It is exactly one hundred years ago since Dr. Johnson wrote his last
letter to Lucy Porter, in which he announced to her that he was very
ill, and that he desired her prayers. Less than a fortnight later,
on the 13th of December, 1784, he was dead. All through the year his
condition had given his friends more than anxiety. The winter of 1783
had been marked by collapse of the constitution; to the ceaseless
misery of his skin was now added an asthma that would not suffer him to
recline in bed, a dropsy that made his legs and feet useless through
half of the weary day. It is somewhat marvellous that he got through
this terrible winter, the sufferings of which are painfully recorded in
his sad correspondence. It is difficult to understand why, just when
he wanted companionship most, his friends seem all to have happened to
desert him. Of the quaint group of invalids in mind and body to whom
his house had been a hospital, all were gone except Mrs. Desmoulins,
who was bedridden; and we may believe that their wrangling company had
never been so distasteful to himself as to his friends. Boswell and
Mrs. Thrale, as we know, had more or less valid reasons for absence,
and Boswell, at least, was solicitous in inquiry. We must, however,
from whatever cause, think of Johnson, who dreaded solitude, as now
almost always alone, mortified by spiritual pains no less acute than
his physical ones, torturing his wretched nights with Baxter’s _Call
to the Unconverted_, and with laborious and repeated diagnosis of his
own bodily symptoms. It is strange to think that, although he was the
leading man of letters in England, and the centre of a whole society,
his absence from the meetings of his associates seems scarcely to have
been noticed. It was not until in February he was relieved that he
allowed himself to speak of the danger he had passed through. Then he
confessed his terror to Lucy Porter, in the famous words, “Pray for me;
death, my dear, is very dreadful; let us think nothing worth our care
but how to prepare for it;” and asked Boswell to consult the venerable
physician, Sir Alexander Dick, as to the best way of avoiding a relapse.
Boswell felt it a duty to apply not to Dick only, but to various
leading doctors. In doing so he reminded them, with his extraordinary
foppishness, of “the elegant compliment” which Johnson had paid to
their profession in his _Life of Garth_, the poet-physician. The
doctors, with one accord, and thinking without doubt far more of
Johnson himself than of Garth, clustered around him with their advice
and their prescriptions, and the great man certainly received for the
brief remainder of his days such alleviation as syrup of poppies and
vinegar of squills could give him. Mrs. Boswell, encouraged by a more
favorable account of his health, invited him down to Auchinlech in
March. He could not venture to accept, but he was pleased to be asked,
and recovered so much of his wonted fire as to fancy, in a freak of
strange inconsistency, that he would amuse himself by decorating his
London study with the heads of “the fathers of _Scottish_ literature.”
To Langton, who—as Johnson justly thought, with unaccountable
“circumduction”—had made inquiries about his old friend through
Lord Portmore, he expressed a hope of panting on to ninety, and said
that “God, who has so wonderfully restored me, can preserve me in
all seasons.” It is very pathetic to follow the old man through the
desolate and wearisome months: nor can we easily understand, from any
of the records we possess, why he was allowed to be so much alone.
On Easter Monday, after recording without petulance that his great
hope of being able to go out on the preceding day had been doomed to
disappointment, he goes on to say, “I want every comfort. My life is
very solitary and very cheerless.... I am very weak, and have not
passed the door since the 13th of December.”
Bright weather came in May, and Johnson went to Islington for a
change of air. Boswell came back to town, and the sage was able to go
to dinner-parties day after day, without at first exasperating his
symptoms. In June he went to Oxford, on the famous occasion when he
told the people in the coach that “Demptster’s sister had endeavored
to teach him knotting, but that he had made no progress;” and at
Oxford, as we know, he talked copiously, and with all his old vivacity.
No doubt, though Boswell does not like to confess it, the constant
dissipation, intellectual and mildly social, of those two summer months
was mischievous to the frail revival of his health. At the dinner
of the Literary Club, June 22, every one noticed how ill he looked.
