Give an account of jhonson qualifications as acritic
Answers
Answer:
Dr. Johnson is an authentic literary voice of his time. He is called the prime minister of literature and the literary dictator of the eighteenth century. Carlyle honoured him by calling him a ‘national hero’. He had a great deal of courage and conviction and was a man of robust commonsense. Though he carried his criticism to extremes yet he was impartial and vigorous. He thrilled his readers with his witty remarks.After the death of Pope in 1744, Dr. Johnson (1709-84) emerged as ‘the undisputed arbiter’ of literary taste of age. With him, says George Watson, “English Criticism achieves greatness on a scale that any reader can instantly recognize.” F. R. Leavis rightly observes : “Johnson’s criticism, most of it, belongs with the living classics : it can be read a fresh every year with unaffected pleasure and new stimulus. It is alive and life-giving.” C. H. Firth regards much of criticism as one of permanent value’, and Mary Lascelles calls him “a movement on the part of that volume of waters whose capacity for motion is inexhaustible.”His criticism bears the weight of his massive personality and the vigour of his powerful mind. A rationalist by temperament, he refused to pay blind homage to any critical cult. “I cannot receive my religion from any human hand,” he wrote in one of his letters. He possessed a sanity of outlook and a catholicity of mind, rarely found in any other English critic of his age. His unflinching faith in reason and common sense, his fundamental respect for the voice of the people, his healthy pragmatic approach to critical problems, his delightfully balanced style are some other qualities of Dr. Johnson as a critic. He emphasized the necessity for judging a work of art as a whole, or again, the need for taking into account historical considerations in forming literary judgement. He based his practice upon the rule derived from the ancients, but he was no slavish follower of the rules. He was able to rise above the literary convention. He accepted rules only as a conventional check upon licence and whenever he found them unsuitable for modern conditions as in the case of the unities of time and place he cast them aside. He accepted truth and reason and nature as the basis of his criticism, suggested that time was a test of literary value, emphasized the necessity of judging a work of art as a whole with its historical perspective in mind.
Some of the other qualities that elevate him to the rank of a great critic and lend a distinctive note to his criticism are: his humanistic outlook on life and literature, his unflinching faith in reason and common sense, his fundamental respect for the voice of the people, his healthy pragmatic approach to critical problems, and above all his delightfully balanced
HOPE IT HEPLS :)