Johnson's understanding dealt only
in round numbers: the fractions were lost upon him. He reduced
everything to the common standard of conventional propriety; and the
most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his
mind, only as they could be translated into the language of measured
prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to
him like an excrescence; and his imagination was dazzled by the
blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native
genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the
rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on
the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural objects but
'such as he could measure with a two-fool rule, or tell upon ten
fingers': he judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and
figure: he saw only the definite, the positive, and the practical,
the average forms of things, not their striking differences--their
classes, not their degrees. He was a man of strong common sense and
practical wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the
regular, habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not
follow the rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of
passion. That is, he was to the poet what the painter of still life
is to the painter of history. Common sense sympathizes with the
impressions of things on ordinary minds in ordinary circumstances:
genius catches the glancing combinations presented to the eye of
fancy, under the influence of passion.
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