THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON
These two men, then, are for ever inseparable. They go down the
centuries together, Johnson owing most of his immortality to the genius
of Boswell, Boswell owing to Johnson that inspiring opportunity without
which genius cannot discover that it is genius. There were other men
in Johnson's circle, whom he knew longer and respected more; but for
us, Boswell's position in relation to Johnson is unique. Beside him
the others, even Burke and Reynolds, are, in this connection, shadows.
They had their independent fields of greatness in which Johnson had no
share: Boswell's greatness is all Johnsonian. We cannot think of him
apart from Johnson: and he has so managed that we can scarcely think of
Johnson apart from him. No one who occupies himself with the one can
ignore the other: in interest and popularity they stand or fall
together. It may be well, therefore, before going further, to give the
bare facts of both their lives; dismissing Boswell first, as the less
important, and then devoting the rest of the chapter to Johnson.
{71}
James Boswell was born in 1740. He came of an ancient family, a fact
he never forgot, as, indeed, few people do who have the same advantage.
His father was a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Auchinleck. The
first of the family to hold the estate of Auchinleck, which is in
Ayrshire, was Thomas Boswell, who received a grant of it from James IV
in whose army he went to Flodden and shared the defeat and death of his
patron. The estate had therefore belonged to the Boswells over two
hundred years when the future biographer of Johnson was born. His
father and he were never congenial spirits. The judge was a Whig with
a practical view of life and had no sympathy with his son's romantic
propensities either in religion, politics or literature. A plain
Lowland Scot, he did not see why his son should take up with Toryism,
Anglicanism, or literary hero-worship. When James, after first
attaching himself to Paoli, the leader of the Corsican struggle for
independence, returned home and took up the discipleship to Johnson
which was to be the central fact in the rest of his life, his father
frankly despaired of him, and broke out, according to Walter Scott:
"There's nae hope for Jamie, mon. Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do
you think, mon? He's done wi' Paoli--he's off wi' the {72} landlouping
scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned
himself to now, mon? A _dominie_, mon--an auld dominie: he keeped a
schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy." Well might Boswell say that they
were "so totally different that a good understanding is scarcely
possible." Beside disliking Paoli and Johnson, Lord Auchinleck cared
nothing for some of Boswell's strict feudal notions, had the bad taste
to give his son a step-mother, and to be as unlike him as possible in
the matter of good spirits. Scarcely anything could interfere with the
judge's cheerfulness, while Boswell was always falling into depressions
about nothing in particular and perhaps indulging in the "foolish
notion," rebuked by Johnson, that "melancholy is a proof of acuteness."
But in spite of their differences the father and son managed to avoid
anything like a definite breach. Boswell was sincerely anxious to
please his father, and was constantly urged in that direction by his
great mentor: and after all the judge went some way to meet his
singular son, for he paid his debts and entertained both Paoli and
Johnson at Auchinleck. The latter visit was naturally a source of some
anxiety to Boswell and it did not go off without a storm when the old
Whig and the old Tory unluckily got on to the topic of Charles I and
Cromwell: but all {73} ended well, and Boswell characteristically ends
his story of it, written after both were dead, with the pious hope that
the antagonists had by then met in a higher state of existence "where
there is no room for Whiggism."
Full of activities as Boswell's life was, the definite facts and dates
in it are not very numerous. He was sent to Glasgow University, and
wished to be a soldier, but was bred by his father to the law. No
doubt he gave some early signs of intellectual promise, for which it
was not thought the army provided a fit sphere, for the Duke of Argyle
is reported to have said to his father when he was only twenty: "My
lord, I like your son: this boy must not be shot at for
three-and-sixpence a day." He paid his first visit to London in 1760;
and, having heard a good deal about Johnson from one Mr. Gentleman, and
from Derrick, a very minor poet, he at once sought an introduction, but
had to leave London without succeeding in his object. He was equally
unsuccessful when he was in London the next year, during which he
published some anonymous poems which would not have helped him to
secure the desired introduction. The great event occurred at last in
1763. The day was the 16th of May and the scene the house of Davies,
the bookseller. "At last," says Boswell, "on {74} Monday the 16th of
May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having
drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the
shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the
room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,--he announced his
aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part
of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's
ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes.'"
So, with characteristic accuracy and characteristic imagination, begins
his well-known account of his first meeting with his hero, and the
storms to which he was exposed in its course. But all ended
satisfactorily, for when the great man was gone, Davies reassured the
nervous Boswell by saying: "Don't be uneasy, I can see he likes you
very well." A few days afterwards Boswell called on Johnson at his
Chambers in the Temple, and the great friendship which was the pleasure
and business of his life was definitely begun. Yet it is worth
remembering, if only as an additional proof of Boswell's biographical
genius, that, according to the calculation of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, when
all the weeks and months during which Johnson and Boswell were living
within reach of each {75} other are added together, they amount to
little more than two years. And of course this includes all the days
on which they were both in London, on many, or rather most, of which
they did not meet.
