On March 29, 1777, the aging Samuel Johnson met with a delegation of London booksellers whose mission was to entice him with a business proposition.The visitors represented a consortium of printers and booksellers who planned to launch a massive multi-volume edition called “The Works of the English Poets,”and they wanted Johnson, as the most eminent figure in English letters, to write a series of prefaces which would be both critical and biographical. Johnson’s involvement,they knew,would ensure brisk sales.

Johnson accepted the commission on the spot and seemed flattered to have been approached. He had always loved biography for “giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” The terms of the commission, for someone who had toiled in penury for much of his life, were attractive too; it seems unimaginable now but in those distant days, poetry could be lucrative. Johnson was hardly impervious to what in his great poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” he called “the general massacre of gold”; he couldn’t afford to be.Moreover,he knew from bitter experience what it meant to stand “athirst for wealth, and burning to be great.” Even so, there is something moving in the occasion. The booksellers could not have known how self-lacerating a man the outwardly unassailable Johnson was, nor how harshly and with what exasperated loathing he probed his own faults. In private notes and journals he excoriated himself for laziness and procrastination; his regularly formed, and regularly broken, resolutions to get up before noon make painful, and somewhat comical, reading. Despite his intimidating aura of authority, Johnson was very much like the rest of us, with the poignant difference that his failings grieved him so that he came close to madness more than once.

The obstacles to compiling the “Lives” were daunting.Documents were scattered or non-existent; much of the information was anecdotal and suspect. Johnson believed that “nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”This meant relying on others,such as James Boswell, ever the eager spaniel laying propitiatory bones at the master’s feet; it was Boswell – a genius in his own right as well as a genius of ingratiation – who arranged, much to Johnson’s annoyance, for the biographer to meet with the Earl of Marchmont, who had known Alexander Pope. But the worst obstacle was Johnson himself. Even at the age of 68 his work habits were slovenly; he was hopelessly disorganized; he found archival research unspeakably tedious; allergic to boredom in any form, he was also a master of procrastination. His luminous intelligence only aggravated his native sluggishness. Luckily for English literature he was afflicted with a relentless conscience. An almost demonic scrupulosity whipped him on, groaning all the way.

The complex financial, editorial, and textual problems of the venture are laid out in splendid detail in the new edition of “The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on Their Works” (Oxford University Press, four volumes, $595), edited by Roger Lonsdale. This is the first full scholarly treatment of the work since the 1905 edition of George Birkbeck Hill, long out-of-print and long superseded by more recent scholarship. The price of the set will make prospective buyers feel like victims of “confiscation’s vultures,” in Johnson’s phrase; and yet, the sumptuous text with its silken ribbon-markers, the superb (and beautifully written) introduction, and the voluminous, and fascinating, commentary make it seem almost justified.

Of the 52 poets treated only a few are still read: Milton, Pope, Gray, Dryden, Cowley, Rochester, Swift, with Collins, Congreve, Otway, Prior, and Waller constituting a dim roster of fading luminaries, known largely now to specialists in 17th- and 18th-century English literature. Some, like Richard Savage, live on only because of Johnson’s impassioned account (written 30 years earlier but republished in the “Lives.”) But, of course, valuable as the biographies are, we read them not for factual information – much of it wrong or incomplete anyway – but for Samuel Johnson’s distinctive vision, not only of poetry but of life itself.

Compared to Coleridge and Hazlitt in a later generation or to such modern figures as Empson or Blackmur – let alone the latest gaggle of “theorists” – Johnson the critic can seem quaint to a modern reader. First of all, he is unabashedly “judgmental,” and not solely of aesthetic faults. Thus, of Jonathan Swift, he comments bluntly:

Whatever he did, he seemed willing to do in a manner peculiar to himself, without considering that singularity, as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule; he therefore who indulges peculiar habits is worse than others, if he be not better.

We value Swift for his “singularity” and yet, Johnson had a deeper point: The man who sets himself apart had better be superior to those he scorns or he will end up as a kind of moral grotesque and risk forfeiting his humanity. In Johnson’s account (based on the reports of those who knew him), even Swift’s appearance betokens apartness. He had “a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety.” The portrait is of a genius disfigured by “the rage of neglected pride, and the languishment of unsatisfied desire.”

Johnson’s moral emphasis can become censorious.The Earl of Rochester, not surprisingly, excited his disgust, not only because “he was for 5 years together continually drunk” but because throughout his short life “he pursued low amours in mean disguises.” Of the dramatist Otway he sniffs, “Of Thomas Otway, one of the first names in the English drama, little is known; nor is there any part of that little which his biographer can take pleasure in relating.”Even so, he praises Otway’s genius and is astute in his comments on Rochester’s best poems, noting their Latin sources and indebtedness to the French poet Boileau. Because Johnson knew all too well the temptations of “singularity,” he strove for balance and the just measure in moral as well as aesthetic matters and deplored those who indulged in extremes.

For Johnson, poetry represented “the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” He admired Pope but was quick to fault the “blaze of embellishment” in his work. In his “Life of Pope” he examines that poet’s celebrated precept that “the sound should seem an echo of the sense.” I’d always accepted this principle without much thought but Johnson persuades me otherwise. He points out that there are really few words in any language that echo the objects they name; even in onomatopoeic words, such as “hiss,” he argues, “the mind often governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their meaning.” And to clinch his point he rather mischievously quotes passages in which Pope uses the same sequence of syllables now for a “slow”verse,now for a “rapid” one.This sort of hard-headed, even stubborn, judgment distinguishes Johnson’s criticism; he revered the good but was no respecter of persons.

Of course, the best motive for reading Johnson’s “Lives”is the incomparable prose.Contrary to general impression, Johnson’s language is not invariably stately and solemn; like Gibbon or Burke, his only possible rivals, he can be brutally terse. His style, like theirs, is built on the agile play of contrasts.When asked about rival biographers, Johnson quipped, “Sir, the dogs don’t know how to write trifles with dignity.”The sentence surprises not only because he calls his competitors dogs but because the unexpected linkage of “trifles” with “dignity” compacts a moral within a lapidary formulation: even a trifle should be done with aplomb.

There are other moments in the “Lives” when Johnson’s prose takes sudden wing and lifts beyond the lapidary. In his great “Life of Milton,” he states:

The appearances of nature, and the occurrences of life, did not satiate his appetite of greatness. To paint things as they are, requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy. Milton’s delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.

Like Milton – or like Pope, of whom he says that his mind was “always investigating, always aspiring, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher,always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do” – Johnson too was a strenuous traveller in the imagination. “All joy or sorrow,” he wrote, “for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realizes the event however fictitious, or approximates it however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate.” Unlike Milton, the only hells Samuel Johnson visited, as well as the only heavens, lay in the minds of those other men whose receding lives he sought to enter by imagination as much as by toil. Perhaps he succeeded because he’d explored his own with such frightened but unflinching truthfulness.

eormsby@nysun.com