The ten handsome volumes which the indefatigable and unresting zeal of
Dr. Birkbeck Hill, and the high spirit of the Clarendon Press, have
edited, arranged, printed, and published for the benefit of the world
and the propagation of the Gospel according to Dr. Johnson are
pleasant things to look upon. I hope the enterprise has proved
remunerative to those concerned, but I doubt it. The parsimony of the
public in the matter of books is pitiful. The ordinary purse-carrying
Englishman holds in his head a ready-reckoner or scale of charges by
which he tests his purchases--so much for a dinner, so much for a
bottle of champagne, so much for a trip to Paris, so much for a pair
of gloves, and so much for a book. These ten volumes would cost him £4
9s. 3d. 'Whew! What a price for a book, and where are they to be put,
and who is to dust them?' Idle questions! As for room, a bicycle takes
more room than 1,000 books; and as for dust, it is a delusion. You
should never dust books. There let it lie until the rare hour arrives
when you want to read a particular volume; then warily approach it
with a snow-white napkin, take it down from its shelf, and,
withdrawing to some back apartment, proceed to cleanse the tome. Dr.
Johnson adopted other methods. Every now and again he drew on huge
gloves, such as those once worn by hedgers and ditchers, and then,
clutching his folios and octavos, he banged and buffeted them together
until he was enveloped in a cloud of dust. This violent exercise over,
the good doctor restored the volumes, all battered and bruised, to
their places, where, of course, the dust resettled itself as speedily
as possible.
Dr. Johnson could make books better than anybody, but his notions of
dusting them were primitive and erroneous. But the room and the dust
are mere subterfuges. The truth is, there is a disinclination to pay
£4 9s. 3d. for the ten volumes containing the complete Johnsonian
legend. To quarrel with the public is idiotic and most un-Johnsonian.
'Depend upon it, sir,' said the Sage, 'every state of society is as
luxurious as it can be.' We all, a handful of misers excepted, spend
more money than we can afford upon luxuries, but what those luxuries
are to be is largely determined for us by the fashions of our time. If
we do not buy these ten volumes, it is not because we would not like
to have them, but because we want the money they cost for something we
want more. As for dictating to men how they are to spend their money,
it were both a folly and an impertinence.
These ten volumes ended Dr. Hill's labours as an editor of _Johnson's
Life and Personalia_, but did not leave him free. He had set his mind
on an edition of the _Lives of the Poets_. This, to the regret of all
who knew him either personally or as a Johnsonian, he did not live to
see through the press. But it is soon to appear, and will be a
storehouse of anecdote and a miracle of cross-references. A poet who
has been dead a century or two is amazing good company--at least, he
never fails to be so when Johnson tells us as much of his story as he
can remember without undue research, with that irony of his, that vast
composure, that humorous perception of the greatness and the
littleness of human life, that make the brief records of a Spratt, a
Walsh, and a Fenton so divinely entertaining. It is an immense
testimony to the healthiness of the Johnsonian atmosphere that Dr.
Hill, who breathed it almost exclusively for a quarter of a century
and upwards, showed no symptoms either of moral deterioration or
physical exhaustion. His appetite to the end was as keen as ever, nor
was his temper obviously the worse. The task never became a toil, not
even a tease. 'You have but two subjects,' said Johnson to Boswell:
'yourself and myself. I am sick of both.' Johnson hated to be talked
about, or to have it noticed what he ate or what he had on. For a
hundred years now last past he has been more talked about and noticed
than anybody else. But Dr. Hill never grew sick of Dr. Johnson.
The _Johnsonian Miscellanies_[A] open with the _Prayers and
Meditations_, first published by the Rev. Dr. Strahan in 1785. Strahan
was the Vicar of Islington, and into his hands at an early hour one
morning Dr. Johnson, then approaching his last days, put the papers,
'with instructions for committing them to the press and with a promise
to prepare a sketch of his own life to accompany them.' This promise
the doctor was not able to keep, and shortly after his death his
reverend friend published the papers just as they were put into his
hands. One wonders he had the heart to do it, but the clerical mind is
sometimes strangely insensitive to the privacy of thought. But, as in
the case of most indelicate acts, you cannot but be glad the thing was
done. The original manuscript is at Pembroke College, Oxford. In these
_Prayers and Meditations_ we see an awful figure. The _solitary_
Johnson, perturbed, tortured, oppressed, in distress of body and of
mind, full of alarms for the future both in this world and the next,
teased by importunate and perplexing thoughts, harassed by morbid
infirmities, vexed by idle yet constantly recurring scruples, with an
inherited melancholy and a threatened sanity, is a gloomy and even a
terrible picture, and forms a striking contrast to the social hero,
the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame
D'Arblay. Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its fellowship
and feeling. Dr. Johnson's piety is delightfully full of human
nature--far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote of the
_Prayers and Meditations_ as follows:
'If it be fair to judge of a book by an extract, I do not wonder
that you were so little edified by Johnson's Journal. It is even
more ridiculous than was poor Rutty's of flatulent memory. The
portion of it given us in this day's paper contains not one
sentiment worth one farthing, except the last, in which he resolves
to bind himself with no more unbidden obligations. Poor man! one
would think that to pray for his dead wife and to pinch himself
with Church fasts had been almost the whole of his religion.'
