theorist, and the laborious
collator at some unlucky moment frolicks in conjecture.

Critical, historical, and explanatory notes have been, likewise,
published upon Shakespeare by Dr. Grey, whose diligent perusal of the
old English writers has enabled him to make some useful observations.
What he undertook he has well enough performed; but as he neither
attempts judicial or emendatory criticism, he employs rather his memory
than his sagacity. It were to be wished that all would endeavour to
imitate his modesty, who have not been able to surpass his knowledge.

I can say, with great sincerity, of all my predecessors, what I hope
will hereafter be said of me, that not one has left Shakespeare without
improvement; nor is there one to whom I have not been indebted for
assistance and information. Whatever I have taken from them, it was my
intention to refer to its original author, and it is certain, that what
I have not given to another, I believed when I wrote it to be my own. In
some, perhaps, I have been anticipated; but if I am ever found to
encroach upon the remarks of any other commentators, I am willing that
the honour, be it more or less, should be transferred to the first
claimant, for his right, and his alone, stands above dispute; the second
can prove his pretensions only to himself, nor can himself always
distinguish invention, with sufficient certainty, from recollection.

They have all been treated by me with candour, which they have not been
careful of observing to one another. It is not easy to discover from
what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The
subjects to be discussed by him are of very small importance; they
involve neither property nor liberty; nor favour the interest of sect or
party. The various readings of copies, and different interpretations of
a passage, seem to be questions that might exercise the wit, without
engaging the passions. But whether it be that "small things make mean
men proud," and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety
of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men
angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of
invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the
most furious controvertist in politicks against those whom he is hired
to defame.

Perhaps the lightness of the matter may conduce to the vehemence of the
agency; when the truth to be investigated is so near to inexistence, as
to escape attention, its bulk is to be enlarged by rage and exclamation:
that to which all would be indifferent in its original state, may
attract notice when the fate of a name is appended to it. A commentator
has, indeed, great temptations to supply by turbulence what he wants of
dignity, to beat his little gold to a spacious surface, to work that to
foam which no art or diligence can exalt to spirit.

The notes which I have borrowed or written are either illustrative, by
which difficulties are explained; or judicial, by which faults and
beauties are remarked; or emendatory, by which depravations are
corrected.

The explanations transcribed from others, if I do not subjoin any other
interpretation, I suppose commonly to be right, at least I intend by
acquiescence to confess, that I have nothing better to propose.

After the labours of all the editors, I found many passages which
appeared to me likely to obstruct the greater number of readers, and
thought it my duty to facilitate their passage. It is impossible for an
expositor not to write too little for some, and too much for others. He
can only judge what is necessary by his own experience; and how long
soever he may deliberate, will at last explain many lines which the
learned will think impossible to be mistaken, and omit many for which
the ignorant will want his help. These are censures merely relative, and
must be quietly endured. I have endeavoured to be neither superfluously
copious, nor scrupulously reserved, and hope that I have made my
author's meaning accessible to many, who before were frighted from
perusing him, and contributed something to the publick, by diffusing
innocent and rational pleasure.

The complete explanation of an author not systematick and consequential,
but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light
hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. All personal
reflections, when names are suppressed, must be in a few years
irrecoverably obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice
of law, such as modes of dress, formalities of conversation, rules of
visits, disposition of furniture, and practices of ceremony, which
naturally find places in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and
unsubstantial, that they are not easily retained or recovered. What can
be known will be collected by chance, from the recesses of obscure and
obsolete papers, perused commonly with some other view. Of this
knowledge every man has some, and none has much; but when an author has
engaged the publick attention, those who can add any thing to his
illustration, communicate their discoveries, and time produces what had
eluded diligence.

To time I have been obliged to resign many passages, which, though I did
not understand them, will, perhaps, hereafter be explained; having, I
hope, illustrated some, which others have neglected or mistaken,
sometimes by short remarks, or marginal directions, such as every editor
has added at his will, and often by comments more laborious than the
matter will seem to deserve; but that which is most difficult is not
always most important, and to an editor nothing is a trifle by which his
author is obscured.

The poetical beauties or defects I have not been very diligent to
observe. Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations, not
in proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave this part
of my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I believe, is seldom
pleased to find his opinion anticipated; it is natural to delight more
in what we find or make, than in what we receive. Judgment, like other
faculties, is improved by practice, and its advancement is hindered by
submission to dictatorial decisions, as the memory grows torpid by the
use of a table-book. Some initiation is, however, necessary; of all
skill, part is infused by precept, and part is obtained by habit; I
have, therefore, shown so much as may enable the candidate of criticism
to discover the rest.

To the end of most plays I have added short strictures, containing a
general censure of faults, or praise of excellence; in which I know not
how much I have concurred with the current opinion; but I have not, by
any affectation of singularity, deviated from it. Nothing is minutely
and particularly examined, and, therefore, it is to be supposed, that in
the plays which are condemned there is much to be praised, and in those
which are praised much to be condemned.