Perhaps the true cause of this was a secret chagrin which we can now
appreciate, the final apostasy of Mrs. Thrale from his friendship. At
all events, Reynolds and Boswell were sufficiently frightened to set
their heads together for the purpose of getting their old friend off
to Italy. We are divided between satisfaction that the inevitable end
did not reach the old man sociable in the midst of strange faces and
foreign voices, and bewildered indignation at the still mysterious
cabal which wrecked so amiable an enterprise. If Lord Thurlow was
shifty, however, other friends were generous. Dr. Brocklesbury, the
physician, pressed Johnson to become his guest that he might the
more carefully attend upon him. From Ashbourne, whither he had been
prevailed upon to go, he kept this last-mentioned friend well posted in
the sad fluctuations of his health, and we see him gradually settling
down again into wretchedness. His mind recurred constantly to the
approaching terror. To Dr. Burney he writes in August, “I struggle
hard for life. I take physic and take air; my friend’s chariot is
always ready. We have run this morning twenty-four miles, and could run
forty-eight more. _But who can run the race with death?_” Reflections
of this class fill all his letters of that autumn; and in October he
sums up his condition in saying to Heberden that “the summer has passed
without giving him any strength.” It is strange that still no one
seemed to notice what is plain to us in every line of his
correspondence, that Johnson was dying. With himself, however, the
thought of death was always present; and even in discussing with Miss
Seward so frivolous a theme as the antics of a learned pig, Johnson
was suddenly solemnized by recollecting that the pig had owed its
life to its education. One hardly knows whether to smile or to sigh
at the quaint and suggestive peroration: “The pig, then, has no cause
to complain; protracted existence is a good recompense for very
considerable degrees of torture.” To protract existence was now all
Johnson’s thought, and he set his powerful will to aid him in the
struggle. His only hopes were those which his strength of will supplied
him with. “I will be conquered,” he said, “I will not capitulate.”
It was not till he reached London in November that he consented to
capitulate. The terror of death was now upon him, indeed. “Love me as
well as you can,” he wrote to Boswell; “teach the young ones to love
me.” On the 8th of November he closed the diary of his symptoms—his
_ægri ephemeris_—now become worse than useless. His suffering,
dejection, and restless weakness left his brain, however, unclouded,
and less than a week before the end he corrected an error in a line
from Juvenal which Dr. Brocklesbury had carelessly recited. The
chronicle of the rapid final decline is given with great simplicity and
force by Hoole in that narrative of the last three weeks of the life of
Dr. Johnson which he contributed to the _European Magazine_ in 1799,
and which Mr. Napier has reprinted in one of the many appendices to his
invaluable edition. At last, exactly a year after his original attack
of asthma, the end came at seven o’clock in the evening of Monday, the
13th of December.
Devoid, as it is, of all the elements of external romance, there is
perhaps no record of the extinction of genius which attracts more
universal interest than this death of Samuel Johnson. So much of
frivolity or so much of cant attends most of us even to the tomb, that
the frank terror, expressed through a long life by this otherwise most
manly and courageous person, has possessed a great fascination for
posterity. The haunting insincerity of verse, particularly of
eighteenth-century verse, had extracted even from Johnson, in the pages
of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, the usual rose-colored commonplace
about death being “Kind Nature’s signal for retreat;” but he completely
cleared his own mind of cant, even though a little clung about his
singing robes. Boswell has given us an extraordinary instance of his
habitual and dismal apprehensions in the celebrated conversation
in 1769, which started with a discussion of David Hume’s supposed
indifference to the idea of death. Not less familiar are the passionate
asseverations with which Johnson startled Mrs. Knowles and Miss
Seward in 1778 by repeating again and again that to exist in pain is
better, far better, than to cease to exist altogether. These and other
revelations of Johnson’s conversation have perhaps led us to exaggerate
his habitual terror. There are, at least, instances to be drawn from
less hackneyed sources which display his attitude towards eternity less
painfully. Of these perhaps the most remarkable is that recorded in the
_Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_, when, on a calm Sunday afternoon,
sailing from Ramsay to Skye, Johnson delivered himself of a little
homily. The text was a passage from _The Cypress Grove_ of Drummond
of Hawthornden, which Boswell had happened to quote. Drummond had
said that a man should leave life as cheerfully as a visitor who has
examined an antiquary’s cabinet sees the curtain drawn again, and makes
way to admit fresh pilgrims to the show. Johnson stripped the conceit
to the skin, as he was in the habit of doing:—
“Yes, sir, if he is sure he is to be well after
he goes out of it. But if he is to grow blind after
he goes out of the show-room, and never to see
anything again, or if he does not know whither he is
to go next, a man will not go cheerfully out of a
show-room. No wise man will be contented to die if he
thinks he is to go into a state of punishment. Nay,
no wise man will be contented to die, if he thinks he
is to fall into annihilation, for however unhappy any
man’s existence may be, he would rather have it than
not exist at all. No; there is no rational principle
by which a man can die contented, but a trust in the
mercy of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ.”