A few months after the first meeting, Boswell went by his father's wish
to Utrecht to study law. But before that the friendship was got on to
a firm footing, and Boswell had had the pride and pleasure of hearing
Johnson say, "There are few people whom I take so much to, as you." A
still stronger proof of Johnson's feeling was that he insisted on going
with Boswell to Harwich to see him out of England. This was the
occasion on which he scarified the good Protestants who were with them
in the coach by defending the Inquisition, and invited one of the
ladies who said she never allowed her children to be idle to take his
own education in hand; "'for I have been an idle fellow all my life.'
'I am sure, sir,' said she, 'you have not been idle.' 'Nay, madam, it
is very true, and that gentleman there,' pointing to me, 'has been
idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow where
he continued to be idle. He then came to London where he has been very
idle; and now he is going to Utrecht where he will be as idle as ever.'
I asked him privately how he could expose me {76} so. 'Pooh, Pooh!'
said he, 'they know nothing about you and will think of it no more.'"
When he was not engaged in these alarums and excursions or in reproving
Boswell for giving the coachman a shilling instead of the customary
sixpence, he was occupied in reading Pomponius Mela _De Situ Orbis_.
How complete the picture is and how vivid! It once more gives
Boswell's method in miniature.
He seems to have stayed at Utrecht about a year, afterwards travelling
in Germany, where he visited Wittenberg, and sat down to write to
Johnson in the church where the Reformation was first preached, with
his paper resting on the tomb of Melanchthon. It is noticeable that,
though he had only known Johnson a year, he already hoped to be his
biographer. "At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend, I
vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I
can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall
endeavour to do honour to your memory." He was also at this time in
Italy and Switzerland, where he visited Voltaire and gratified him by
quoting a remark of Johnson's that Frederick the Great's writings were
the sort of stuff one might expect from "a footboy who had been
Voltaire's amanuensis." Nor did this {77} collector of celebrities
omit to visit Rousseau, the rival lion of the day, between whom and
Voltaire the orthodox Johnson thought it was "difficult to settle the
proportion of iniquity." But as far as Boswell's records go, he never
said such violent things of Voltaire as of Rousseau, whom he called "a
rascal who ought to be hunted out of society and transported to work in
the plantations." Boswell, however, was an admirer of the _Vicaire
Savoyard_, and said what he could in defence of his host, in return for
the hospitality he had enjoyed at Neuchatel, with the usual result, of
course, that Johnson only became more outrageous.
In 1765 Boswell made the acquaintance of another distinguished man with
whom his name will always be connected. Corsica had at that time been
long, and on the whole victoriously, engaged in a struggle to free
itself from the hated rule of Genoa. The leader of the Corsicans was a
man of high birth, character and abilities, Pascal Paoli, who had acted
since 1753 at once as their General and as the head of the civil
administration. Both the generous and the curious element in Boswell
made him anxious not to return from Italy without seeing something of
so interesting a people and so great a hero. Armed with introductions
from Rousseau {78} and others and with such protection as a British
Captain's letter could give him against Barbary Corsairs, he sailed
from Leghorn to Corsica in September 1765. His account of the island
and of his tour there, published in 1768, is still very good reading.
He soon made his way to the palace where Paoli was residing, with whom
he at first felt himself in a presence more awe-inspiring than that of
princes, but ventured after a while upon a compliment to the Corsicans.
"Sir, I am upon my travels, and have lately visited Rome. I am come
from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people: I now see the rise
of another." The good sense of Paoli declined any parallel between
Rome and his own little people, but he soon received Boswell into his
intimacy and spent some hours alone with him almost every day. One
fine answer of his, uniting the scholar and the patriot, is worth
quoting. Boswell asked him how he, who confessed to his love of
society and particularly of the society of learned and cultivated men,
could be content to pass his life in an island where no such advantages
were to be had; to which Paoli replied at once--
"Vincit amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido."
{79}
Well might Boswell wish to have a statue of him taken at that moment.
Even Virgilian quotation has seldom been put to nobler use. Like all
the great men of the eighteenth century, Paoli was an enthusiast for
the ancients. "A young man who would form his mind to glory," he told
Boswell, "must not read modern memoirs; _ma Plutarcho, ma Tito Livio_."
