```“Six hours to law, to soothing slumbers seven,
```Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven.”=
The second couplet puzzles Mr. Croker strangely. “Sir William,” says he,
“has shortened his day to twenty-three hours, and the general advice of
“all to heaven,” destroys the peculiar appropriation of a certain period
to religious exercises.” [v. 233.] Now we did not think that it was
in human dullness to miss the meaning of the lines so completely. Sir
William distributes twenty-three hours among various employments. One
hour is thus left for devotion. The reader expects that the verse will
end with “and one to heaven.” The whole point of the lines consist in
the unexpected substitution of “all” for “one.” The conceit is wretched
enough, but it is perfectly intelligible, and never, we will venture to
say, perplexed man, woman, or child before.
Poor Tom Davies, after failing in business, tried to live by his
pen. Johnson called him “an author generated by the corruption of a
bookseller.” This is a very obvious, and even a commonplace allusion
to the famous dogma of the old physiologists. Dryden made a similar
allusion to that dogma before Johnson was born. Mr. Croker, however, is
unable to understand what the doctor meant. “The expression,” he says,
“seems not quite clear.” And he proceeds to talk about the generation of
insects, about bursting into gaudier life, and Heaven knows what. [Vol.
iv. 323.]
There is a still stranger instance of the editor’s talent for finding
out difficulty in what is perfectly plain. “No man,” said Johnson, “can
now be made a bishop for his learning and piety.” “From this too just
observation,” says Boswell, “there are some eminent exceptions.” Mr.
Croker is puzzled by Boswell’s very natural and simple language. “That
a general observation should be pronounced too just, by the very person
who admits that it is not universally just, is not a little odd.” [2
iii. 228.]
A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the
editor boasts of having added to those of Boswell and Malone consists
of the flattest and poorest reflections, reflections such as the least
intelligent reader is quite competent to make for himself, and such as
no intelligent reader would think it worth while to utter aloud. They
remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting
annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries’ boys
on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries;
“How beautiful!” “Cursed prosy!” “I don’t like Sir Reginald Malcolm
at all.” “I think Pelham is a sad dandy.” Mr. Croker is perpetually
stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in
the language, to observe that really Dr. Johnson was very rude, that
he talked more for victory than for truth, that his taste for port wine
with capillaire in it was very odd, that Boswell was impertinent, that
it was foolish in Mrs. Thrale to marry the music-master; and so forth.
We cannot speak more favourably of the manner in which the notes are
written than of the matter of which they consist. We find in every page
words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest
rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of “mutual friend,” for “common
friend.” We have “fallacy” used as synonymous with “falsehood.” We have
many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows:
“Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the
first time that he had the honour of being in his company.” Lastly, we
have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling those which we
subjoin. “Markland, who, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three
contemporaries of great eminence.” [iv. 377.] “Warburton himself did not
feel, as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or gratefully
of Johnson.” [iv. 415.] “It was him that Horace Walpole called a man
who never made a bad figure but as an author.” [ii. 461.] One or two
of these solecisms should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who has
certainly done his best to fill both the text and the notes with all
sorts of blunders. In truth, he and the editor have between them made
the book so bad, that we do not well see how it could have been worse.
When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the work of our old
friend Boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other
edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton
manner. Much that Boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the
shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix. The editor has also taken
upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as indecorous.
This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There is nothing immoral
in Boswell’s book, nothing which tends to inflame the passions. He
sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a taint which requires
expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning
and evening lessons. The delicate office which Mr. Croker has
undertaken he has performed in the most capricious manner. One strong,
old-fashioned, English word, familiar to all who read their Bibles,
is changed for a sober synonym in some passages, and suffered to stand
unaltered in others. In one place a faint allusion made by Johnson to
an indelicate subject, an allusion so faint that, till Mr. Croker’s note
pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are quite
sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for
whose sake books are expurgated, is altogether omitted. In another
place, a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor on the same subject,
expressed in the broadest language, almost the only passage, as far as
we remember, in all Boswell’s book, which we should have been inclined
to leave out, is suffered to remain.
We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions.
We have half of Mrs. Thrale’s book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr.
Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and
connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst
of Boswell’s text. To this practice we most decidedly object. An
editor might as well publish Thucydides with extracts from Diodorus
interspersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius with the History and
Annals of Tacitus. Mr. Croker tells us, indeed, that he has done only
what Boswell wished to do, and was prevented from doing by the law of
copyright. We doubt this greatly. Boswell has studiously abstained
from availing himself of the information given by his rivals, on many
occasions on which he might have cited them without subjecting himself
to the charge of piracy. Mr. Croker has himself, on one occasion,
remarked very justly that Boswell was unwilling to owe any obligation to
Hawkins. But, be this as it may, if Boswell had quoted from Sir John
and from Mrs. Thrale, he would have been guided by his own taste and
judgment in selecting his quotations. On what Boswell quoted he would
have commented with perfect freedom; and the borrowed passages, so
selected, and accompanied by such comments, would have become original.
