There can be little doubt that the illustrious Dr. Johnson was a
psychasthenic. His father could see in life nothing but gloom, though
his mother seems to have been hearty and sensible enough. Therefore
presumably we are entitled to say that the Great Cham’s family history
was faulty. At an early age he developed some trouble that his parents
diagnosed as scrofula, or tuberculous glands of the neck, but Boswell
expressly hints was suspected to have been caught from a nurse. They took
him to England’s kindly but not intelligent majesty, Queen Anne, who,
wearing a long black hood and diamonds to impress her patients, touched
him for his “grievous malady.” But she did not cure him; rather it would
seem that she made him worse; for all Johnson’s frightful jerkings and
grimaces, roarings and puffings, may possibly be traced back to that one
moment of nervous tension when he felt himself a little boy, the observed
of all observers, waiting to be touched by the sister-in-law of William
the Dutchman.
A child of bad heredity—indeed any child—must be treated with the utmost
care long before it appears to be conscious, before it appears to take
notice of what is going on around it; quarrelsome parents and angry
nurses may so warp his whole mental outlook that it is spoiled for life.
And it could not have been a good thing for the coming Great Cham to
subject him to such nervous strain as was necessarily involved in taking
him before Queen Anne. He was lucky in that it did not make him stammer.
Many a sensitive boy has been made to stammer by less than was involved
in Sam’s childish treatment. Long before a child appears to be conscious
its mind is taking notice of all that goes on around it, and its whole
future life may be warped in one moment of terror or anxiety. And the
sad thing is that probably Mrs. Johnson senior had made a mistake in
diagnosis, that probably little Sam was not suffering from scrofula at
all, but from some swelling of the glands of the neck that was due to
something in his scalp. That he lived till he was seventy-five seems to
show that he never suffered either from tuberculosis or syphilis, those
two great slayers; and if his glands had really been tuberculous it is
probable that, bursting, they would have formed a “mixed infection” that
would have had more serious effects than mere local scarring.
It is possible that while the incident persisted in Johnson’s conscious
memory as a “confused and solemn memory,” in his unconscious memory it
may have persisted in those extraordinary antics which to Boswell seemed
a sort of St. Vitus’s dance. Perhaps in them we see the struggles of a
sensitive little boy to avoid the frightful ordeal of being “touched”
and resentment at the insult to his masculine grandeur. We know that his
masculinity had already been very much insulted at the age of three when
a schoolmistress ran after him lest he fall into the gutter.
Psychasthenia is a grim half-sister to neurasthenia, from which it
appears to differ in that, while neurasthenia merely shows that the man’s
nervous system is not sufficiently strong to stand the stout clouts
and buffets of this wicked world, in psychasthenia he has never had a
chance. The best translation of the term “psychasthenic” appears to be
“unbalanced,” and, though probably psychasthenia was about the best
term that Professor Janet could have selected for this queer condition,
still it conveys an unwarranted implication of imbecility, for many
men of the greatest genius have been utterly unbalanced. The man of
genius is seldom actually insane, but he is often unbalanced and of the
manic-depressive temperament; at any moment he may be “knocked off his
perch” and may become definitely insane.
Thus, subject always to the possible denial of the alienists, I should
certainly imagine that Beethoven was psychasthenic, for he was always
falling in and out of love, was constantly quarrelling with his
landlords, cast his rice pudding at the cook, jammed his hat fiercely on
his head when he and Goethe walked before royalty, was looked upon as
crazy, and used to run about the fields trying to roar the latest melody
that had come into his head. And Charles Lamb not only stammered but had
a sister who was definitely insane.
The unbalanced are subject to queer actions which appear to take their
origin in the unconscious mind. Thus, there arise from the unconscious
into consciousness imperative ideas which insist on recognition however
malapropos they may happen to be. Sometimes these actually go on to form
obsessions, and I must ask you to permit me to define these two important
terms. The imperative idea simply arises into consciousness out of the
unconscious. When it compels appropriate action it is generally, though
not always, called an obsession. Thus, when Johnson walked along Fleet
Street the imperative idea arose from his unconscious that it would be
a fitting thing to put his hand upon every horse-post that he passed.