The baldness of this statement, the resolute contempt of the author
of it for the mere dress and ornament of language, throw not a little
light upon the reason why, after the lapse of a hundred years, we still
listen with so quick an interest and so personal an affection to all
that is recorded of Johnson’s speech. The age in which we live cannot
be entirely given up to priggishness and the dry rot of sentiment, so
long as any considerable company in it are wont to hang upon Johnson’s
lips, without being offended by his jocular brutality, his strenuous
piety, or his unflinching enmity to affectation. Of course a class
still exists, perhaps it never was more numerous than it now is, whose
nerves and lungs can endure the strong light and tonic air of Johnson’s
vigorous genius, and who rejoice to think that no one ever tamed their
tiger-cat. To these such an anniversary as the present, not needed to
remind them of one who is almost as real to them as any of their own
relations, is yet valuable as giving them a landmark from which they
may look back and judge the effect that distance has upon the apparent
and relative size of such a figure. This can be the only excuse, in a
brief note such as this must be, for dealing with facts and personages
which are the absolute commonplaces of literary history. We may know
our Boswell by heart, and be prepared to pass a searching examination
in _Rasselas_ and in the _Rambler_, and yet be ready to listen for
a moment with surprise to the voice which reminds us that a century has
passed away since the great pontiff of literature died.
How then does the noble and familiar figure strike us in looking
backward from the year 1884? In “constant repercussion from one coxcomb
to another,” have the sounds which he continued to make through a
career of stormy talk ceased to preserve all their value and importance
for us? How does he affect our critical vision now that we observe in
relief against him such later talker-seers as Coleridge, De Quincey,
and Carlyle? To these questions it is temperament more than literary
acumen which will suggest the replies; and the present writer has no
intention at this particular moment of attempting to forestall the
general opinion of the age. His only object in putting forth this brief
note is to lay stress on the curious importance of temperament in
dealing with what seems like a purely literary difficulty. The
personality of all other English writers, in prose and verse, even of
Pope, even of De Quincey, must eventually yield in interest to the
qualities of their writing. In Dr. Johnson alone the writings yield to
the personality, and in spite of the wonder of foreign critics such as
M. Taine, he remains, and will remain, although practically unread, one
of the most potent of English men of letters.
Must we not admit now, at the close of a century, that it is
practically impossible to read him? Among the lesser men that
surrounded him, there are many who have outstripped him in literary
vitality. In verse he lags far behind Gray and Collins, Churchill
and Chatterton; nay, if the _Wanderer_ were by Johnson and _London_
by Savage, the former would possess more readers than the latter
now attracts. In prose, who shall venture to say that Johnson is
the equal of Fielding, Smollett, Hume, Goldsmith, Gibbon, or Burke?
We know that he is far less entertaining, far less versatile and
brilliant, than any one of these. The _Discourses_ of his direct
disciple Reynolds are more often read, and with more pleasure, than
those essays of _The Rambler_ from which their style was taken. As a
dramatist, as a novelist, Johnson ranks below _Douglas_ Home, below
the inventor of _Peter Wilkins_. For years he labored upon what was
not literature at all, for other years on literature which the world
has been obliged, against its will, to allow to disappear. When all
is winnowed away which has become, in itself, interesting only to
scholars, there remains _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, a gnomic poem
of tedious morality, singularly feeble in the second joint of almost
every recurring distich; _Rasselas_, a _conte_ in the French taste,
insufferable in its lumbering machinery and pedantic ethics; the _Lives
of the Poets_, in which prejudice, ignorance, and taste combine to
irritate the connoisseur and bewilder the student. Such, with obvious
exaggeration, and with wilful suppression of exceptional facts, the
surviving literary labors of Johnson may be broadly described to be.
The paradox is that a Johnsonian may admit all that, and yet hold to it
that his hero is the principal Englishman of letters throughout the
rich second half of the eighteenth century. In this Johnson is unique.
