The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [72]
Moreover, if we were to look at the context of Dr. Johnson’s famous paragraph, we would discover that it runs quite counter to most of what he has to say about the poet in his “Life of Gray.” Having devoted several pages to biography, Johnson now turns to his work.
Gray’s poetry is now to be considered [Johnson writes, having devoted several pages to biography] and I hope not to be looked on as an enemy to his name, if I confess that I contemplate it with less pleasure than his life.
The poem On the Cat was doubtless by its author considered as a trifle, but it is not a happy trifle.
The Prospect of Eton College suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel. His supplication to Father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself.35
And so on, through the entire corpus of Gray’s poetry, often stanza by stanza and word by word, culminating in a general assessment of his work before the paragraph on Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” that, coming at the end of the “Life,” contains the phrase that Woolf uses in the preface to her book.
In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claims to poetical honours. The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning “Yet even these bones” are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.36
The sentiments of the common reader are thus invoked only at the end of a long and detailed assessment of Gray’s poetry, which, in the main, finds his successes intermittent at best, and some of his work incomprehensible or overrated. This is the only moment in the “Life of Gray” when Johnson concurs with the common reader, and he does so in a graceful, concessive spirit that leads up to his superbly crafted, quietly devastating final sentence: “Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.” We might linger for a moment on Johnson’s phrase “useless to praise,” which carries the notion that the poetry speaks for itself (and thus that the common reader’s views would prevail without any intercession on the part of the critic). This is clearly a condition contrary to fact. The existence of The Lives of the Poets likewise contradicts the utopian notion that in an aesthetically just world, quality always prevails. If love of literature is linked to the judgment of the common reader rather than that of the professional critic or scholar, the practice of these two meticulous and learned arbiters of literary taste, Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, puts that connection in question even as it seems, or is taken, to uphold it. Neither critic defers to the common reader, though both imagine him or her as a crucial ancillary part of the world of readers. Each in fact demonstrates an uncommon love of literature precisely by combining it with learning—as well as with a strongly urged, felicitously phrased, hard-won, and often infectious set of literary