When he did so or turned on his tracks that no horse-post should be left
uncapped the definition of an obsession would appear to be correct. And
from the unconscious arise those queer phobias or fears which often so
strangely influence their actions.
Still gossiping about the unbalanced, was St. Francis of Assisi entirely
sane when he left all the money that he owed his father on a heap of his
clothes and set out to build a church with his own hands? If this be
insanity let us have more of it. The ordinary sane stodgy man does not
lead the world; secure in his stodginess he makes money and lives happy
ever after. But the genius is always a little “cracked,” otherwise he
would probably not be a genius. And so many of them have been ill men; in
fact one can hardly call to mind as one writes a single really healthy
and sane genius, unless possibly Sir Walter Scott. St. Francis is said to
have had renal tuberculosis.
That is probably the only real serious objection to birth-control; you
can never tell whom you are condemning to perpetual absence of life.
Thus Abraham Lincoln, strictly speaking, should never have been born,
for his mother, Nancy Hanks, though never insane, lived all her life in
the depths of gloom and on the verge of insanity. Yet it would appear
that the absence of Old Abe at a given crisis of the world’s history
might have made some difference to civilisation. And even if we are to
take bodily health as the criterion of fitness, what about Mozart, the
tuberculous and pallid little genius of Vienna whom many people still
consider as the very greatest musician that ever lived? Certainly not
even Beethoven in his first period ever attained to Mozart’s delicious
childlikeness of touch.
If the world had insisted that St. Francis of Assisi, Abe Lincoln, and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart should not have been born one would think that
the world would now be a poorer place than it is. And one names only a
few; for Spinoza should never have been born, doomed to live only a few
years and then to die of tuberculosis while he was mystically trying to
reduce God to a mathematical formula.
In fact one could go on for weeks on this subject, and the conclusion
that any fair-minded person must reach is that birth-control, even of
the apparently unfit, is too risky an experiment for the human race
to try if it wishes to keep its geniuses. You never can tell what the
infant may turn out that you are preventing from being born. But I am
aware that this is a highly contentious subject, and that awful thing,
“the sex-war,” is involved in it. People are sure to have differences of
opinion about it; since woman has risen to her new estate these opinions
will assuredly be held with more vigour than ever.
“Treat ’em rough” is a known and tried aphorism, which has been elevated
to a pitch of almost epic grandeur by Schopenhauer’s “Pitch ’em
downstairs”; and probably some such aphorism was in Johnson’s mind when
he rode with old Mrs. Porter to the church that they might be married,
and, you remember, reduced her to tears before they got there. Up till
then he probably had only the poet’s knowledge of woman; but that after
such an ill beginning the marriage turned out so happily, seems to argue
that Mrs. Porter, though she might paint her face, was nevertheless
a woman with the heart of a lion to tame his aggressively masculine
soul. And it is quite possible that before she died—she was twice his
age, you know—he began to have for her a love similar to that one has
for a mother. Of course it may be that Boswell, in his uncomplimentary
description of Johnson’s wife, was misled by jealousy of her who sat too
near the throne of his hero-worship. But in any case she must have been a
remarkable woman to tame Ursa Major as she did.
If one were to translate psychasthenic into “poor in spirit”—which is not
very far from its Greek meaning—probably we should come very near to its
real inner meaning; and we have the best possible authority for knowing
the post-mortem future of the poor in spirit. If the Kingdom of Heaven
is to be composed of such men as Johnson and Beethoven it would not be a
bad place to inhabit, though the shade of Johnson would certainly insist
on carrying home some fallen angel, while Beethoven would probably throw
something at a monotonous orchestra of harps, if he could hear it.