His own mind was formed not only to glory, but also to what so often
fails to go with glory, to justice and moderation. Nothing is more
remarkable in the conversations with him recorded by Boswell than his
good sense and fairness of mind in speaking of the Genoese. Even in
the excitement of Corsica, Boswell did not forget Johnson. He says
that he quoted specimens of Johnson's wisdom to Paoli, who "translated
them to the Corsican heroes with Italian energy"; and, as he had
written to his master "from the tomb of Melanchthon sacred to learning
and piety," so he also wrote to him "from the palace of Pascal Paoli
sacred to wisdom and liberty." Boswell was received with great honour
in Corsica, no doubt partly because he was very naturally supposed to
have some mission from the British Government. He left the island in
December and arrived in London in February 1766, when his intimacy with
Johnson was at once resumed, in spite {80} of the visits to Rousseau
and Voltaire which drew some inevitable sarcasms from the great man.
He soon, however, returned to Scotland, where he was admitted an
Advocate in the summer of 1766.
Johnson thought he was too busy about Corsica, and wrote to him: "Empty
your head of Corsica, which I think has filled it rather too long."
But this was in March 1768, when Boswell's _Account of Corsica_ had
already been published. It sold very well, a second and a third
edition appearing within the year. Gray and other good judges spoke
warmly of it and it seems that a French translation as well as two
Dutch ones were made. It caused so much stir and aroused so much
sympathy in England that Lord Holland was quite afraid we were going to
be "so foolish as to go to war because Mr. Boswell has been in
Corsica." After this it was less likely than ever that Boswell would
forget that island. Motives of vanity combined with his genuine
enthusiasm to keep him full of it, and he replied to Johnson's
monition: "Empty my head of Corsica! empty it of honour, empty it of
humanity, empty it of friendship, empty it of piety! No! while I live,
Corsica and the cause of the brave islanders shall ever employ much of
my attention and interest me in the sincerest {81} manner." It seems
from his letters to Temple that he found these outbursts a great deal
easier than living in a manner worthy of a friend of Paoli. But he did
more than talk. He wrote to Chatham to try to interest him in Corsica,
and received a reply three pages long applauding his generous warmth;
he brought out a volume of _British Essays in Favour of the Brave
Corsicans_, sent Paoli Johnson's Works and, what was more substantial,
forwarded a quantity of ordnance, to buy which he had managed to raise
a subscription of 700 pounds. His desire to be a well-known man now
began to receive some gratification and he frankly confesses his
pleasure at having such men as Johnson, Hume and Franklin dining with
him at his chambers. Nor will any reasonable man blame him. His
snobbishness, if it is to be so called, was always primarily a
snobbishness of mind and character, not of wealth or rank.
Nothing else of importance occurred to him in these years. He was much
occupied with the great law-suit about the succession to the Douglas
property, on which he wrote two pamphlets and was so sure of the
justice of his view that he once dared to tell Johnson he knew nothing
about that subject. He was with Johnson at Oxford in 1768 and they
were already talking of going to the Hebrides {82} together. The next
year, 1769, saw the conquest of Corsica by the French to whom the
Genoese had ceded their claims. The result was that Paoli came to
London, where he lived till 1789, and Boswell was constantly with him.
In this year he did at least one very foolish thing, and at least one
very wise one. He made himself ridiculous by going to the Shakespeare
Jubilee at Stratford and appearing in Corsican costume with "_Viva la
Libertà_" embroidered on his cap. He also took the most sensible step
of his whole life in marrying his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, on
November 25. She never liked Johnson, and her husband had the candour
to report an excellent sally of hers at his and his sage's expense: "I
have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by
a bear." But though, as Boswell says, she could not be expected to
like his "irregular hours and uncouth habits," she never failed in
courtesy to him: and he on his part was unwearied in sending friendly
messages to his "dear enemy" as he called her, and was well aware of
her importance to her husband. The event unhappily proved his
prescience; for after her death in 1789, Boswell's downward course was
visibly accelerated.
After Boswell's marriage there was no {83} communication between him
and Johnson for a year and a half, and they did not meet again till
March 1772, when Boswell came to London, and stayed some time. The
next year he came again, and, by Johnson's active support, was elected
a member of "The Club," a small society of friends founded by Reynolds
and Johnson in 1764. At first it met weekly for supper, but after a
few years the members began the custom of dining together on fixed
dates which has continued to the present day. Among the members when
Boswell was elected were Johnson and Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and
Garrick. Gibbon and Charles Fox came in the next year, and Adam Smith
in 1775. In 1780 the number of members was enlarged to forty which is
still the limit. "The Club" has always maintained its distinction, and
a recent article in the _Edinburgh Review_ records that fifteen Prime
Ministers have been members of it, as well as men like Scott, Tennyson,
Hallam, Macaulay and Grote. The first advantage over and above pride
and pleasure derived by Boswell from his election was the acquaintance
of Burke, which he had long desired and retained through life. Burke
said of him that he had so much good humour naturally that it was
scarcely a virtue in him.
