JOHNSON ON SHAKESPEARE’S DEFECT
Joseph Wood krutch : It is also true that Johnson once remarked, when he was again praising Congreve: “Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. But he was merely saying what every critic without exception from the days of Ben Johnson on, had said and what was perfectly obvious to any one familiar with what the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had come to mean by faultless or “correct” rhythm or diction and by “propriety”. Yet Johnson was as far as Dryden from supposing that this put Shakespeare below the “correct” poets. Out of this same sense that Shakespeare’s greatness is his greatness, he could humorously turn upon Mrs. Thrale, who tried to force him to agree that Edward Young’s description of night was better than Shakespeare’s or Dryden’s because it was more “general” and therefore, according to the poetic theory, which Johnson ostensibly accepted, more poetical, “Young froths, and foams and bubbles”, he retorted, “sometimes very vigorously; but we must not compare the noise made by our tea-kettle here with the roaring of the ocean”.
