E-text prepared by Al Haines
Transcriber's note:
Page numbers are enclosed between curly brackets to assis the
reader in using the index.
DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE
by
JOHN BAILEY
Author of "Poets and Poetry," "The Claims of French Poetry," etc.
Thornton Butterworth Limited
15 Bedford Street, London, W.C.2
First Published . . . . February 1913
Second Impression . . . September 1919
Third Impression . . . . August 1927
Fourth Impression . . . January 1931
All Rights Reserved
{v}
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I JOHNSON AS A NATIONAL INSTITUTION . . . . . . . . 7
II THE GENIUS OF BOSWELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
III THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON . . . . . . . . . 70
IV JOHNSON'S CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTICS . . . . . 109
V JOHNSON'S WORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
VI THE FRIENDS OF JOHNSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
{7}
DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE
CHAPTER I
JOHNSON AS A NATIONAL INSTITUTION
The name of Samuel Johnson is, of course, not the greatest in English
prose, but even to-day, when he has been dead more than a century and a
quarter, it is still the most familiar. We live in an age of
newspapers. Where all can read, the newspaper press, taken as a whole,
will be a fairly accurate reflection of what is in the mind of a
people. Nothing will be mentioned frequently in newspapers which is
not of some interest to a large number of readers; and whatever is
frequently mentioned there cannot fail to become widely known. Tried
by this test, Johnson's name must be admitted to be very widely known
and of almost universal interest. No man of letters--perhaps scarcely
even Shakespeare himself--is so often quoted in the columns of the
daily press. His is a name that may {8} be safely introduced into any
written or spoken discussion, without fear of the stare of
unrecognizing ignorance; and the only danger to which those who quote
him expose themselves is that of the yawn of over-familiarity. Even in
his own lifetime his reputation extended far beyond the limited circle
of literature or scholarship. Actresses delighted in his conversation;
soldiers were proud to entertain him in their barracks; innkeepers
boasted of his having slept in their inns. His celebrity was such that
he himself once said there was hardly a day in which the newspapers did
not mention his name; and a year after his death Boswell could venture
to write publicly of him that his "character, religious, moral,
political and literary, nay his figure and manner, are, I believe, more
generally known than those of almost any man." But what was, in his
own day, partly a respect paid to the maker of the famous _Dictionary_
and partly a curiosity about "the great Oddity," as the Edensor
innkeeper called him, has in the course of the nineteenth century
become a great deal more.
He is still for us the great scholar and the strongly marked
individuality, but he has gradually attained a kind of apotheosis, a
kind of semi-legendary position, almost rivalling that of the great
John Bull himself, as the {9} embodiment of the essential features of
the English character. We never think of the typical Englishman being
like Shakespeare or Milton. In the first place, we know very little
about Shakespeare, and not very much about Milton; and so we are thrown
back on their works, and our mental picture of them takes on a dim and
shadowy grandeur, very unlike what we see when we look within into our
familiar and commonplace selves. Nor do Englishmen often plume
themselves on their aesthetic or imaginative gifts. The achievements
of Wren, or Purcell, or Keats may arouse in them admiration and pride,
but never a sense of kinship. When they recognize themselves in the
national literature, it is not Hamlet, or Lear, or Clarissa, or
Ravenswood that holds up the mirror; but Falstaff, or The Bastard, or
Tom Jones, or Jeanie Deans, or perhaps Gabriel Oak: plain people, all
of them, whatever their differences, with a certain quiet and downright
quality which Englishmen are apt to think the peculiar birthright of
the people of this island. It is that quality which was the central
thing in the mind of Johnson, and it is to his possession of it, and to
our unique knowledge of it through Boswell, that more than anything
else he owes this position of the typical Englishman among our men of
letters. We can all imagine that {10} under other conditions, and with
an added store of brains and character, we might each have been Doctor
Johnson. Before we could fancy ourselves Shelley or Keats the self
that we know would have to be not developed but destroyed. But in
Johnson we see our own magnified and glorified selves.