They would have dovetailed into the work. No hitch, no crease, would
have been discernible. The whole would appear one and indivisible.=
```“Ut per laeve severos
```Effundat junctura ungues.”=
This is not the case with Mr. Croker’s insertions. They are not chosen
as Boswell would have chosen them. They are not introduced as Boswell
would have introduced them. They differ from the quotations scattered
through the original Life of Johnson, as a withered bough stuck in the
ground differs from a tree skilfully transplanted with all its life
about it.
Not only do these anecdotes disfigure Boswell’s book; they are
themselves disfigured by being inserted in his book. The charm of Mrs.
Thrale’s little volume is utterly destroyed. The feminine quickness
of observation, the feminine softness of heart, the colloquial
incorrectness and vivacity of style, the little amusing airs of a
half-learned lady, the delightful garrulity, the “dear Doctor Johnson,”
the “it was so comical,” all disappear in Mr. Croker’s quotations. The
lady ceases to speak in the first person; and her anecdotes, in the
process of transfusion, become as flat as Champagne in decanters,
or Herodotus in Beloe’s version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses
nothing; and for the best of reasons. Sir John Hawkins has nothing to
lose.
The course which Mr. Croker ought to have taken is quite clear. He
should have reprinted Boswell’s narrative precisely as Boswell wrote
it; and in the notes or the appendix he should have placed any anecdote
which he might have thought it advisable to quote from other writers.
This would have been a much more convenient course for the reader, who
has now constantly to keep his eye on the margin in order to see whether
he is perusing Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Murphy, Hawkins, Tyers, Cradock, or
Mr. Croker. We greatly doubt whether even the Tour to the Hebrides ought
to have been inserted in the midst of the Life. There is one marked
distinction between the two works. Most of the Tour was seen by Johnson
in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of the Life.
We love, we own, to read the great productions of the human mind as
they were written. We have this feeling even about scientific treatises;
though we know that the sciences are always in a state of progression,
and that the alterations made by a modern editor in an old book on any
branch of natural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements.
Some errors have been detected by writers of this generation in the
speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been made to much knowledge
at which Sir Isaac Newton arrived through arduous and circuitous paths.
Yet we still look with peculiar veneration on the Wealth of Nations and
on the Principia, and should regret to see either of those great works
garbled even by the ablest hands. But in works which owe much of their
interest to the character and situation of the writers, the case
is infinitely stronger. What man of taste and feeling can endure
rifacimenti, harmonies, abridgments, expurgated editions? Who ever reads
a stage-copy of a play when he can procure the original? Who ever
cut open Mrs. Siddons’s Milton? Who ever got through ten pages of Mr.
Gilpin’s translation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim into modern English? Who
would lose, in the confusion of a Diatessaron, the peculiar charm which
belongs to the narrative of the disciple whom Jesus loved? The feeling
of a reader who has become intimate with any great original work is that
which Adam expressed towards his bride:=
```“Should God create another Eve, and I
```Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
```Would never from my heart.”=
No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void left by
the original. The second beauty may be equal or superior to the first;
but still it is not she.
The reasons which Mr. Croker has given for incorporating passages from
Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale with the narrative of Boswell, would
vindicate the adulteration of half the classical works in the language.
If Pepys’s Diary and Mrs. Hutchinson’s Memoirs had been published a
hundred years ago, no human being can doubt that Mr. Hume would have
made great use of those books in his History of England. But would it,
on that account, be judicious in a writer of our own times to publish an
edition of Hume’s History of England, in which large extracts from
Pepys and Mrs. Hutchinson should be incorporated with the original text?
Surely not. Hume’s history, be its faults what they may, is now one
great entire work, the production of one vigorous mind, working on such
materials as were within its reach. Additions made by another hand may
supply a particular deficiency, but would grievously injure the general
effect. With Boswell’s book the case is stronger. There is scarcely,
in the whole compass of literature, a book which bears interpolation so
ill. We know no production of the human mind which has so much of what
may be called the race, so much of the peculiar flavour of the soil from
which it sprang. The work could never have been written if the writer
had not been precisely what he was. His character is displayed in every
page, and this display of character gives a delightful interest to many
passages which have no other interest.
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is
not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the
first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no
second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not
worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human
intellect so strange a phaenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest
men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the
smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we
are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of
all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson
described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality
by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk
used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the
laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to
him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the
feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon.