In the autumn of that year, 1773, Johnson {84} and Boswell made their
famous tour to the Hebrides. They, in fact, went over much more than
the Hebrides, seeing the four Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews,
Aberdeen and Glasgow, besides many less famous places. Johnson says
they were everywhere "received like princes in their progress," and
though no doubt hospitality was freer in those days when travellers
were few and inns poor, yet the whole story is a remarkable proof of
Johnson's fame and Boswell's popularity. The University Professors
vied with each other in paying civilities to Johnson, the town of
Aberdeen gave him its freedom, and among their hosts were magnates like
the Duke of Argyll, Lord Errol and Lord Loudoun, who "jumped for joy"
at their coming, and great men of law or learning like Lord Monboddo
and Lord Elibank.
By this time all the important events in Boswell's life were over
except the publication of his two great books, the _Tour to the
Hebrides_ and the _Life of Johnson_. During all the ten years which
Johnson still had to live, except 1780 and 1782, the two friends
managed to spend some time together, and when they did not, the
friendship was maintained by correspondence. Boswell's father died in
1782, and Boswell came into possession of the estate, {85} worth 1,600
pounds a year. Johnson and Boswell took more than one "jaunt" in the
country together, visiting Oxford, Lichfield and other places. They
were at Oxford together in June 1784; but Johnson was then evidently
failing. On their return to London, Boswell busied himself with the
help of Reynolds in trying to get Johnson's pension increased, so that
he might be able to spend the winter abroad. Johnson was very pleased
on hearing of the attempt, saying, when Boswell told him, "'This is
taking prodigious pains about a man.' 'O, sir,' said Boswell, 'your
friends would do everything for you.' He paused, grew more and more
agitated, till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with
fervent emotion, 'God bless you all.' I was so affected that I also
shed tears. After a short silence he renewed and extended his grateful
benediction, 'God bless you all, for Jesus Christ's sake.'" Those were
the last words Boswell heard under Johnson's roof. The next day they
both dined with Reynolds, and on July 2 Boswell left London, to see
Johnson no more. Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784.
Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large
part of Boswell's later years. He made some approaches to standing as
a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, {86} and again in 1788, was called to
the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped
to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got
nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a
certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle. That
unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all
his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics.
Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of
literature had brought him. It was not the laird or the lawyer, but
the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed
in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign
Correspondence. And those last years, while they brought him
disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a
successful author. The _Tour to the Hebrides_ was published in 1785,
and sold out in a few weeks. The third edition was issued within a
year of the appearance of the first. It was followed by the
publication of Johnson's famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an
account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by the
_Life_ itself. A second edition of this was called for in 1793.
Boswell only lived two years more. He died on May 19, 1795. He left
two sons, Alexander, {87} who became Sir Alexander, was the principal
mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was
killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third
edition of his father's great book, and edited the third _Variorum
Shakespeare_, known as Boswell's _Malone_, in 1821.
Such were the main outlines of the life of the biographer. We may now
turn to those of the life which he owes his fame to recording. They
are in most ways very unlike his own. Samuel Johnson was very far from
being heir to a large estate and an ancient name. He was the son of a
bookseller at Lichfield, and was born there on the 18th of September
1709, in a house which is now preserved in public hands in memory of
the event of that day. His father's family was so obscure that he once
said, "I can hardly tell who was my grandfather." His mother was Sarah
Ford, who came of a good yeoman stock in Warwickshire. She was both a
good and an intelligent woman. Samuel was the elder and only
ultimately surviving issue of the marriage. A picturesque incident in
his childhood is that his mother took him to London to be "touched" by
Queen Anne for the scrofula, or "king's evil," as it was called, from
which he suffered. He must have been one of the last persons to go
through this curious {88} ceremony, which the Georges never performed,
though the service for it remained in the Book of Common Prayer for
some years after the accession of George I. The boy made an impression
upon people from the first. He liked to recall in later life that the
dame who first taught him to read brought him a present of gingerbread
when he was starting for Oxford, and told him he was the best scholar
she had ever had. Afterwards he went to Lichfield School, and at the
age of fifteen to Stourbridge. At both he was evidently held in
respect by boys and masters alike. Probably the curious combination in
him of the invalid and the prize-fighter which was conspicuous all
through his life, already arrested attention in his boyhood. He played
none of the ordinary games, but yet, as we have already seen, was
acknowledged as a leader by the boys, and his abilities were the pride
of the school. He already exhibited the amazing memory which enabled
him in later life to dictate to Boswell his famous letter to
Chesterfield rather than search for a copy, and to confute a person who
praised a bad translation from Martial by a contemptuous "Why, sir, the
original is thus," followed by a recitation not only of the Latin
original which it is not likely he had looked at for years, but also of
the translation which he had only read {89} once. So on another
occasion when Baretti, who had read a little Ariosto with him some
years before, proposed to give him some more lessons, but feared he
might have forgotten their previous readings, "Who forgets, sir?" said
Johnson, and immediately repeated three or four stanzas of the
_Orlando_. To the lover of literature there is no possession more
precious than a good verbal memory, and this Johnson enjoyed to a very
unusual degree all through his life. But it is worth noting that he
was entirely free from the defect which commonly results from an
exceptional memory. He always thought and spoke for himself, and was
never prevented from using his own mind and his own words by the fact
that his memory supplied him abundantly with those of others. His
scholarly friend Langton annoyed him by depending upon books too much
in his conversation, and one of his compliments to Boswell was, "You
and I do not talk from books."