In support of the contention that towards the end of her life he had
begun to consider Mrs. Porter as less a wife in the ordinary sense of the
term than a mother-surrogate whom he could trust as a faithful friend who
would never desert him whatever the circumstances, here is a letter that
he wrote to the Rev. Dr. Taylor on the day she died:
“SIR,
“Pray desire Mrs. Taylor to inform me what mourning I should
buy for my mother and Miss Porter, and bring a note of writing
with you.”
His dear wife dead he could not trust himself even to buy mourning
without her aid.
He appears not to have been able even to take care of himself without
some woman to act the mother towards him. Years later he found another
mother-surrogate in Mrs. Thrale, who saw to it that he wore respectable
clothing with brass buttons, and silver buckles—not too big—on his shoes.
It was evidently a severe blow to him when the naughty thing went and
married Signor Piozzi, for it left him without a single woman to show him
how to take care of himself.
That nervous malady which Boswell diagnosed as a sort of St. Vitus’s
dance probably merely represented the violent impulsive and involuntary
movements occasionally seen in psychasthenia; had the defect affected the
nerves of speech Johnson would probably have stammered; but one can never
imagine a man so aggressive stammering.
How far back in life is it possible to remember? Freud thinks that the
first five years of life are not retained in conscious memory, although
they exercise the greatest possible influence upon our afterlives.
Personally I try to think that my first recollection is that of the
frightful itching that accompanied the wearing of my first pair of
knickerbockers, which my mother used to tell me occurred on my fourth
birthday; but it is so difficult to distinguish between what you remember
and what older people have told you that one must sometimes think that
after all probably Freud may be right, and it is impossible to remember
before the fifth birthday.
Johnson’s roars and bluster were probably really to conceal an innate
shyness that is frequently seen in very nervous men. In further evidence
that he was at heart a shy man here is a letter that he wrote to his old
friend Dr. Birch:
“March 29, 1765.
“To Dr. Birch,
“Sir:
“I have sent some parts of my dictionary, such as were at hand,
for your inspection. The favour which I ask of you is that if
you do not like them, you will say nothing.
“I am, sir,
“Your most affectionate humble servant,
“SAM JOHNSON.”
He could not even bear to hear the faithful words of his old friend about
the child of his brain, though he felt himself entitled to sign “your
most affectionate humble servant.”
Like most men of apparently strong common sense, when you look too
critically into their dogmata, Johnson’s common sense begins to look
more like uncommon foolishness; for it was certainly no answer to Bishop
Berkeley’s metaphysics to bang his foot against a stone. It requires a
far more subtle argument which must probably be fortified by the eye of
faith, which, you remember, has been defined as “the faculty of believing
what you know to be untrue.” But Johnson’s argument is the sort of bluff
obvious thing that so appeals to a common-sense person like John Bull.
And doubtless that is why Johnson has so appealed to John Bull that he
has almost been elevated to the pinnacle of a national hero. Full of
rats, poor old gentleman; yet one can’t help loving him for his rats.
As woman seldom stammers, so she is seldom afflicted by psychasthenia,
which, being a variation, appears to be almost confined to the male,
like genius. Woman is seldom “ratty”; she has far too much hard common
sense. Who ever heard of women killing each other to settle whether a
word should be spelt homooisian or homoousian? Or to decide whether there
are three Gods or One? Yet men have waged savage tumult over these very
things, which no person can possibly know. Sometimes lady novelists seem
to go ratty when they try to describe men, and ultimately describe some
creature who is like nothing on earth; but it is only fair to say that
such lady novelists are suspected by men to be between the ages of forty
and fifty, and probably for a time slightly unbalanced. But the normal
average woman is far saner than the normal average man. Once she has
secured her man her chief duty afterwards seems to be to see that his
rats do not lead him away from the paths of respectability, into such
nonsense as that of Bernard Palissy, for instance, who burned even his
furniture to keep the stove going that might lead to the discovery of a
porcelain glaze, even though his wife and children might starve. No woman
ever followed a will-o’-the-wisp with such fury, simply because no woman
was ever so ratty; it is hardly respectable; it seems to be purely a
matter of sex-physiology.