It has sometimes been asserted to be the function of the man of letters
to say what others can feel or think but only he can express. Whatever
may be thought of such a definition of literature, it is certain that
Johnson discharged this particular function with almost unique success.
And he continues to do so still, especially in certain fields.
Whenever we feel strongly the point of view of common sense we almost
expect to be able to find some trenchant phrase of Johnson's with which
to express it. If it cannot be found it is often invented. A few
years ago, a lover of Johnson walking along a London street passed by
the side of a cabmen's shelter. Two cabmen were getting their dinner
ready, and the Johnsonian was amused and pleased to hear one say to the
other: "After all, as Doctor Johnson says, a man may travel all over
the world without seeing anything better than his dinner." The saying
was new to him and probably apocryphal, though the sentiment is one
which can well be imagined {11} as coming from the great man's mouth.
But whether apocryphal or authentic, the remark well illustrates both
the extent and the particular nature of Johnson's fame. You would not
find a cabman ascribing to Milton or Pope a shrewd saying that he had
heard and liked. Is there any man but Johnson in all our literary
history whom he would be likely to call in on such an occasion? That
is the measure of Johnson's universality of appeal. And the secret of
it lies, to use his own phrase, not used of himself of course, in the
"bottom of sense," which is the primary quality in all he wrote and
said, and is not altogether absent from his ingrained prejudices, or
even from the perversities of opinion which his love of argument and
opposition so constantly led him to adopt. Whether right or wrong
there is always something broadly and fundamentally human about him
which appeals to all and especially to the plain man. Every one feels
at home at once with a man who replies to doubts about the freedom of
the will with the plain man's answer: "Sir, we _know_ our will's free,
and there's an end on't," and if he adds to it an argument which the
plain man would not have thought of, it is still one which the plain
man and everyone else can understand. "You are surer that you can lift
up your finger or not as you please, than you are of any {12}
conclusion from a deduction of reasoning." Moreover we all think we
are more honest than our neighbours and are at once drawn to the man
who was less of a humbug than any man who ever lived. "Clear your mind
of cant" is perhaps the central text of Johnson, on which he enlarged a
hundred times. "When a butcher tells you his heart bleeds for his
country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling." No one who has ever
attended an election meeting fails to welcome that saying, or the
answer to Boswell's fears that if he were in Parliament he would be
unhappy if things went wrong, "That's cant, sir. . . . Public affairs
vex no man." "Have they not vexed yourself a little, sir? Have you
not been vexed at all by the turbulence of this reign and by that
absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown
has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?" "Sir, I
have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would
have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not
_vexed_."
Here we all know where we are. This is what we wish we could have said
ourselves, and can fancy ourselves saying under more favourable
circumstances; and we like the man who says it for us. Certainly no
man, not even Swift, ever put the plain man's view with {13} such
exactness, felicity, and force as Johnson does a thousand times in the
pages of Boswell. And not only in the pages of Boswell. One of the
objects of this introductory chapter is to try to give a preliminary
answer to the very natural question which confronts every one who
thinks about Johnson, how it has come about that a man whose works are
so little read to-day should still be so great a name in English life.
How is it that in this HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY he is the second author
to have a volume to himself, only Shakespeare preceding him? The
primary answer is, of course, that we know him, as we know no other man
whose face we never saw, whose voice we never heard. Boswell boasted
that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in
his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast
is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact. But
after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation. On the contrary,
it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book. No man owes so much to
his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget
that Johnson was the most famous man of letters in England before he
ever saw Boswell. Boswell's earnest desire to make his acquaintance
and to sit humbly at his feet was only an extreme {14} instance of an
attitude of respect and admiration, often even of reverence, commonly
felt towards him among the more intelligent and serious portion of the
community. He had not then attained to the position of something like
Dictatorship which he filled in the world of English letters at the
time he wrote the _Lives of the Poets_, but, except the _Shakespeare_
and the _Lives_, all the work that gave him that position was already
done. In this case, as in others, fame increased in old age without
any corresponding increase in achievement, and it was the easy years at
Streatham, not the laborious years at Gough Square, that saw him
honoured and courted by bishops and judges, peers and commoners, by the
greatest of English statesmen and the greatest of English painters.