After he left Stourbridge he spent two years at home in desultory
reading, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient
writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and
Hesiod," the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the
Master of his College said he was "the best qualified for the
University that {90} he had ever known come there." His College was
Pembroke, of which he became a Commoner (not a Servitor, as Carlyle
said) in 1728. The Oxford of that day was not a place of much
discipline and the official order of study was very laxly maintained.
It seems not to have meant much to Johnson, and he is described as
having spent a good deal of his time "lounging at the College gates
with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining
with wit and keeping from their studies." Most good talkers find the
first real sphere for their talent when they get to the University, and
the best of all was not likely to be an exception, nor to resist that
strongest of the intellectual temptations. But he did some solid
reading, especially Greek, though he seemed to himself to be very idle,
perhaps because his standard was so high that he used to say in later
life, "I never knew a man who studied hard." So when he confesses the
imperfections of his Greek scholarship, and other people exaggerate his
confession, it is well to remember the reply made by Jacob Bryant when
Gifford in an argument quoted Johnson's admission that "he was not a
good Greek scholar," "Sir, it is not easy for us to say what such a man
as Johnson would call a good Greek scholar." A man whose remedy for
{91} sleeplessness was to turn Greek epigrams into Latin was at any
rate not ignorant of Greek.
Johnson was prevented by his poverty from getting the full advantages
either out of the life or the studies of Oxford. His want of shoes
prevented his attending lectures, his pride forbad him to receive doles
of help, the friend, said to be a Mr. Corbet of Shropshire, on whose
promises of support he had relied in going to Oxford, failed him, his
father's business went from little to less; with the inevitable result
that he had to leave Oxford without a degree. This was in December
1729. But he had made an impression there, had a strong affection for
his College, and liked going to stay there in the days of his glory.
His usual host was one Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke, who had once
been his tutor but told Boswell that the relation was only nominal; "he
was above my mark." When he left Oxford he returned to his Lichfield
home, where his father died two months later, leaving so little behind
him that all that Johnson received of his estate was twenty pounds. He
seems to have remained at Lichfield, where the poverty of his family
did not prevent his mixing with the most cultivated society of a town
rich in cultivated people, till 1732, when he became an usher in a
school at Market Bosworth. He hated this monotonous drudgery {92} and
left it after a few months, going to live with a Mr. Warren, a
Birmingham bookseller of good repute, whom he helped by his knowledge
of literature. While in Birmingham he did a translation of a Jesuit
book about Abyssinia, for which Warren paid him five guineas. In 1734
he returned to Lichfield, tried without success to obtain subscribers
for an edition of the poems of Politian, and offered to write in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_. It is difficult to see how he supported
himself at this period: perhaps he was helped by his mother or by his
brother who carried on the bookselling business till his death a little
later. Anyhow it was just at this time that he took a step for which
poverty generally finds the courage more quickly than wealth. He
married Elizabeth Porter at St. Werburgh's Church, Derby, in July 1735.
Mrs. Porter was a widow twice his age and not of an attractive
appearance; but there is no doubt that Johnson's love for her was
sincere and lasting. To the end of his life he remembered her
frequently in his prayers "if it were lawful," and kept the anniversary
of her death with prayers and tears. Eighteen years after she died he
could write in his private note-books that his grief for her was not
abated and that he had less pleasure in any good that happened to him,
because she could not share {93} it: and in 1782 when she had been dead
thirty years, and he was drawing near his own end, he prays for her and
after doing so, noted "perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her.
Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me."
This was the inner truth of the relation between Johnson and his
elderly wife, but it was natural and indeed inevitable that the world,
the little world of their acquaintances, should have been chiefly alive
to the humorous external aspect of the marriage, and one does not
wonder that Beauclerk, whose married life was a scandal following on a
divorce, should have enjoyed relating that Johnson had said to him,
"Sir, it was a love marriage on both sides!" Johnson's own account of
the actual wedding is singular enough. "Sir, she had read the old
romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman
of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told
me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I
rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged
behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to
begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was
fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was
sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should {94} soon
come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears."