He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then “binding it as
a crown unto him,” not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited
himself, at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled
Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription
of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at
Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile
and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with
family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common
butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who was
talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred,
we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most
childish distinctions, that when he had been to Court, he drove to the
office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and
summoned all the printer’s devils to admire his new ruffles and sword;
such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything
which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of
which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and
clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he
said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled
with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on
waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair of
the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away
maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of
his babies because she was not scared at Johnson’s ugly face, how was
frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as
they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork’s one
evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent
he was to the Duchess of Argyll and with what stately contempt she put
down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his
impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom
laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to
all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious
rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his
vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he
displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that
he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a
parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill;
but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world
is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted
themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has
indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being=
```“Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll.”=
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come
in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary
eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason
of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have
been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest
and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness,
the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility
to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He
was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his
own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never
scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation
of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense
enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was
exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an
important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers
as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers,
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which
is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we
do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of
fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he
is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a
retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense
and virtue would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him
conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they
have made him immortal.
Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly
worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the
character of the writer. Bad in themselves, they are good dramatically,
like the nonsense of justice Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius,
or the misplaced consonants of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell
is the most candid. Other men who have pretended to lay open their own
hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have evidently written
with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most distrusted when
they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any man who would
not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous
passions than proclaim all his little vanities and wild fancies. It
would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of
Caesar Borgia, or Danton, than one who would publish a daydream like
those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most men keep
covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed
to the eye of friendship or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which
Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because
the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits
prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His book
resembles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the
Palace of Truth.
His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be lasting; but it is
fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infamy.
We remember no other case in which the world has made so great a
distinction between a book and its author. In general, the book and
the author are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire
the author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only
exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be
interesting, instructive, eminently original: yet it has brought him
nothing but contempt. All the world reads it, all the world delights in
it: yet we do not remember ever to have read or ever to have heard any
expression of respect and admiration for the man to whom we owe so much
instruction and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was
coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it, and
hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and reasonable. Sir
Alexander saw that in proportion to the celebrity of the work, was
the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate
gentleman’s books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like those
Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his
person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr.
Croker, for example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on
the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer,
whose performance he has taken such pains to illustrate, without some
expression of contempt.
An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the malignity of the
most malignant satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his thoughtless
loquacity. Having himself no sensibility to derision and contempt, he
took it for granted that all others were equally callous. He was not
ashamed to exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a common
tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of poverty, and to tell a
hundred stories of his own pertness and folly, and of the insults which
his pertness and folly brought upon him. It was natural that he should
show little discretion in cases in which the feelings or the honour of
others might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such stories
respecting persons whom he professed to love and revere. He would
infallibly have made his hero as contemptible as he has made himself,
had not his hero really possessed some moral and intellectual qualities
of a very high order. The best proof that Johnson was really an
extraordinary man is that his character, instead of being degraded, has,
on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all his vices and
weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than they ever were exposed by
Churchill or by Kenrick.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other
man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure,
his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus’s dance, his rolling walk, his
blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation
of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with
plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the
posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps
of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous,
acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his
insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all
are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded
from childhood.
But we have no minute information respecting those years of Johnson’s
life during which his character and his manners became immutably fixed.
We know him, not as he was known to the men of his own generation, but
as he was known to men whose father he might have been. That celebrated
club of which he was the most distinguished member contained few persons
who could remember a time when his fame was not fully established and
his habits completely formed. He had made himself a name in literature
while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty
years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty
years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about forty years
older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham. Boswell and
Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of our knowledge
respecting him, never saw him till long after he was fifty years old,
till most of his great works had become classical, and till the pension
bestowed on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty. Of those
eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the close of
his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew him during the
first ten or twelve years of his residence in the capital, was David
Garrick; and it does not appear that, during those years, David Garrick
saw much of his fellow-townsman.
Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of
a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. It was a dark night
between two sunny days. The age of patronage had passed away. The age
of general curiosity and intelligence had not arrived. The number of
readers is at present so great that a popular author may subsist in
comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the reigns of
William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, even such men
as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live like
gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the
natural demand for literature was, at the close of the seventeenth
and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, more than made up by
artificial encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premiums.
There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of literary merit
were so splendid, at which men who could write well found such easy
admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the highest
honours of the State. The chiefs of both the great parties into which
the kingdom was divided, patronised literature with emulous munificence.