But his kingship was in him from the first. He had been _anax andron_
even among his schoolfellows. His bigness, in more ways than one, made
them call him "the great boy," and the father of one of them was astute
enough even then to perceive that he would be more than that: "you call
him the great boy, but take my word for it, he will one day prove a
great man." The boys looked upon him so much as a superior being to
themselves that three of them, of whom one was his friend Hector, whom
he often saw in later life, "used to come in the morning as his humble
{15} attendants and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped
while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported him, and
thus he was borne triumphant." Such a tribute by boys to intellectual
superiority was less rare in those days than it has become since: but
it would not be easy to find a parallel to it at any time. What began
at school continued through life. Even when he was poorest and most
obscure, there was something about him that secured respect. It is too
little to say that no one ever imagined he could with impunity behave
disrespectfully to Johnson. No one ever dared to do so. As he flung
the well-meant boots from his door at Oxford, so throughout life he
knew how to make all men afraid to insult, slight, or patronize him.
But these, after all, were qualities that would only affect the few who
came into personal contact with him. What was it that affected the
larger world and gave him the fame and authority of his later years?
Broadly speaking of course it was what he had written, the work he had
done, his poems, his _Rambler_ and _Idler_, his _Rasselas_, his
_Shakespeare_, above all that colossal and triumphant piece of
single-handed labour, the _Dictionary of the English Language_. But
there was more than that. Another man might have written {16} books
quite as valuable, and attained to nothing like Johnson's position. A
thousand people to-day read what Gray was writing in those years for
one who reads what Johnson wrote, and they are quite right. Yet Gray
in his lifetime had little fame and no authority except among his
friends. Pope, again, had of course immense celebrity, more no doubt
than Johnson ever had among men of letters; but he never became, as
Johnson did, something almost like a national institution. What was it
that gave Johnson what great poets never attained? It could not yet be
his reputation as a great talker, which was only beginning to spread.
We think of him as the greatest talker the world has ever seen: but
that is chiefly due to Boswell, of course, and we are speaking at
present of the years before the memorable meeting in the back parlour
of Mr. Davies's shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden. Besides, good
talk, except in Boswell's pages, is like good acting, a vain thing to
those who only know it by hearsay. We are therefore thrown back on
Johnson's public work for an explanation of the position he held. What
was it in his work, with so little of Pope's amazing wit and
brilliancy, with so little of Gray's fine imaginative quality and
distinction, prose too, in the main, and not poetry, with none of the
prestige of poetry, {17} that gave him what neither Pope nor Gray ever
received, what it is scarcely too much to call, the homage of a nation?
The answer is that, especially in England, it is not brilliance or
distinction of mind that win the respect of a nation. George III had
many faults, but all through his reign he was an admirable
representative of the general feelings of his people. And he never did
a more representative act than when he gave Johnson a pension, or when
he received him in the library of Buckingham House. No doubt many,
though not all, of Johnson's political and ecclesiastical prejudices
were very congenial to the king, but plenty of people shared George
Ill's views without gaining from him an ounce of respect. What he and
the nation dimly felt about Johnson was a quality belonging less to the
author than to the man. The English, as we were saying just now, think
of themselves as a plain people, more honest and direct in word and
deed than the rest of the world. George III never affected to be
anything but a plain man, was very honest according to his lights, and
never for an instant failed to have the courage of his convictions.