But we must dilate yet a little further on the utterly unbalanced
character of Johnson. An incident is told of him in 1784, when he was
about 74 years of age; as it is impossible to tell it better than
Boswell, let us leave it in Boswell’s own words. “Coming home late one
night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that
she could not walk; he took her upon his back” (by the way it was a quite
unnecessarily laborious and cumbersome way to carry a woman; for a giant
like Sam it would have seemed an easier matter to stoop down and pick
her up in his arms), “and carried her to his home, where he found her to
be one of those wretched females who have sunk to the lowest levels of
vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of upbraiding her he had her taken
care of with all care and tenderness for a long time at considerable
expense, till she was restored to health and endeavoured to put her into
a virtuous way of living.” This was just the sort of kind, impulsive, and
senseless thing that would seem so utterly natural to a psychasthenic
and so utterly silly to a normal man. We know now that it is almost
impossible to reclaim a prostitute, for no normal woman ever becomes a
prostitute. Normal woman always has far too much dignity and self-respect
and reads too mystic a meaning into the sexual act ever to offer herself
to the embraces of any casual man in the street, however great her
economic distress; rather if driven into a corner by poverty a normal
woman finds some one male friend to help her, so that she may console
herself with the thought that at least she is married in the sight of
God, if not in the sight of man. Normal woman is essentially monogamous.
But Sam appears to have been as hopeful of success as Theodora when
she made her famous raid upon the brothels of Byzantium; one would
like to know the ultimate success or failure of his adventure into the
underworld. We know that poor Theodora failed absolutely. One cannot help
wondering what Anna Williams would have thought of it, for women are the
enemies of women; but fortunately for her she seems to have been recently
dead, having quarrelled with everyone who was open to quarrel with her.
If this be true, at least she never knew to what depths of degradation
Samuel could sink. But a doctor can easily imagine the fulsome gratitude
that would be lavished by the poor starving prostitute upon the huge
preserver when she woke up and found him giving her something to eat
without wanting anything else from her. Prostitutes do not meet with so
much disinterested kindness in this world that it ever palls. That is why
it is so sad that sexual reclamation of them is almost impossible, for
too often they carry the seeds of their own destruction with them.
Then there is that delicious incident of Mr. Osborn the bookseller. “The
fellow insulted me, so I beat him; but it was in the privacy of my own
chamber—it was not in his shop.” Of course. To knock down a publisher was
only quite right and proper. Who would not do it? But even a publisher
has his rights. To do it in his own shop would be to expose him to the
insults of his own servants, and that is positively not done, especially
by an Oxford man. Rats, pure rats. Yet publishers are said to be fair
game for authors and so far no close-season has been proclaimed for them.
Few men attain to the age of seventy odd without some warning that they
are mortal and that the grave is waiting. Of course there is the classic
instance of Voltaire, who from the age of sixty odd complained of mortal
illness, and yet, recovering, lived to a vast age, wizened, malicious,
and “peaky” as a rat. But then, like Mr. Blake, Voltaire was a regular
out and out hardened sinner and words could not possibly express the
contempt that he felt for the mediæval devil of eighteenth-century
Christianity. Probably he persisted in living on just to cheat the devil
of his just due because he despised him so.
As a matter of fact we often find that soon after fifty some illness
attacks a man from which he never really recovers, even though he may
appear to be well; there is always the trifling difference in him that
marks the passage of the years. Johnson’s warning came to him—though he
did not observe it—many years before when Boswell could observe the sight
that he made of himself as he gobbled his meals.