Congreve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for
his first comedy with places which made him independent for life. Smith,
though his Hippolytus and Phaedra failed, would have been consoled
with three hundred a year but for his own folly. Rowe was not only Poet
Laureate, but also land-surveyor of the customs in the port of London,
clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the
Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the
Commissions of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative
Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of
Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed
in embassies of high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life
as apprentice to a silk mercer, became a secretary of legation at
five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the death of Charles the Second,
and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his introduction
into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his Auditorship of the
Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of the queen,
would have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand,
passed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that
ingenious writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of stamps
and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a commissioner of the
customs, and auditor of the imprest. Tickell was secretary to the Lords
Justices of Ireland. Addison was Secretary of State.
This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, by the
magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier in the Court of
Charles the Second who possessed talents for composition which were
independent of the aid of a coronet. Montague owed his elevation to the
favour of Dorset, and imitated through the whole course of his life
the liberality to which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory
leaders, Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of
the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But soon after
the accession of the House of Hanover a change took place. The supreme
power passed to a man who cared little for poetry or eloquence. The
importance of the House of Commons was constantly on the increase.
The Government was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary
support much of that patronage which had been employed in fostering
literary merit; and Walpole was by no means inclined to divert any part
of the fund of corruption to purposes which he considered as idle. He
had eminent talents for governments and for debate. But he had paid
little attention to books, and felt little respect for authors. One of
the coarse jokes of his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far
more pleasing to him than Thomson’s Seasons or Richardson’s Pamela. He
had observed that some of the distinguished writers whom the favour of
Halifax had turned into statesmen had been mere incumbrances to their
party, dawdlers in office and mutes in Parliament. During the whole
course of his administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single
man of genius. The best writers of the age gave all their support to
the Opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent which,
after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust war, overthrew
the Minister to make room for men less able and equally immoral. The
Opposition could reward its eulogists with little more than promises and
caresses. St. James’s would give nothing: Leicester House had nothing to
give.
Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary career, a writer
had little to hope from the patronage of powerful individuals. The
patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable
subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low that
a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little
more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine
had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the
good ears. The season of rich harvest was over, and the period of famine
had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in
the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow,
familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified to
decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King’s Bench
prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him;
and they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject,
their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally
acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar
among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages
of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and
pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George’s Fields, and from
St. George’s Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin’s church, to sleep
on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to
die in an hospital, and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of
more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would
have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus
Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been intrusted with
embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would
have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or
in Paternoster Row.
As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of life has
its peculiar temptations. The literary character, assuredly, has always
had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these
faults were now superadded the faults which are commonly found in men
whose livelihood is precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the
trial of severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the
beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched
lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. If
good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain
to be abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night
or a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged,
unwashed poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the
images of which his mind had been haunted while he was sleeping amidst
the cinders and eating potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A
week of taverns soon qualified him for another year of night-cellars.
Such was the life of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others.
Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying
in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats
because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking Champagne and Tokay
with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house
in Porridge island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford
to taste; they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and
frugal life with the same aversion which an old gipsy or a Mohawk hunter
feels for a stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities of
civilised communities. They were as untameable, as much wedded to their
desolate freedom, as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to
the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to serve and
abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like beasts of a still
fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered to their necessities. To
assist them was impossible; and the most benevolent of mankind at length
became weary of giving relief which was dissipated with the wildest
profusion as soon as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the
wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might have supplied
him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of
sensuality, and, before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was
again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin
of beef at a subterraneous cookshop. If his friends gave him an asylum
in their houses, those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and
taverns. All order was destroyed; all business was suspended. The most
good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man of
genius in distress when he heard his guest roaring for fresh punch at
five o’clock in the morning.
A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had been raised above
poverty by the active patronage which, in his youth, both the great
political parties had extended to his Homer. Young had received the only
pension ever bestowed, to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert
Walpole, as the reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many
poets who attached themselves to the Opposition, Thomson in particular
and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the means of
subsistence from their political friends. Richardson, like a man of
sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him, which his novels, admirable
as they are, would scarcely have done, But nothing could be more
deplorable than the state even of the ablest men, who at that time
depended for subsistence on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding,
and Thomson, were certainly four of the most distinguished persons that
England produced during the eighteenth century. It is well known that
they were all four arrested for debt. Into calamities and difficulties
such as these Johnson plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that
time, till he was three or four and fifty, we have little information
respecting him; little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate
information which we possess respecting his proceedings and habits
towards the close of his life. He emerged at length from cock-lofts and
sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the polished and the opulent.
His fame was established. A pension sufficient for his wants had been
conferred on him: and he came forth to astonish a generation with which
he had almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; but he had seen
them as a beggar. He now came among them as a companion. The demand for
amusement and instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been
gradually increasing. The price of literary labour had risen; and those
rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth to associate,
were for the most part persons widely different from those who had
walked about with him all night in the streets for want of a lodging.