Such a king and such a people would inevitably be attracted to a man of
Johnson's fearless sincerity and invincible common sense. The ideal of
the nation is {18} still the same. Johnson once praised the third Duke
of Devonshire for his "dogged veracity." We have lately seen one of
that duke's descendants and successors, a man of no obvious or shining
talents, attain to a position of almost unique authority among his
fellow countrymen mainly by his signal possession of this hereditary
gift of veracity, honesty and good sense. So it was with Johnson
himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned
language could conceal. "On s'attend à voir un auteur et on trouve un
homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical,
namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's
interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities,
indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody could
feel that about Johnson.
He never pretended to be superior to the pains or pleasures of the body
and never concealed his interest in the physical basis of life. He
might with truth have spoken, as Pope did, of "that long disease, my
life," for he declares in one of his letters that after he was past
twenty his health was such that he seldom enjoyed a single day of ease;
and he was so scrupulously truthful when he had a pen in his hand that
that must be taken as at the least a literal record of the truth as it
appeared {19} to him at that moment. But though he never enjoyed
health he never submitted to the tyranny of disease. The manliness
that rings through all he wrote made itself felt also in his life, and
we are not surprised to hear from Mrs. Thrale, in whose house he lived
so long, that he "required less attendance sick or well than ever I saw
any human creature." He could conquer disease and pain, but he never
affected stoic "braveries," about not finding them very actual and
disagreeable realities. In the same way, he never pretended not to
enjoy the universal pleasures, such as food and sleep. Boswell records
him as saying: "Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or
pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly
very studiously and very carefully, for I look upon it that he who does
not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else." This is not
particularly refined language, and Johnson's manners at the
dinner-table, where, until he had satisfied his appetite, he was
"totally absorbed in the business of the moment," were not always of a
nature to please refined people. But our present point is that they
were only an exaggeration of that sense of bodily realities which is
one of the things that has always helped to secure for him the plain
man's confidence. Throughout his life he kept his {20} feet firmly
based on the solid ground of fact. Human life, as it is actually and
visibly lived, was the subject of his study and conversation from first
to last. He always put fine-spun theories to mercilessly positive
tests such as the ordinary man understands and trusts at once, though
ordinary men have not the quickness or clearness of mind to apply them.
When people preached a theory to him he was apt to confute them simply
by applying it to practice. He supposed them to act upon it, and its
absurdity was demonstrated. One of his friends was Mrs. Macaulay, who
was a republican and affected doctrines of the equality of all men.
When Johnson was at her house one day he put on, as he says, "a very
grave countenance," and said to her: "Madam, I am now become a convert
to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an
equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I
am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved
fellow-citizen, your footman: I desire that he may be allowed to sit
down and dine with us." No wonder that, as he adds, "she has never
liked me since." To the political thinker, perhaps, such an argument
rather proves the insincerity of Mrs. Macaulay than what he claimed for
it, "the absurdity of the levelling doctrine." But it exhibits, {21}
with a force that no theoretical reasoning could match, the difficulty
which doctrines of equality will always have to meet in the resistance
of human nature as it is and as it is likely to remain for a long time
to come. And it illustrates the habit of Johnson's mind which has
always made the unlearned hear him so gladly, the habit of forcing
theory to the test of fact. For quick as he was, perhaps quicker than
any recorded man, at the tierce and quart of theoretical argument, he
commonly used the bludgeon stroke of practice to give his opponent the
final blow. We are vaguely distrustful of our reasoning powers, but
every man thinks he can understand facts and figures. The quickness of
Johnson in applying arithmetical tests to careless statements must have
been another of the elements in the fear, respect and confidence he
inspired. A gentleman once told him that in France, as soon as a man
of fashion marries, he takes an opera girl into keeping, and he
declared this to be the general custom. "Pray, sir," said Johnson,
"how many opera girls may there be?" He answered, "About four score."
"Well then, sir," replied Johnson, "you see there can be no more than
fourscore men of fashion who can do this."