Coleridge, for instance, was much more than a writer of readable
works in prose and verse; but let an age arrive in which the _Ancient
Mariner_, _Christabel_, and the _Biographia Literaria_ are no longer
read or admired, and Coleridge will scarcely be able, on the score
of his personality alone, to retain his lofty position among men of
letters. Yet this is what Johnson promises to succeed in continuing
to do. No one will ever say again, with Byron, that the _Lives of the
Poets_ is “the finest critical work extant,” but that does not make
Johnson ever so little a less commanding figure to us than he was to
Byron.
Let us consider for one moment the case of the unfortunate tragedy
of _Irene_. There are very few of us who are capable of placing our
hands upon our bosoms in the open sight of heaven and swearing that we
have ever read it quite through. The _Mourning Bride_ still counts its
admirers, and even _Cato_, but not _Irene_. Who among the staunchest
and strongest Johnsonians can tell what hero it was that confessed, and
upon what occasion,
“I thought (forgive me, fair!) the noblest aim,
The strongest effort of a female soul
Was but to choose the graces of the day.”
without peeping furtively at the text? Nevertheless _Irene_ lives
and always will live in the memory of men. But while other dramas
exist on the strength of their dramatic qualities, this of Johnson’s
lives on the personal qualities of the author himself. It is not
the blank, blank verse, nor the heroine’s reflections regarding the
mind of the Divine Being, nor the thrilling Turkish fable, nor the
snip-snap dialogue about prodigies between Leontius and Demetrius,
that preserves the memory of this tragedy. It is the anecdote of how
Walmsley asked, melted by the sorrows of Irene, “How can you possibly
contrive to plunge her into deeper calamity?” and how Johnson answered,
with a reference to his friend’s office, “Sir, I can put her into the
spiritual court!” It is the eagerness which George III. expressed to
possess the original MS. of the play. It is the monstrous folly which
made Cave suppose that the Royal Society would be a likely body to
purchase the copyright of it. It is the screams of the audience at
Drury Lane when they saw Mrs. Pritchard with the bowstring round her
neck. It is the garb in which Johnson insisted on dressing to look on
at the performance, in a scarlet waistcoat, and with a gold-laced hat
on his head. It is the tragedian’s unparalleled frankness about the
white silk stockings. These are the things which we recall when _Irene_
is mentioned, and if the play had been performed in dumb show, if it
had been a ballet, an opera, or a farce, its place in literary history
would be just where it is, no higher and no lower. Such is the curious
fate which attends all Johnson’s works, the most interesting of them is
not so interesting as the stories which cluster around its authorship.
This personal interest which we all feel in the sayings and doings of
Johnson is founded so firmly on his broad humanity that we need not
have the slightest fear of its cessation or diminution. The habits of
thought and expression which were in vogue in the eighteenth century
may repeat themselves, as some of us expect, in the twentieth, or our
children may become more captious, more violent, more ungraceful in
their tastes than we are ourselves. The close of the preface to the
_Dictionary_ may cease to seem pathetic, or may win more tributes of
tears than ever. The reputation of Johnson does not stand or fall by
the appetite of modern readers for the _Life of Savage_ or even for
the _Letter to Lord Chesterfield_. It depends on the impossibility of
human beings ever ceasing to watch with curiosity “the very pulse of
the machine” when it is displayed as Johnson displayed it through the
fortunate indiscretions of his friends, and when it is on the whole so
manly, wholesome, brave, honest, and tender as it was in his. There
will always be readers and admirers of what Johnson wrote. Let us
welcome them; but let us not imagine that Johnson, as a great figure
in letters, depends upon their suffrages. The mighty Samuel Johnson,
the anniversary of whose death both hemispheres of the English-speaking
race will solemnise on the 13th of this month, is not the author
of this or that laborious contribution to prose or verse, but the
convulsive invalid who “see-sawed” over the Grotius, the courageous old
Londoner who trusted his bones among the stormy Hebrides, the autocrat
of the Literary Club, the lover of all the company of blue-stockings,
the unequalled talker, the sweet and formidable friend, the truculent
boon-companion, the child-like Christian, who, for all his ghostly
terrors, contrived at last “to die contented, trusting in the mercy of
God, through the merits of Jesus Christ.” If the completed century
finds us with any change at all of our feelings regarding him, it
is surely merely this, that the passage of time is steadily making
his faults seem more superficial and accidental, and his merits more
striking, more essential, more pathetical and pleasing.—_Fortnightly
Review._