Mrs. Johnson was the widow of a Birmingham draper, and brought her
husband several hundred pounds, part of which was at once spent in
hiring and furnishing a large house at Edial near Lichfield where
Johnson proposed to take pupils. But no pupils came except David
Garrick and his brother, the sons of an old Lichfield friend, and the
"academy" was abandoned after a year and a half. The lack of pupils,
however, was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for it enabled Johnson to
write most of his tragedy _Irene_, with which he went to London in
March 1737. His pupil, David Garrick, went with him to study law, and
when Garrick was a rich, famous and rather vain man, Johnson, who liked
to curb the "insolence of wealth" once referred to 1737 as the year
"when I came to London with twopence half-penny in my pocket; and thou,
Davy, with three-halfpence in thine." Nothing came of this first visit
to the capital. He lived as best he could, dining for eightpence, and
seeing a few friends, one of whom was Henry Hervey, son of the Earl of
Bristol, of whose kindness he always retained an affectionate memory,
so that he once said to Boswell, "If you call a dog Hervey, I shall
love him." In the summer he returned to Lichfield, and finished his
{95} tragedy, after which he brought his wife back with him to London
which was his home for the rest of his life. Efforts to get _Irene_
performed were unsuccessful, but he soon began to write regularly for
the _Gentleman's Magazine_, of which he held so high an opinion that he
looked "with reverence" on the house where it was printed. To this he
contributed essays and was soon employed to write the _Parliamentary
Debates_ which, in the days before reporters, were made up with
fictitious names from such scanty notes as could be got of the actual
speeches. There is a story of his being, many years later, in a
company who were praising a famous oration of Chatham, and were
naturally a good deal startled by his quietly saying, "That speech I
wrote in a garret in Exeter Street." He continued to do this work till
1743 when he became aware that the speeches were taken as authentic and
refused to be "accessory to the propagation of falsehood." But, while
engaged in it, he had had no scruples about taking care "that the Whig
dogs should not have the best of it."
A much more important matter than this hack-work was the publication of
his _London_, a poem in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. This
appeared in May 1738. He got ten guineas for it, which he was in no
position to despise; but he also got something {96} much more
important, an established name in the world of letters. Every one
talked of him, and Pope, who published his "1738" in the same year, was
not only generous enough to inquire about him, and to say when told
that the author of _London_ was some obscure man, "He will soon be
_déterré_," but also to try to get him an Irish degree of M.A. This
was in view of some attempts Johnson made to escape from dependence on
journalism for his daily bread: but they were all unsuccessful, and
till he received his pension his only source of income was what his
various writings produced. In such circumstances he naturally wrote
many things of quite ephemeral interest which call for no mention now.
Perhaps the only prose work of permanent value he produced in these
years was the life of his mysterious friend, Richard Savage. This
curious volume appeared in 1744. The subject of it died in 1743. He
and Johnson had been companions both in extreme poverty and in the
intellectual pleasures which in such men poverty is unable to
annihilate. Mrs. Johnson seems to have been out of London at this
time, and the two struggling men of letters often passed nights
together, walking and talking in the streets and squares without the
price of a night's lodging between them. Johnson's account of {97} his
friend did not fill his pocket, but must have contributed something to
his fame as it was very favourably criticized. It was the occasion of
Reynolds first becoming acquainted with his name. He was so interested
by the book that, having taken it up while standing with his arm
leaning upon a chimney-piece, he read the whole without sitting down
and found his arm quite benumbed when he got to the end.
"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." Johnson had now been seven
years in London, but had not yet found the way to do anything worthy of
his powers. If he had died then, only the curious and the learned
would have known his name to-day. A single satire in verse would
never, by itself, have had the force to push its way through the
ever-increasing crowd of applicants that besiege the attention of
posterity. But the next year, 1745, is the literary turning-point of
his life. Before it was over he had begun to deal with two subjects
with which much of his remaining life was occupied, and on which much
of his fame depends. He had published a pamphlet upon Shakespeare's
_Macbeth_ which won the praise of Warburton, for which Johnson always
felt and showed his gratitude ("He praised me at a time when praise was
of value to me"); and, if Boswell is right, he had begun to occupy {98}
himself with the idea of making an English Dictionary. Thus, poor and
obscure as he was in those years, sick with deferred hope as he must
have been, he had in fact laid the foundation-stones of the authority
and fame he was soon to enjoy as the Editor of Shakespeare and above
all as "Dictionary Johnson." Now at last he began to do work worthier
of his powers. The "_Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language_"
was published in 1747 and in the same year he wrote the admirable
_Prologue_ for the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, of which his pupil,
David Garrick, more fortunate than the master with whom he had come to
London, was now become manager.
Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy of _Irene_.
