It is the province of the
didactic reasoner to take cognizance of those results of human
nature which are constantly repeated and always the same, which
follow one another in regular succession, which are acted upon by
large classes of men, and embodied in received customs, laws,
language, and institutions; and it was in arranging, comparing, and
arguing on these kind of general results, that Johnson's excellence
lay. But he could not quit his hold of the commonplace and
mechanical, and apply the general rule to the particular exception,
or show how the nature of man was modified by the workings of
passion, or the infinite fluctuations of thought and accident. Hence
he could judge neither of the heights nor depths of poetry. Nor is
this all; for being conscious of great powers in himself, and those
powers of an adverse tendency to those of his author, he would be
for setting up a foreign jurisdiction over poetry, and making
criticism a kind of Procrustes' bed of genius, where he might cut
down imagination to matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according
to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and
rhetorical declamation. Thus he says of Shakespeare's characters, in
contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to what every one else
feels, that each character is a species, instead of being an
individual.
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