He was evidently very fond of eating; himself, he boasted of his delicate
tastes in food; and when he ate “the veins of his forehead stood out and
a strong perspiration was visible.” This appears to have much disgusted
Macaulay, but most of us have seen similar prowess in perfectly worthy
men. Presumably when Boswell said “the veins of his forehead” he meant
the superficial temporal arteries, for if they had really been the
soft and thin-walled veins, Johnson, bestrewn with bladders, would
have looked indeed noteworthy. But there came a time when they stood
out once too often, and probably they never shrank back again to the
normal size, but became thickened. Thus his blood-pressure rose under
the strain of arteriosclerosis and in the course of years the inevitable
results of gluttony overtook him. Drink, guzzle, and syphilis are the
three deadly sins, and they are deadly in proportion to the effect that
they cause upon the arteries. And in the term “arteries” one includes
heart and kidneys. The heart is simply a large expansion of an artery,
and the kidneys are merely a network of arterioles and capillaries;
if one part goes all the rest follow, and thus it is that the term
“cardiovascular disease” is generally used to describe the results of
high blood-pressure. It is of course possible that Johnson’s glooms may
have been due to intestinal auto-intoxication; but melancholia is a
constant companion of an unduly sensitive nervous system.
Warnings came in 1782 with breathlessness and pain in the chest; the
heart was evidently beginning to rebel, but the first real alarming
warning came on the night of June 17th, 1783, when he awoke in the middle
of the night and found that he could not speak. Trying to write, he
found that “my hand made wrong letters,” that is to say he had not only
aphasia, but “agraphia” or loss of power to write. Possibly if anybody
had happened to think of it he might have been able to communicate with
the outer world by means of children’s block letters. But nobody did; and
when his servant came in the morning he could not comprehend why the old
gentleman expected him to read something that he had written instead of
speaking in answer to his own chatter.
This sudden aphasia in old people is not uncommon, and may be due to
several causes, that all in one way or other affect the so-called “speech
centre” of the brain. As the “writing centre” is situated in the very
near vicinity, it is not surprising that a lesion that affects one
generally also affects the other. That Johnson’s right hand was not also
paralysed at the same time is rather unusual, because the left side of
the brain which controls the right side of the body also contains the
speech centre; and it is supposed that it does so because man has for
many thousands of years been accustomed to use his right hand more than
his left, wherefore the left side of his brain would naturally be more
ready to acquire new functions than the right, which only controls the
comparatively awkward left hand. If this theory be true it would rather
seem to show that men were accustomed to use their right hands long
before they could speak; and this indeed is quite probable.
The exact lesion would appear to have been that one of the cerebral
arteries that supplied the left side of Johnson’s brain had for
some reason been thrown into a state of spasm, and caused temporary
softening of the brain owing to interference with its blood-supply.
If an artery had actually burst on the site of a tiny aneurysm, as
occasionally happens in cases of arteriosclerosis, the old man would
not have recovered so soon, even temporarily. As it was, he seems to
have recovered sufficiently by July to pay a visit to Dr. Langton at
Rochester. The shock and terror induced by an attack of aphasia are
generally very dreadful. I remember one elderly lady, who had always been
of a most gentle and virtuous way of living, who one day suddenly sat up
in bed with a scream, clutching at her bedclothes and at her throat and
uttering meaningless noises like an ape. Twelve hours later she had for
a time recovered her power of speech, and after lying musing for half
an hour, said in her customary gentle voice, “I should like some fish;
they say fish is good for the brain.” She had somewhere read that fish
contains a large amount of phosphorus, which is supposed to be good for
the brain—by patent-medicine vendors. But I shall never forget the scream
of that poor lady, nor the look of terror that came over her gentle face.
Johnson’s terror led him to write a prayer for his recovery, done in
Latin verse. “The lines were not very good, but I knew them to be not
very good, so concluded that I was not impaired in my faculties.” There
you see at once the supreme passion of the man—Learning—coming out in
what he thought to be the very article of death.