Burke, Robertson, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie,
Sir William Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distinguished
writers of what may be called the second generation of the Johnsonian
age. Of these men Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace the
stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson first came up
to London, was common among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt
the pressure of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted into
the most respectable society on an equal footing. They were men of quite
a different species from the dependants of Curll and Osborne.
Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past age, the last
survivor of the genuine race of Grub Street hacks; the last of that
generation of authors whose abject misery and whose dissolute manners
had furnished inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From
nature he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his
manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his
moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings
who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his
hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted
with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in
society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the
last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was,
undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full information
concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should probably find
that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part,
failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He
ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
St. John’s Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate
as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his
life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for
the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear
privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation.
He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like
a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and the
perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But
when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These
were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which
raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected
from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by
the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes,
by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the
derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is
the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome
of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through
all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled
manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the
exercise of his power, he should be “eo immitior, quia toleraverat,”
that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his
demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress
he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief. But for
the suffering which a harsh word inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no
pity; for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive.
He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from
the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of
wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all
their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the
pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous: and he scarcely felt
sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had
seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected by
paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as
much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell
for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about
the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his
phrase, “foppish lamentations,” which people ought to be ashamed to
utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because The
Good-natured Man had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own
health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him
very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might
weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a
plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle
of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such
grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy.
A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have
sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental
grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others
in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how
a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. “My dear
doctor,” said he to Goldsmith, “what harm does it do to a man to call
him Holofernes?” “Pooh, ma’am,” he exclaimed, to Mrs. Carter, “who is
the worse for being talked of uncharitably?” Politeness has been well
defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not
because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller
to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for
fourpence halfpenny a day.
The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great
powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of
his mind, we should place him almost as high as he was placed by the
idolatry of Boswell; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should place
him even below Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of
some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him
from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute
reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too
fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies
in argument, or by exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while he
was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish
prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well-managed nursery,
came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled
away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness.
Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were
now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the
fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature
had overshadowed the whole seacoast, and whose might seemed equal to
a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small
prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon.
Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity the evidence
for all stories which were merely odd. But when they were not only odd
but miraculous, his severity relaxed. He began to be credulous precisely
at the point where the most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It
is curious to observe, both in his writings and in his conversation,
the contrast between the disdainful manner in which he rejects
unauthenticated anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the
general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he mentions
the wildest stories relating to the invisible world. A man who told
him of a water-spout, or a meteoric stone, generally had the lie direct
given him for his pains. A man who told him of a prediction or a dream
wonderfully accomplished was sure of a courteous hearing. “Johnson,”
observed Hogarth, “like King David, says in his haste that all men
are liars.” “His incredulity,” says Mrs. Thrale, “amounted almost to
disease.” She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who gave him an
account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a poor Quaker who related
some strange circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the siege
of Gibraltar. “It is not so. It cannot be true. Don’t tell that story
again. You cannot think how poor a figure you make in telling it.” He
once said, half-testingly, we suppose, that for six months he refused to
credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still believed
the extent of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated. Yet he related
with a grave face how old Mr. Cave of St. John’s Gate saw a ghost, and
how this ghost was something of a shadowy being. He went himself on
a ghost-hunt to Cock Lane, and was angry with John Wesley for not
following up another scent of the same kind with proper spirit and
perseverance. He rejects the Celtic genealogies and poems without the
least hesitation; yet he declares himself willing to believe the stories
of the second sight. If he had examined the claims of the Highland
seers with half the severity with which he sifted the evidence for
the genuineness of Fingal, he would, we suspect, have come away from
Scotland with a mind fully made up. In his Lives of the Poets, we find
that he is unwilling to give credit to the accounts of Lord Roscommon’s
early proficiency in his studies: but he tells with great solemnity an
absurd romance about some intelligence preternaturally impressed on the
mind of that nobleman. He avows himself to be in great doubt about the
truth of the story, and ends by warning his readers not wholly to slight
such impressions.
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and
enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness
of all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the
Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight
into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered
Christianity as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote the
happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The horror which the
sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies, and
dancing-bears, excited his contempt. To the arguments urged by some very
worthy people against showy dress he replied with admirable sense and
spirit, “Let us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the
lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and
tongues. Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will
not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one.” Yet he was himself
under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras
or Ralpho, and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical
dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with
Christian charity. He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once
committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he
thought it his duty to pass several months without joining in public
worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been ordained
by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours was
somewhat singular. “Campbell,” said he, “is a good man, a pious man. I
am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years: but
he never passes a church without pulling off his hat; this shows he
has good principles.” Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious
robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a
Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon’s singers, and talked
in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled
villain, whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt. But a man
who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated
must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could
easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat
as sinful, deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the
ends of revelation. But with what a storm of invective he would have
overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of
mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns.
Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of patriotism. Nobody saw
more clearly the error of those who regarded liberty, not as a means,
but as an end, and who proposed to themselves, as the object of their
pursuit, the prosperity of the State: as distinct from the prosperity
of the individuals who compose the State. His calm and settled opinion
seems to have been that forms of government have little or no influence
on the happiness of society. This opinion, erroneous as it is, ought
at least to have preserved him from all intemperance on political
questions. It did not, however, preserve him from the lowest, fiercest,
and most absurd extravagances of party spirit, from rants which, in
everything but the diction, resembled those of Squire Western. He was,
as a politician, half ice and half fire. On the side of his intellect he
was a mere Pococurante, far too apathetic about public affairs, far too
sceptical as to the good or evil tendency of any form of polity. His
passions, on the contrary, were violent even to slaying against all who
leaned to Whiggish principles. The well-known lines which he inserted
in Goldsmith’s Traveller express what seems to have been his deliberate
judgment:
How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which kings or
laws can cause or cure!
He had previously put expressions very similar into the mouth of
Rasselas. It is amusing to contrast these passages with the torrents of
raving abuse which he poured forth against the Long Parliament and the
American Congress. In one of the conversations reported by Boswell this
inconsistency displays itself in the most ludicrous manner.
“Sir Adam Ferguson,” says Boswell, “suggested that luxury corrupts a
people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON: ‘Sir, that is all
visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of
government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of
an individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to
a private man. What Frenchman is prevented passing his life as he
pleases?’ SIR ADAM: ‘But, sir, in the British constitution it is surely
of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as to preserve a
balance against the Crown.’ JOHNSON: ‘Sir, I perceive you are a vile
Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the Crown? The
Crown has not power enough.’”
One of the old philosophers, Lord Bacon tells us, used to say that life
and death were just the same to him. “Why, then,” said an objector, “do
you not kill yourself?” The philosopher answered, “Because it is just
the same.” If the difference between two forms of government be not
worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler
than Toryism, or how the Crown can have too little power. If the
happiness of individuals is not affected by political abuses, zeal for
liberty is doubtless ridiculous. But zeal for monarchy must be equally
so. No person could have been more quick-sighted than Johnson to such a
contradiction as this in the logic of an antagonist.
The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, in his own time,
regarded with superstitious veneration, and, in our time, are generally
treated with indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments of a strong
but enslaved understanding. The mind of the critic was hedged round
by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his
narrow limits, he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have
enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him.
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should
assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human
nature. The same inconsistency may be observed in the schoolmen of the
middle ages. Those writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in
arguing on their wretched data, that a modern reader is perpetually at
a loss to comprehend how such minds came by such data. Not a flaw in
the superstructure of the theory which they are rearing escapes
their vigilance. Yet they are blind to the obvious unsoundness of
the foundation. It is the same with some eminent lawyers. Their legal
arguments are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest
analogies and the most refined distinctions. The principles of their
arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-book and the reports
being once assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be
allowed to be perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to
the postulates on which their whole system rests, if they are called
upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system which they have
passed their lives in studying, these very men often talk the language
of savages or of children. Those who have listened to a man of this
class in his own court, and who have witnessed the skill with which he
analyses and digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of
precedents which at first sight seem contradictory, scarcely know him
again when, a few hours later, they hear him speaking on the other side
of Westminster Hall in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely
believe that the paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a storm
of coughing, and which do not impose on the plainest country gentleman,
can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited
their admiration under the same roof, and on the same day.
Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator.
He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole
code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes
quoted a precedent or an authority, but rarely troubled himself to give
a reason drawn from the nature of things. He took it for granted that
the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had been
accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself
written with success, was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical
work he has repeatedly laid it down as an undeniable proposition that
during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the earlier part
of the eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant progress of
improvement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope, had been, according to
him, the great reformers. He judged of all works of the imagination by
the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed
Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought
the Aeneid a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he well might have
thought so; for he preferred Pope’s Iliad to Homer’s. He pronounced
that, after Hoole’s translation of Tasso, Fairfax’s would hardly be
reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine old English ballads, and
always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy’s fondness for
them. Of the great original works of imagination which appeared during
his time, Richardson’s novels alone excited his admiration. He could see
little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver’s Travels, or in Tristram
Shandy. To Thomson’s Castle of Indolence he vouchsafed only a line of
cold commendation, of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed
on the Creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray
was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The
contempt which he felt for the trash of Macpherson was indeed just; but
it was, we suspect, just by chance. He despised the Fingal for the very
reason which led many men of genius to admire it. He despised it, not
because it was essentially commonplace, but because it had a superficial
air of originality.