It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later
years. There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot
called it "the finest tragedy of modern times," to which his only reply
was, "If Pot says so, Pot lies." But this hardly has the genuine ring
about it. Even Garrick's talent and friendship could not make _Irene_
a success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit
and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds. In
the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was
given {99} by the appearance of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, another
Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first. From 1750
to 1752 he was writing _The Rambler_, a sort of newspaper essay which
appeared every Tuesday and Friday. He wrote it almost entirely
himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was
calling for it. No one will now wonder that it never had a large
circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his
gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from
sermons. But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to
intellectual frivolity. We have seen that the idlest sort of reading
Johnson could think of for a boy was "voyages and travels"; novels he
does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he
rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by
them, he of course could not so much as conceive. _The Rambler_ had no
sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to
compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for
its two years of life. The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was
the praise of his wife, who said to him, "I thought very well of you
before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to
this." That was just the discovery a good {100} many people beside his
wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that
when _The Rambler_ appeared as a book, it sold well and had gone
through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author's life.
Three years after the cessation of _The Rambler_ and, unhappily, also
three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been
his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary
appeared. It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever
accomplished a literary task of such vast extent. The mere labour, one
might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the
materials of such a work is enormous. Nor could any literary labour
bring with it greater temptations. Johnson's success is not more due
to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never
failed him and the strong will which he could generally exert when he
chose. He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface,
"with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of
literature"; but that, of course, was where the danger lay. A man of
an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have
allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and
the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw {101} that these
visions of intellectual pleasure were "the dreams of a poet doomed at
last to wake a lexicographer"; and that, if he was to do the thing he
had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the
pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable
perfection, which is the constant parent of futility. He realized, as
so many men of letters have failed to realize, that "to deliberate
whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have
protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much
improvement"; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving
nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the
attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he
attempted.
The praise he deserved was somewhat slow in coming, as is commonly the
case with the greatest literary achievements. But though, as he sadly
says in the last words of his great Preface, most of those whom he
wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had therefore little
to hope or fear from praise or censure, yet he was always and before
all things a human being, and only a creature above or below humanity
could have been insensible to the pleasure of the new fame, the new
authority and the new friends which his {102} Dictionary gradually
brought him. Before many years had passed the "harmless drudge," as he
himself had defined a lexicographer, had become the acknowledged
law-giver and dictator of English letters; he had gathered round him a
society of the finest minds of that generation, he had received a
public pension which secured his independence, he had begun the long
friendship which gave him a second home for more than fifteen years.
These things did not all come at once--he did not know the Thrales till
1764 or 1765--but the true turning-point in his career is the
publication of his Dictionary. He was still poor for some years after
that, and still much occupied in the production of hack-work: but he
was never again obscure and was soon to be famous. Within a year after
the appearance of the Dictionary he had issued his _Proposals for an
Edition of Shakespeare_, the second in time and perhaps in importance
of his three great works. His new position secured him a good number
of subscribers and he intended to publish it the next year, 1757; but
the interruptions of indolence, business and pleasure, as he himself
says of Pope, usually disappoint the sanguine expectations of authors,
and the book did not in fact appear till 1765.
Neither Shakespeare nor idleness had {103} occupied the whole of the
intervening years. From 1758 to 1760 he produced a weekly paper called
_The Idler_, of the same character as _The Rambler_. In 1759 he wrote
his once famous story _Rasselas_ to pay the expenses of his mother's
funeral. It was written in the evenings of a single week. Good judges
thought that, if he had known how to make a bargain, he ought to have
received as much as four hundred pounds for this book, which was
translated into most of the European languages; but he did not in fact
receive more than a hundred pounds for the first and twenty-five for
the second edition. By this time he could visit Oxford, from which
University he had received the degree of M.A. when his Dictionary was
on the eve of publication: and another sign of the position he was
beginning to occupy is that we find Smollet writing of him in 1759 as
the "great Cham of literature." More substantial evidences followed in
1762 when George III was advised by Bute to grant him a pension of 300
pounds a year, an income which must have seemed boundless affluence to
a man who had never known a time when five pounds was not an important
sum to him.
Next year came the event which was even more important to his fame than
the receipt of the pension was to his comfort. In 1763 {104} he met
Boswell for the first time. Fortune now began to smile upon him in
good earnest and evidences of his established position and prosperity
follow each other in rapid succession. "The Club" (its proper and
still existing name, though Boswell occasionally calls it The Literary
Club) was founded in 1764 and provided him for the rest of his life
with an ideal theatre for the display of his amazing powers of talk,
though it appears that he was not in his later years a very regular
attendant. The next year, 1765, was probably the year in which he
first met Thrale, the great brewer, and his clever and ambitious wife.
No event contributed so much to the happiness of his after years.
