rested on important principles which were among the most solid foundationsof Johnson's nature and largely explain his real greatness, namely on...

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There was really something to be said for his refusal to
listen to the Americans' demand for liberty while they themselves held
slaves. Living in a period of change, Johnson perceived that in many cases
innovations prove dangerous and that the progress of society largely
depends on the continuance of the established institutions in which the
wisdom of the past is summed up. Of course in specific instances, perhaps
in the majority of them, Johnson was wrong; but that does not alter the
fact that he thought of himself as standing, and really did stand, for
order against a freedom which is always more or less in danger of leading
to anarchy.
Johnson's personality, too, cannot be fairly judged by its more grotesque
expression. Beneath the rough surface he was a man not only of very
vigorous intellect and great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm
heart, unusual sympathy and kindness, and the most unselfish, though
eccentric, generosity. Fine ladies were often fascinated by him, and he was
no stranger to good society. On himself, during his later years, he spent
only a third part of his pension, giving away the rest to a small army of
beneficiaries. Some of these persons, through no claim on him but their
need, he had rescued from abject distress and supported in his own house,
where, so far from being grateful, they quarreled among themselves,
complained of the dinner, or even brought their children to live with them.
Johnson himself was sometimes exasperated by their peevishness and even
driven to take refuge from his own home in that 'of his wealthy friends the
Thrales, where, indeed, he had a room of his own; but he never allowed any
one else to criticize or speak harshly of them. In sum, no man was ever
loved or respected more deeply, or with better reason, by those who really
knew him, or more sincerely mourned when he died.
Johnson's importance as a conservative was greatest in his professional
capacity of literary critic and bulwark of pseudo-classicism. In this case,
except that a restraining influence is always salutary to hold a new
movement from extremes, he was in opposition to the time-spirit;
romanticism was destined to a complete triumph because it was the
expression of vital forces which were necessary for the rejuvenation of
literature. Yet it is true that romanticism carried with it much vague and
insincere sentimentality, and it was partly against this that Johnson
protested. Perhaps the twentieth-century mind is most dissatisfied with his
lack of sympathy for the romantic return to an intimate appreciation of
external Nature. Johnson was not blind to the charm of Nature and sometimes
expresses it in his own writing; but for the most part his interest, like
that of his pseudo-classical predecessors, was centered in the world of
man. To him, as he flatly declared, Fleet Street, in the midst of the hurry
of London life, was the most interesting place in the world.
In the substance of his work Johnson is most conspicuously, and of set
purpose, a moralist. In all his writing, so far as the subject permitted,
he aimed chiefly at the inculcation of virtue and the formation of
character. His uncompromising resoluteness in this respect accounts for
much of the dulness which it is useless to try to deny in his work. 'The
Rambler' and 'The Idler' altogether lack Addison's lightness of touch and
of humor; for Johnson, thoroughly Puritan at heart, and dealing generally
with the issues of personal conduct and responsibility, can never greatly
relax his seriousness, while Addison, a man of the world, is content if he
can produce some effect on society as a whole. Again, a present-day reader
can only smile when he finds Johnson in his Preface to Shakspere blaming
the great dramatist for omitting opportunities of instructing and
delighting, as if the best moral teachers were always explicit. But
Johnson's moral and religious earnestness is essentially admirable, the
more so because his deliberate view of the world was thoroughly
pessimistic. His own long and unhappy experience had convinced him that
life is for the most part a painful tribulation, to be endured with as much
patience and courage as possible, under the consciousness of the duty of
doing our best where God has put us and in the hope (though with Johnson
not a confident hope) that we shall find our reward in another world.
It has long been a popular tradition, based largely on a superficial page
of Macaulay, that Johnson's style always represents the extreme of
ponderous pedantry. As usual, the tradition must be largely discounted. It
is evident that Johnson talked, on the whole, better than he wrote, that