A Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Principles of Morality, Or Essay on Man (A Translation from the French) by Samuel Johnson (review)

56 These are quibbles, and we are grateful to Mr. Brack and Ms. Chilton for reminding us of the place of the Devil upon Crutches in the busy years between 1748 and 1751. And any scholarly edition that comes with its own guide to pharmaceuticals (this being Smollett, many of them laxatives and aphrodisiacs) has an additional reason to recommend itself. Neil Guthrie University of Toronto SAMUEL JOHNSON. A Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Principles of Morality, Or Essay on Man (A Translation from the French), ed. O M Brack, Jr. New Haven and London: Yale, 2004. Pp. lvi ⫹ 441. $75. ‘‘A less happy confrontation of minds and methods could hardly have been imagined .’’ Thus Maynard Mack describes the situation when the Swiss theologian Jean Pierre de Crousaz set out to write a critical commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man. To make matters worse, Crousaz admittedly knew no English, so his work was based on a French verse translation of Pope by Du Resnel, which increased the number of lines from 1300 in the original to 2000, while omitting many sections and rearranging many others. Pope’s cleverness in publishing his poem anonymously had allowed a largely favorable reception in England, but the continental criticism sparked an interest among English booksellers to the extent that more than one translation of Crousaz’s attacks (the 1738 Commentary and another work a year earlier, based on a prose French translation of Pope) were offered almost immediately. Mr. Brack has provided a scholarly edition of the translation made by Samuel Johnson, now appearing as Volume XVII in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Two related short pieces round out the volume, more notably Johnson’s ‘‘Review of Soame Jenyns’ Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.’’ Mr. Brack’s Introduction provides a vade mecum for anyone who would undertake the long hard slog of reading every word of Johnson’s translation. He first discusses the circumstances surrounding the publication of the book, a discussion that will give readers familiar with his 1995 SB essay a sense of déjà vu, as he repeats large sections of that essay virtually verbatim. (A note on p. xxxiii cites the essay, but the selfborrowing begins as early as p. xx.) Mr. Brack then provides a useful analysis, acknowledged to be based on the work of John Lawrence Abbott, of Johnson’s translation idiosyncrasies (for example, his tendency to introduce doublets); and he concludes by discussing ‘‘Johnson’s major contribution to the Commentary,’’the footnotes . Johnson frequently defends Pope when Crousaz’s attack depends on words or concepts original with Du Resnel and not found in Pope. He sides with Crousaz, as we would expect, on the problem of evil, the ruling passion, and the necessity of free will. ‘‘From these scattered observations it is clear that Johnson comes down firmly on the side of orthodoxy, believing that God created man for happiness but that both physical and moral evil entered the world because of Original Sin and, hence, that many of the miseries of life are mankind’s own fault.’’ This sentence repeats one at the end of the first paragraph of Mr. Brack’s Preface so he must think it important, 57 and it is. But it is hardly novel. This brings me to perhaps the overall problem with this volume, a justification of its raison d’être. Mr. Brack clearly envisions an audience of Johnsonians, and bilingual ones at that: ‘‘Annotations for a translation differ significantly from those for an original composition . No attempt has been made here to annotate Crousaz’s or Du Resnel’s work; rather the focus of the annotations is on Johnson’s translation. The assumption has been that this edition is for a scholarly audience with a reading knowledge of French.’’ Repeatedly, however, a reader comes upon a passage which cries out for annotation, such as when Crousaz points out that Pope’s rhetorical questions will sometimes not receive their expected answer: ‘‘But ask the opinion of young libertines, such as are to be met with in the army and great cities, and such as are described by Mr Du Pin in...