He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions fashioned on
his own principles. But when a deeper philosophy was required, when he
undertook to pronounce judgment on the works of those great minds which
“yield homage only to eternal laws,” his failure was ignominious.
He criticised Pope’s Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on
Shakspeare’s plays and Milton’s poems seem to us for the most part as
wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we take to
have been the worst critic that ever lived.
Some of Johnson’s whims on literary subjects can be compared only to
that strange nervous feeling which made him uneasy if he had not touched
every post between the Mitre tavern and his own lodgings. His preference
of Latin epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An English
epitaph, he said, would disgrace Smollett. He declared that he would
not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English epitaph on
Goldsmith. What reason there can be for celebrating a British writer in
Latin, which there was not for covering the Roman arches of triumph
with Greek inscriptions, or for commemorating the deeds of the heroes of
Thermopylae in Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine.
On men and manners, at least on the men and manners of a particular
place and a particular age, Johnson had certainly looked with a most
observant and discriminating eye. His remarks on the education of
children, on marriage, on the economy of families, on the rules of
society, are always striking, and generally sound. In his writings,
indeed, the knowledge of life which he possessed in an eminent degree is
very imperfectly exhibited. Like those unfortunate chiefs of the middle
ages who were suffocated by their own chain-mail and cloth of gold,
his maxims perish under that load of words which was designed for their
defence and their ornament. But it is clear from the remains of his
conversation, that he had more of that homely wisdom which nothing but
experience and observation can give than any writer since the time of
Swift.
If he had been content to write as he talked, he might have left books
on the practical art of living superior to the Directions to Servants.
Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on literature,
indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness as for strength.
He was no master of the great science of human nature. He had studied,
not the genus man, but the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so
thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life and of all the shades
of moral and intellectual character which were to be seen from Islington
to the Thames, and from Hyde Park Corner to Mile-End Green. But his
philosophy stopped at the first turnpike-gate. Of the rural life of
England he knew nothing; and he took it for granted that everybody
who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable. “Country
gentlemen,” said he, “must be unhappy; for they have not enough to keep
their lives in motion;” as if all those peculiar habits and associations
which made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the world
to himself had been essential parts of human nature. Of remote countries
and past times he talked with wild and ignorant presumption. “The
Athenians of the age of Demosthenes,” he said to Mrs. Thrale, “were a
people of brutes, a barbarous people.” In conversation with Sir Adam
Ferguson he used similar language. “The boasted Athenians,” he said,
“were barbarians. The mass of every people must be barbarous where there
is no printing.” The fact was this: he saw that a Londoner who could not
read was a very stupid and brutal fellow: he saw that great refinement
of taste and activity of intellect were rarely found in a Londoner who
had not read much; and, because it was by means of books that people
acquired almost all their knowledge in the society with which he was
acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest and clearest
evidence, that the human mind can be cultivated by means of books alone.
An Athenian citizen might possess very few volumes; and the largest
library to which he had access might be much less valuable than
Johnson’s bookcase in Bolt Court. But the Athenian might pass every
morning in conversation with Socrates, and might hear Pericles speak
four or five times every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles and
Aristophanes; he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and the paintings
of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses of Aeschylus: he heard the
rhapsodist at the corner of the streets reciting the Shield of Achilles
or the Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high
questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under
a liberal and generous discipline: he was a judge compelled every day to
weigh the effect of opposite arguments. These things were in themselves
an education, an education eminently fitted, not, indeed, to form exact
or profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the perceptions, delicacy
to the taste, fluency to the expression, and politeness to the manners.
All this was overlooked. An Athenian who did not improve his mind by
reading was, in Johnson’s opinion, much such a person as a Cockney
who made his mark, much such a person as black Frank before he went to
school, and far inferior to a parish clerk or a printer’s devil.