Then, “in order to rouse the vocal organs, I took two drams. Wine has
been celebrated for the production of eloquence, so I put myself into
violent motion and I think repeated it; but all was in vain.” It is
hardly fair to comment upon this action of a man bemused with terror
and aphasia that probably wine was the very worst thing he could have
taken; for it tends to raise the blood-pressure. Not that it made much
difference; Death was focussing his eyes on Dr. Johnson; the call was
coming, and no earthly power could avert it.
But apparently even Boswell nods; for after telling of Johnson’s terrible
illness in 1783 he goes on to tell how in _1784_ he was able to put a
woman on his back and carry her home. Well, one simply does not believe
it; the thing is impossible; Boswell must have got his dates mixed a
little; for to carry a woman, even though she were starving and the man
a giant, is no small feat; and if the man were very old and had just
recovered from an attack of aphasia, it would be absolutely incredible.
Really, wonderful though we men are—in no way more wonderful than in our
power of believing nonsense—we are not such terrible fellows as some say.
After the paralytic stroke all the devils in hell seem to have settled
upon the poor old gentleman, with their gout, dropsy, and continual
fear of death. Probably the gout was simply another manifestation of
the defect of metabolism—faulty chemical physiological process, or
dystrophy—that had caused his high blood-pressure. The asthma and
oppression in his chest were probably due to a failing heart; and thence
also doubtless came the dropsy; for dropsy is not a disease—it is a
symptom of many things, generally cardiac or renal. And his cough became
exceedingly troublesome, possibly due to congestion of the base of his
lungs that would be caused in a way much the same as caused the dropsy;
he was becoming “water-logged.”
A rather remarkable thing is that, once having become filled up with
dropsy, he got rid of it apparently suddenly. If I remember rightly Dr.
Johnson was taking squills at the time, and squills is still used for
getting rid of fluid from the body, though it has been supplanted by
more efficient drugs. One might perhaps think that hope told Johnson
a flattering tale, but he says expressly that he got rid of twenty
pints. Queer things happen in dropsy, and even such a pseudo-miracle as
Johnson’s is not unknown. Once water-logged with dropsy, legs, belly,
lungs and all, it would have seemed to require a miracle to get him
emptied, and miracles seldom happen.
The really wonderful thing is, however, that a man of so gloomy a
temperament as the Great Cham should have retained such comparative
cheerfulness of spirits as he had even after an experience so depressing
as an attack of aphasia. He must have been a remarkably brave old man,
which is quite in accordance with his strongly masculine character. And
this discovery of the wrong dating of one of the most remarkable things
that Boswell tells of him only makes his conduct more heroic; for if what
I surmise is true, Miss Williams must have been alive and quarrelsome,
ready to give Sam the rough side of her tongue for daring to carry home a
woman of abandoned character. Cynics have said that to marry a woman is
to marry a conscience; but it is even more terrible when the woman is not
a man’s wife, but, old, blind, deaf, and quarrelsome, is dependent on his
generosity for a living. She may probably consider it her duty to look
after his morals as strictly as though she were his wife.
His actual end seems to have been caused by a mild terminal pneumonia,
which in a healthy young person would have been thrown off like a cold in
the head; but was too much for ancient lungs and tired heart.
“To be miserable,” said Goldsmith, who had known what it was to be
inarticulate and despised, “was to ensure the protection of Dr. Johnson.”
Was not that a better definition of sainthood than whimsically to pervert
the Sermon on the Mount?
To sum up, probably all Johnson’s psychasthenic involuntary movements,
which made him so strange a figure to his contemporaries, took their
origin in unconscious memory of some affront to his childish masculinity,
such as would be caused by taking him to Queen Anne to be “touched.” And
she was not even a king, nor yet even in the direct line of accession
either! These women! They will go poking their noses in everywhere.
And possibly here too many have been the source of those extraordinary
imperative ideas which it was dangerous to deny, lest he roar at you for
an ignorant and intolerant fellow. Assuredly you cannot treat a child too
carefully if you want it to grow up a sane and normal member of the human
race.