[Footnote A: Two volumes. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1897.]
It were hateful to pit one man's religion against another's, but it
is only fair to Dr. Johnson's religion to remember that, odd compound
as it was, it saw him through the long struggle of life, and enabled
him to meet the death he so honestly feared like a man and a
Christian. The _Prayers and Meditations_ may not be an edifying book
in Cowper's sense of the word; there is nothing triumphant about it;
it is full of infirmities and even absurdities; but, for all that, it
contains more piety than 10,000 religious biographies. Nor must the
evidence it contains of weakness be exaggerated. Beset with
infirmities, a lazy dog, as he often declared himself to be, he yet
managed to do a thing or two. Here, for example, is an entry:
'29, EASTER EVE (1777).
'I rose and again prayed with reference to my departed wife. I
neither read nor went to church, yet can scarcely tell how I have
been hindered. I treated with booksellers on a bargain, but the
time was not long.'
Too long, perhaps, for Johnson's piety, but short enough to enable the
booksellers to make an uncommon good bargain for the _Lives of the
Poets_. 'As to the terms,' writes Mr. Dilly, 'it was left entirely to
the doctor to name his own; he mentioned 200 guineas; it was
immediately agreed to.' The business-like Malone makes the following
observation on the transaction: 'Had he asked 1,000, or even 1,500,
guineas the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would
doubtless have readily given it.' Dr. Johnson, though the son of a
bookseller, was the least tradesman-like of authors. The bargain was
bad, but the book was good.
A year later we find this record:
'MONDAY, _April_ 20 (1778).
'After a good night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably
and prayed, using the collect for yesterday. In reviewing my time
from Easter, 1777, I find a very melancholy and shameful blank. So
little has been done that days and months are without any trace. My
health has, indeed, been very much interrupted. My nights have been
commonly not only restless but painful and fatiguing.... I have
written a little of the _Lives of the Poets_, I think, with all my
usual vigour. I have made sermons, perhaps, as readily as formerly.
My memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, in
retaining occurrences. Of this vacillation and vagrancy of mind I
impute a great part to a fortuitous and unsettled life, and
therefore purpose to spend my life with more method.
'This year the 28th of March passed away without memorial. Poor
Tetty, whatever were our faults and failings, we loved each other.
I did not forget thee yesterday. Couldst thou have lived! I am now,
with the help of God, to begin a new life.'
Dr. Hill prints an interesting letter of Mr. Jowett's, in which occur
the following observations:
'It is a curious question whether Boswell has unconsciously
misrepresented Johnson in any respect. I think, judging from the
materials, which are supplied chiefly by himself, that in one
respect he has. He has represented him more as a sage and
philosopher in his conduct as well as his conversation than he
really was, and less as a rollicking "King of Society." The gravity
of Johnson's own writings tends to confirm this, as I suspect,
erroneous impression. His religion was fitful and intermittent; and
when once the ice was broken he enjoyed Jack Wilkes, though he
refused to shake hands with Hume. I was much struck with a remark
of Sir John Hawkins (excuse me if I have mentioned this to you
before): "He was the most humorous man I ever knew."'
Mr. Jowett's letter raises some nice points--the Wilkes and Hume
point, for example. Dr. Johnson hated both blasphemy and bawd, but he
hated blasphemy most. Mr. Jowett shared the doctor's antipathies, but
very likely hated bawd more than he did blasphemy. But, as I have
already said, the point is a nice one. To crack jokes with Wilkes at
the expense of Boswell and the Scotch seems to me a very different
thing from shaking hands with Hume. But, indeed, it is absurd to
overlook either Johnson's melancholy piety or his abounding humour and
love of fun and nonsense. His _Prayers and Meditations_ are full of
the one, Boswell and Mrs. Thrale and Madame D'Arblay are full of the
other. Boswell's _Johnson_ has superseded the 'authorized biography'
by Sir John Hawkins, and Dr. Hill did well to include in these
_Miscellanies_ Hawkins' inimitable description of the memorable
banquet given at the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, in the spring of
1751, to celebrate the publication of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's first
novel. What delightful revelry! what innocent mirth! prolonged though
it was till long after dawn. Poor Mrs. Lennox died in distress in
1804, at the age of eighty-three. Could Johnson but have lived he
would have lent her his helping hand. He was no fair-weather friend,
but shares with Charles Lamb the honour of being able to unite narrow
means and splendid munificence.