There is no art of persuasion, as all orators know, so overwhelming in
effect as this appeal, {22} or even appearance of appeal, to a court in
which every man feels as much at home as the speaker himself. And
though Johnson's use of it is, of course, seen at its most telling in
his conversation, it was in him from the first, is a conspicuous
feature of all he wrote, and was undoubtedly a powerful factor in
winning for him the reputation of manliness and honesty he enjoyed.
Take, for instance, a few paragraphs from his analysis of the rhetoric
of authors on the subject of poverty. It is No. 202 of _The Rambler_.
There is no better evidence of his perfect freedom from that slavery to
words which is the besetting sin of authors.
"There are few words of which the reader believes himself better to
know the import than of _poverty_; yet whoever studies either the poets
or philosophers will find such an account of the condition expressed by
that term as his experience or observation will not easily discover to
be true. Instead of the meanness, distress, complaint, anxiety and
dependence, which have hitherto been combined in his ideas of poverty,
he will read of content, innocence and cheerfulness, of health and
safety, tranquillity and freedom; of pleasures not known but to men
unencumbered with possessions; and of sleep that sheds his balsamick
anodynes only on the {23} cottage. Such are the blessings to be
obtained by the resignation of riches, that kings might descend from
their thrones and generals retire from a triumph, only to slumber
undisturbed in the elysium of poverty."
* * * * * *
"But it will be found upon a nearer view that they who extol the
happiness of poverty do not mean the same state with those who deplore
its miseries. Poets have their imaginations filled with ideas of
magnificence; and being accustomed to contemplate the downfall of
empires, or to contrive forms of lamentation for monarchs in distress,
rank all the classes of mankind in a state of poverty who make no
approaches to the dignity of crowns. To be poor, in the epick
language, is only not to command the wealth of nations, nor to have
fleets and armies in pay.
"Vanity has perhaps contributed to this impropriety of style. He that
wishes to become a philosopher at a cheap rate easily gratifies his
ambition by submitting to poverty when he does not feel it, and by
boasting his contempt of riches when he has already more than he
enjoys. He who would show the extent of his views and grandeur of his
conceptions, or discover his acquaintance with splendour and
magnificence, may talk, like Cowley, of an humble station and quiet
{24} obscurity, of the paucity of nature's wants, and the
inconveniences of superfluity, and at last, like him, limit his desires
to five hundred pounds a year; a fortune indeed, not exuberant, when we
compare it with the expenses of pride and luxury, but to which it
little becomes a philosopher to affix the name of poverty, since no man
can with any propriety be termed poor who does not see the greater part
of mankind richer than himself."
What good sense, what resolute grip on the realities of life, what a
love of truth and seriousness, shines through the long sentences! The
form and language of the essay may perhaps be too suggestive of the
professional author; but how much the opposite, how very human and
real, is the stuff and substance of what he says! Professor Raleigh
once proposed as a test of great literature, that it should be found
applicable and useful in circumstances very different from those that
were in the author's mind when he wrote. By that test these words of
Johnson are certainly great literature. The degrees of wealth and
poverty have varied infinitely in the history of the world. They were
very different under the Roman Empire from what they became in the
Middle Age; by Johnson's day they had become quite unlike what they had
been in {25} the days of Dante and Chaucer; and they have again changed
almost or quite as much in the hundred and thirty years that have
passed since he died. Yet was there ever a time, will there ever be,
when the self-deception of the human heart or the loose thinking of the
human mind, will not allow men who never knew poverty to boast of their
cheerful endurance of it? Have we not to-day reached a time when men
with an assured income of ten, twenty, or even thirty pounds a week,
affect to consider themselves too poor to be able to afford to marry?
And where will such people better find the needed recall to fact, than
in Johnson's trenchant and unanswerable appeal to the obvious truth as
all can see it, if they will, for themselves, in the visible conditions
of the world about them: "No man can, with any propriety, be termed
poor who does not see the greater part of mankind richer than himself?"
This hold on the realities of life is the most essential element in
Johnson's greatness. Ordinary people felt it from the first, however
unconsciously, and looked to Johnson as something more than an author.