Thrale was a man of character and understanding, and was not without
scholarly tastes. He at once saw the value of such a friend as
Johnson, lived in the closest intimacy with him for the rest of his
days, and named him executor in his will, which gave Johnson an
opportunity such as he always liked, of mixing in business, and
incidentally also, of saying the best thing that ever was said at the
sale of a brewery. He appeared at the auction, according to the story
told by Lord Lucan, "bustling about with an inkhorn and pen in his
button-hole, like an excise-man; and, on being asked what he really
considered to be the value of the {105} property, answered, 'We are not
here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of
growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.'" The brewery was sold for
135,000 pounds to Mr. Barclay, the founder of the present firm of
Barclay & Perkins, who now put Johnson's head on the labels of their
beer bottles. But it was not so much on the silent and busy Thrale
himself as on his wife, a quick and clever woman fond of literary
society, that the visible burden, honour and pleasure of the long
friendship with Johnson fell. Till the breach caused by her second
marriage just before he died no one had so much of his society as Mrs.
Thrale. She soon became "my mistress" to him, an adaptation of his
from the "my master" which was her phrase for her husband. And for
him, too, Thrale was "my master." A somewhat masterful servant, no
doubt, to them both, but he loved them sincerely and was deeply
grateful for their kindness. He lived at their house at Streatham as
much as he liked, and had his own room reserved for him both there and
at their London house. At Streatham he sometimes remained for several
months, and it is chiefly there that Boswell's only rival, Fanny
Burney, saw him. It may be said that the Thrales' house was more of a
home to him than anything else he ever knew: it was at {106} least the
only house since his childhood in which he ever lived with children.
There in the garden or in the library he studied and idled and talked
at his ease; there many of his friends gathered round him; there his
wishes were anticipated and his words listened to, sometimes with fear,
sometimes with amusement, sometimes with reverence, always with
affection and almost always with admiration. Well might he write to
Mrs. Thrale as he did in October 1777: "I cannot but think on your
kindness and my master's. Life has upon the whole fallen short, very
short, of my early expectation; but the acquisition of such a
friendship, at an age when new friendships are seldom acquired, is
something better than the general course of things gives man a right to
expect. I think on it with great delight. I am not very apt to be
delighted."
Johnson had now become a comparatively prosperous man, and the lives of
the prosperous have a way of producing little to record. He received
many honours and compliments of different sorts. Dublin University
made him LL.D. in 1765, he had his well-known interview with George III
in 1767, the Royal Academy appointed him their Professor in Ancient
Literature in 1769, and in 1775 he received the honorary degree of
D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. But the only events {107} of any
special importance in the last twenty years of his life were the
publication of his _Shakespeare_ in 1765, his journey in Scotland with
Boswell in 1773, and the writing of his last and most popular book,
_The Lives of the Poets_. This he undertook in 1777 and completed in
1781. Its easier style, pleasant digressions, and occasional bits of
autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson's life.
He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of
disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the
earlier works it substitutes an old man's kindliness of retrospect.
Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of his
_Journey to the Western Islands_, of the _Prologue_ to Goldsmith's
_Good-Natured Man_ and of his political pamphlets, _The False Alarm_,
_Falkland's Islands_, _The Patriot_, and _Taxation no Tyranny_. But
none of these things except the _Lives of the Poets_ occupied much of
his time, and his principal occupation in his old age was talking to
his friends. He travelled a good deal, often visiting Oxford, his old
home at Lichfield, and his friend Taylor's house in Derbyshire. In
1775 he went to France with the Thrales, and even in his last year was
planning a tour to Italy. But by that time the motive was rather
health than pleasure. He had a {108} paralytic stroke in 1783 and lost
his powers of speech for some days. One of the doctors who attended
him was Dr. Heberden, who had cured Cowper of a still graver illness
twenty years earlier. His strong constitution enabled him to recover
rapidly, and within a month he was paying visits in Kent and Wiltshire.
But he had other complaints, and never again knew even that modest
measure of health which he had once enjoyed.
The inevitable loss of friends, that saddest and most universal sorrow
of old age, joined with illness to depress his last years. Beauclerk
died in 1780, Thrale in 1781, Levett and Mrs. Williams, two of the
humble friends to whom his charity had given a home in his house, in
1782 and 1788. He was left almost alone. Yet the old courage and love
of society asserted itself to the last, and he founded a new dining
club the year before he died. But it was too late. The year 1784
opened with a prolonged illness lasting for months, and though in the
summer he was well enough to get away to Oxford with Boswell once more,
all could see that the end could not be far off. It came on the 18th
of December 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20th.
Burke and Windham, with Colman the dramatist and Sir Joseph Bankes the
President of the Royal Society, were among the {109} pall-bearers, and
the mourners included Reynolds and Paoli. Seldom has the death of a
man of letters created such a sense of loss either in the public at
large or among his friends. Murphy, the editor of Fielding, and
biographer of Garrick, says in his well-known essay that Johnson's
death "kept the public mind in agitation beyond all previous example."
Those great men, then, who attended his funeral represented not merely
themselves and his other friends but the intelligence of the whole
nation, which saw in the death of Johnson the fall of one of the mighty
in the moral and intellectual Israel.