Johnson’s friends have allowed that he carried to a ridiculous extreme
his unjust contempt for foreigners. He pronounced the French to be a
very silly people, much behind us, stupid, ignorant creatures. And this
judgment he formed after having been at Paris about a month, during
which he would not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an
advantage over him in conversation. He pronounced them, also, to be an
indelicate people, because a French footman touched the sugar with his
fingers. That ingenious and amusing traveller, M. Simond, has defended
his countrymen very successfully against Johnson’s accusations, and has
pointed out some English practices which, to an impartial spectator,
would seem at least as inconsistent with physical cleanliness and social
decorum as those which Johnson so bitterly reprehended. To the sage, as
Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred to doubt that there must
be something eternally and immutably good in the usages to which he had
been accustomed. In fact, Johnson’s remarks on society beyond the bills
of mortality, are generally of much the same kind with those of honest
Tom Dawson, the English footman in Dr. Moore’s Zeluco. “Suppose the King
of France has no sons, but only a daughter, then, when the king dies,
this here daughter, according to that there law, cannot be made queen,
but the next near relative, provided he is a man, is made king, and not
the last king’s daughter, which, to be sure, is very unjust. The French
footguards are dressed in blue, and all the marching regiments in
white, which has a very foolish appearance for soldiers; and as for blue
regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the artillery.”
Johnson’s visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a state of society
completely new to him; and a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies
seems on that occasion to have crossed his mind for the first time. He
confessed, in the last paragraph of his journey, that his thoughts on
national manners were the thoughts of one who had seen but little,
of one who had passed his time almost wholly in cities. This feeling,
however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that to the last he
entertained a fixed contempt for all those modes of life and those
studies which tend to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a
particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign travel and of history
he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. “What
does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling?
What did Lord Charlemont learn in his travels, except that there was a
snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?” History was, in his opinion, to
use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old almanack; historians
could, as he conceived, claim no higher dignity than that of
almanack-makers; and his favourite historians were those who, like Lord
Hailes, aspired to no higher dignity. He always spoke with contempt of
Robertson. Hume he would not even read. He affronted one of his friends
for talking to him about Catiline’s conspiracy, and declared that he
never desired to hear of the Punic war again as long as he lived.
Assuredly one fact which does not directly affect our own interests,
considered in itself, is no better worth knowing than another fact.
The fact that there is a snake in a pyramid, or the fact that Hannibal
crossed the Alps, are in themselves as unprofitable to us as the fact
that there is a green blind in a particular house in Threadneedle
Street, or the fact that a Mr. Smith comes into the city every morning
on the top of one of the Blackwall stages. But it is certain that those
who will not crack the shell of history will never get at the kernel.
Johnson, with hasty arrogance, pronounced the kernel worthless, because
he saw no value in the shell. The real use of travelling to distant
countries and of studying the annals of past times is to preserve men
from the contraction of mind which those can hardly escape whose whole
communion is with one generation and one neighbourhood, who arrive at
conclusions by means of an induction not sufficiently copious, and who
therefore constantly confound exceptions with rules, and accidents
with essential properties. In short, the real use of travelling and
of studying history is to keep men from being what Tom Dawson was in
fiction, and Samuel Johnson in reality.
Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in
Boswell’s books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been
quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in
manners. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible
and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write
for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books
are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears
front his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever
quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which
nobody ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in
the dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came first to
his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for
publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His
letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work
of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the translation; and it is
amusing to compare the two versions. “When we were taken upstairs,”
says he in one of his letters, “a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on
which one of us was to lie.” This incident is recorded in the journey as
follows: “Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up,
at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge.” Sometimes
Johnson translated aloud. “The Rehearsal,” he said, very unjustly,
“has not wit enough to keep it sweet” then, after a pause, “it has not
vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.”
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the
manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would
be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a
mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been
adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant
effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all
our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost
superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use
than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon
or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our
language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long
after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and
Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be
considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king’s English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets,
till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical
forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no
opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little
things, his harsh inversions so widely different from those graceful
and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the
expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities have been
imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public
have become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily, and very justly, “If you were to
write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little
fishes talk like whales.” No man surely ever had so little talent
for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a
disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or
a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style.
His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton’s Euphuistic eloquence, betrayed him
under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac
the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her
reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these:
“I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find,
instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always
promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused
wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every
face was clouded, and every motion agitated.” The gentle Tranquilla
informs us, that she “had not passed the earlier part of life without
the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph; but had danced
the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of
applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great,
the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the
obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of
love.” Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with
a worse grace. The reader may well cry out with honest Sir Hugh Evans,
“I like not when a ‘oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under
her muffler.” [It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very
close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20). The resemblance
may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism.]
We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and
we must close it. We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from
the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed
his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced
us to read Boswell’s book again. As we close it, the club-room is before
us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons
for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the
canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin
form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of
Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in
his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the
gigantic body, the hugh massy face, seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the
scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we
see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the “Why,
sir!” and “What then, sir?” and the “No, sir!” and the “You don’t see
your way through the question, sir!”
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be
regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion. To
receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius
have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately
known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case,
the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably
expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities
of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably
thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the
English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.