Pope might do himself honour by acclaiming the verses of the unknown
poet: Warburton might hasten to pay his tribute to the unknown critic:
but they could not give Johnson, what neither {26} of them could have
gained for himself, the confidence, soon to be felt by the whole
reading part of the population of England, that here was a man uniquely
rich in the wisdom of every day, learned but no victim of learning,
sincerely religious but with a religion that never tried to ignore the
facts of human life, a scholar, a philosopher and a Christian, but also
pre-eminently a man.
A grave man, no doubt, apt to deal in grave subjects, especially when
he had his pen in his hand. But that helped rather than hindered his
influence. He would not have liked to think that he owed part of his
own authority to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritans, but no
doubt he did. Still the Puritan movement only deepened a vein of
seriousness which had been in the English from Saxon days. One may see
it everywhere. The Puritans would not have been the power they were if
they had not found congenial soil in the English character. The
Reformation itself, a Protestant may be excused for thinking, owes its
ultimate triumph in England partly to the fact that Englishmen saw in
it a movement towards a more serious and ethical religion than the
Catholicism either of the Middle Age or of the Jesuits. The same thing
may be seen in the narrower fields of literature. The Renaissance {27}
on the whole takes a much more ethical note in England than, for
instance, in France. A little later indeed, in the France of Pascal
and Bossuet, books of devotion and theology were very widely read, as
may be seen in the letters of Madame de Sévigné; but they can never
have had anything like the circulation which they had in England, both
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every one who looks at an
English country-house library is struck by the abundant provision of
sermons, mainly collected, like everything else indeed, in the
eighteenth century. And every reader of Boswell's _Johnson_ has been
impressed by the frequent recurrence of devotional and religious books
in the literary talk of the day, and, what is perhaps more remarkable,
by the fact that wherever Boswell and Johnson go they constantly find
volumes of sermons lying about, not only in the private houses, but
also in the inns where they stay. There never was a period when
"conduct," as Matthew Arnold used to call it, was so admitted to be the
three-fourths of life he claimed for it, as it was between the
Restoration and the French Revolution. It was conduct, not faith,
ethics not religion, the "whole duty of man" in this life, not his
supernatural destiny in another, that mainly occupied the minds of
serious people {28} in that unecclesiastical age. And Johnson,
definite Christian, definite Churchman as he was, full even of
ecclesiastical prejudices, was just the man to appeal to a generation
with such interests as these.
No questions occupied him so much as moral questions. He was all his
life considering how he ought to live, and trying to live better.
People who are in earnest about these things have always found not only
his published prayers or his moral essays, but his life as told by
Boswell full of fortifying and stimulating ethical food. All alike
exhibit a mind that recognized the problem of the conduct of life as
the one thing of supreme interest to a rational man, and recognized it
as above all things a moral problem. His treatment of it is usually
based on reason, not on mere authority or orthodoxy, or even on
Christianity at all. _Rasselas_, for instance, his most popular
ethical work, which was translated into most of the European languages,
does not contain a single allusion to Christianity. Its atmosphere is
neither Mahomedan nor Christian, but that of pure reason. And when
elsewhere he does discuss definitely Christian problems it is usually
in the light of free and unfettered reason. Reason by itself has
probably never made any one a Christian, and certainly Johnson's {29}
Christianity was not an affair of the reason alone, but he was seldom
afraid to test it by the touchstone of reason. That was not merely a
thing done in accordance with the fashion of his age; it was the
inevitable activity of an acute and powerful mind. But the fact that
he had in him this absorbing ethical interest, and that throughout his
life he was applying to it a rare intellectual energy, and what was
rarer still in those fields, a close and unfailing grip on life and
reality, gave him that peculiar position to which he came in his last
years; one of an authority which was probably not equalled by that of
any professed philosopher or divine.
