Johnson's principal work as a scholar and critic of literature is to be found in his Dictionary, the edition of Shakespeare, and the _Lives of the Poets_. It has the strength { 203} and weakness which might be anticipated by any intelligent person who had read Boswell and the _Ramblers_. It abounds in manliness, courage, and modesty: it never for an instant forgets that literature exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of literature: it has no esoteric or professional affectations, but says plain things in plain words such as all can understand. The literary critic can have no more valuable qualities than these. But they do not complete his equipment. The criticism of Johnson has many limitations. He was entirely without aesthetic capacity. Not only were music and the plastic arts nothing to him--as indeed they have been to many good judges of poetry--but he does not appear to have possessed any musical ear or much power of imagination. It is not going too far to say that of the highest possibilities of poetry he had no conception. He imagines he has disposed of _Lycidas_ by exhibiting its "inherent improbability" in the eyes of a crude common sense: a triumph which is as easy and as futile as his refutation of Berkeley's metaphysics by striking his foot upon the ground. The truth is of course that in each case he is beating the air. The stamp upon the ground would have been a triumphant answer to a fool who should say that the senses cannot feel: it does not touch { 204} Berkeley who says they cannot know. So the attack on _Lycidas_ might be fatal to a judge who put his judgment into the form of a pastoral; as the criticism of a poet it is in the main simply irrelevant. It is evident that what Johnson admires in Milton is the power of his mind and the elevation of his character, not at all his purely poetic gifts. He never betrays the slightest suspicion that in speaking of Milton he is speaking of one of the very greatest artists the world has ever known. He thought blank verse was verse only to the eye, and found the "numbers" of _Lycidas_ "unpleasing." He did not believe that anybody read _Paradise Lost_ for pleasure, and said so with his usual honesty. He saw nothing in _Samson Agonistes_ but the weakness of the plot; of the heights and depths of its poetry he perceived nothing. He preferred the comedies to the tragedies of Shakespeare: felt the poet in him much less than the omniscient observer of universal life: and indeed, if we may judge by what he says in the preface to the Dictionary, hardly thought of him as a master of poetic language at all. He had evidently no appreciation of the Greek dramatists. The thing that moves him in poetry is eloquence of expression and energy of thought: both good things but things that can exist outside poetry. The arguments { 205} in which he states his objections to devotional poetry in the life of Waller show that he regarded poetry as an artful intellectual embroidery, not as the only fit utterance of an exalted mood.