Still, his seriousness could not by itself have given him this
position. The English people like their public men to be serious, but
they do not like them to be nothing else. The philosopher and the
saint, the merely intellectual man or the merely spiritual man, have
never been popular characters or become leaders of men, here any more
than elsewhere. The essential element in the confidence Johnson
inspired was not his seriousness: it was his sovereign sanity, the
unfailing common sense, to which allusion has already been made. He
was pre-eminently a bookish man, but he was conspicuously free from the
unreality that is so often felt {30} in the characters of such men. He
knew from the first how to strike a note which showed that he was well
aware of the difference between literature and life and their relative
importance.
"Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise."
So he said, as a young man, in his finest poem, and so he acted all
through the years. Scholar as he was, and very conscious of the
dignity of scholarship, he never forgot that scholarship faded into
insignificance in presence of the greater issues of life. In his most
scholarly moment, in the Preface to the _Dictionary_, he will throw out
such remark as "this recommendation of steadiness and uniformity (in
spelling) does not proceed from an opinion that particular combinations
of letters have much influence on human happiness." Such a sentence
could not but give plain people a feeling of unusual confidence in the
writer. How different they would at once feel it to be, how different,
indeed, we still feel it, from the too frequent pedantry of critics,
insisting with solemn importance or querulous ill-temper upon trifling
points of grammar or style. We know that this man has a scale of
things in his mind {31} he will not vilify his opponent's character for
the sake of a difference about a Greek construction, or make a lifelong
quarrel over the question of the maiden name and birthplace of
Shelley's great-grandmother. From first to last he was emphatically a
human being, with a feeling for human life as a whole, and in all its
parts. He said once: "A mere antiquarian is a rugged being," and he
was never himself a mere grammarian or a mere scholar, but a man with
an eager interest in all the business and pleasure of life. His high
sense of the dignity of literature looked to its large and human side,
not to any parade of curious information. Everywhere in his writings
plain people are conciliated by his frank attitude as to his own
calling, by his perfect freedom from any pontifical airs of the mystery
of authorship. "I could have written longer notes," he says in the
great Preface to his _Shakespeare_, "for the art of writing notes is
not of difficult attainment." "It is impossible for an expositor not
to write too little for some, and too much for others." "I have indeed
disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I have endeavoured to
perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the
whole work has appeared to me corrupt which I have not attempted to
restore; or {32} obscure which I have not endeavoured to illustrate.
In many I have failed, like others, and from many, after all my
efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse. I have not
passed over with affected superiority what is equally difficult to the
reader and to myself, but where I could not instruct him have owned my
ignorance. I might easily have accumulated a mass of seeming learning
upon easy scenes; but it ought not to be imputed to negligence that,
where nothing was necessary, nothing has been done, or that, where
others have said enough, I have said no more."
A man who writes like this is sure of his public at once. He is
instantly seen to be too proud, as well as too sincere, too great a
man, in fact, altogether, to stoop to the dishonest little artifices by
which vanity tries to steal applause. In his writings as in his talk,
he was not afraid to be seen for what he actually was; and just as,
when asked how he came to explain the word Pastern as meaning the knee
of a horse, he replied at once, "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," so
in his books he made no attempt to be thought wiser or more learned
than he was. And this modesty which he showed for himself he showed
for his author too. The common notion that he depreciated {33}
Shakespeare is, indeed, an entire mistake. There were certainly things
in Shakespeare which were out of his reach, but that does not alter the
fact that Shakespeare has never been better praised than in Johnson's
Preface. But he will not say what he does not mean about Shakespeare
any more than about himself. There is in him nothing at all of the
subtle trickery of the common critic who thinks to magnify his own
importance by extravagant and insincere laudation of his author. He is
not afraid to speak of the poet with the same simplicity as he speaks
of the editor. "Yet it must be at last confessed that, as we owe
everything to him, he owes something to us; that, if much of his praise
is paid by perception and judgment, much is likewise given by custom
and veneration." He even adds that Shakespeare has "perhaps not one
play which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary
writer, would be heard to the conclusion." Whether that is true or not
of Johnson's day or of our own--and let us not be too hastily sure of
its untruth--at least the man who wrote it in the preface to an edition
of Shakespeare lacked neither honesty nor courage. And he had then, as
he has still, the reward which the most popular of the virtues will
always bring.
{34}
With courage and honesty usually go simplicity and directness. That is
not the first praise that Johnson would win from people familiar with
caricatures of his style. But it is a complete mistake to suppose that
he always wore that heavy armour of magniloquence. He could be as free
from pedantry of phrase as he always was from pedantry of thought. He
is not only a supreme master of common sense; he is a supreme master of
the language of common sense. He has the gift of saying things which
no one can misunderstand and no one can forget. His common sense is
what its name implies, no private possession thrust upon the minds of
others, but their own thoughts expressed for them. That was one of the
secrets of the unique confidence he inspired. The jury gave him their
verdict because he always put the issue on a basis they could
understand. His answer to the specious arguments of the learned is
always an appeal to what it needs no learning to know. The critics of
Pope's _Homer_ are met by the unanswerable retort: "To a thousand
cavils one answer is sufficient. The purpose of a writer is to be
read." To Pope himself affecting scorn of the great, the same
merciless measure of common knowledge is dealt. "His scorn of the
great is too often repeated to be real: no man thinks {35} much of that
which he despises." And so once more to Pope's victims. If they would
have kept quiet, he says, the _Dunciad_ would have been little read:
"For whom did it concern to know that one or another scribbler was a
dunce?" But this is what the dunces are the last people to realize:
indeed, "every man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his
own opinion, to others"; so the victim is the first to "publish
injuries or misfortunes which had never been known unless related by
himself, and at which those that hear them will only laugh; for no man
sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity."
Every one who is much read in Johnson will recall for himself other and
perhaps better instances than these of his rare faculty of gathering
together into a sentence some piece of the common stock of wisdom or
observation, and applying it simply, directly and unanswerably to the
immediate business in hand. Is there anything which clears and
relieves an argument so well? "The true state of every nation is the
state of common life"; "If one was to think constantly of death the
business of life would stand still"; "To be happy at home is the
ultimate result of all ambition." How firm on one's feet, on the solid
ground of truth, one feels when one reads such sentences! The writer
of them {36} is at once recognized as no maker of phrases, no victim of
cloudy speculations, self-deceived and the deceiver of others, but a
man who kept himself always close to the realities of things. And when
to this, which had been always there, was added the special charm of
the _Lives of the Poets_, the old man speaking, often in the first
person, without reserve or mystery, out of the fullness of his
knowledge of books and men and the general life which is greater than
either, then the feeling entertained for him grew into something not
very unlike affection. The man who could not be concealed even by the
grave abstractions of the earlier works, was now seen and heard as a
friend speaking face to face with those who understood him. The
wisdom, and learning and piety, the shrewdness and vigour and wit, the
invincible common sense, took visible shape in the face of Samuel
Johnson, were heard in his audible voice, became known and honoured and
loved as a kind of national glory, the embodiment of the mind and
character of the English people. And then, of course, came Boswell.
And what might have died away as a memory or a legend was made secure
from mortality by a work of genius. At the moment Boswell had only to
complete an impression already made. But, strong as it was at the
time, without Boswell it could {37} not have lasted. Those who had sat
with Johnson at the Mitre or "The Club" could not long survive, and
could not leave their eyes and ears behind them. Literary fashions
changed; popular taste began to ask evermore for amusement and less for
instruction or edification; and the works of Johnson were no longer
read, except by students of English literature. But for Boswell the
great man's name might soon have been unknown to any but bookish men.
It is due to Boswell that journalists quote him, and cabmen tell
stories about him. Johnson had himself almost every quality that makes
for survival except genius; and that, by the happiest of fates for
himself and for us, he found in his biographer.