CHAPTER IV

JOHNSON'S CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTICS

Something has already been said in the first chapter of this book about

the character of Johnson. The argument of that chapter was that the

singular position of Johnson as, in a way, the most national of our men

of letters, was due not so much to anything he wrote, or even to

anything written about him, as to the quality of his own mind and

character, to a sort of central sanity that there was about him which

Englishmen like {110} to think of as a thing peculiarly English. We

may now pass on to look at this character in a little more detail.

Visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk

round the space under the dome to come upon a statue which (but for the

roll with a Greek inscription upon it) would appear to be that of a

retired gladiator meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more

astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it

represents Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but is not one of his best

works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture,

clothed only in a loose robe which leaves legs, arms, and one shoulder

bare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we

know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all

through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt

to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous, and probably

valetudinarian sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than

the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right.

And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant. The body

and the mind are inextricably interwoven in all of us, and certainly in

Johnson's case the influence of the body was obvious and {111}

conspicuous. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the

general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his

constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his

entire indifference to pain, were partly due to his great bodily

strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which

sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of

an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He

was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St. Vitus's

Dance. He never knew, Boswell says, "the natural joy of a free and

vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling

gait of one in fetters." All accounts agree that his strange

gesticulations and contortions were painful for his friends to witness

and attracted crowds of starers in the streets. But Reynolds says that

he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind

was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it

is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of

losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced

him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength.

He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a

valetudinarian, and was determined not to be one {112} himself. He had

known what it was to live on fourpence halfpenny a day and scorned the

life of sofa cushions and beef-tea into which well-attended old

gentlemen so easily slip. Once, when Mrs. Thrale asked him how he was,

his reply was "Ready to become a scoundrel, Madam" (his word for a

self-indulgent invalid); "with a little more spoiling you will make me

a complete rascal." But in that she never succeeded. Rather he

carried the war into her camp, and when they were driving together

would never allow her to complain of rain, dust, or any such

inconveniences. "How do other people bear them?" he would ask, and

would treat those who talked of such topics as evidently having nothing

intelligent to say. "A mill that goes without grist is as good a

companion as such creatures," he once broke out. He required no

valeting, or nursing; bathed at Brighton in October when he was nearing

sixty, refused to be carried to land by the boatmen at Iona, as Boswell

and Sir Allan Maclean were, but sprang into the sea and waded ashore;

would not change his clothes when he got wet at Inverary; was a hundred

years before his time in his love of open windows, and rode fifty miles

with fox-hounds, only to declare that hunting was a dull business and

that its popularity merely showed the paucity of human pleasures.

{113} Mrs. Thrale says that no praise ever pleased him more than when

some one said of him on Brighton Downs, "Why, Johnson rides as well as

the most illiterate fellow in England." He was always eager to show

that his legs and arms could do as much as other people's. When he was

past sixty-six he ran a race in the rain at Paris with his friend

Baretti. He insisted on rolling down a hill like a schoolboy when

staying with Langton in Lincolnshire: once at Lichfield when he was

over seventy he slipped away from his friends to find a railing he used

to jump when he was a boy, threw away his coat, hat, and wig, and, as

he reported with pride, leapt over it twice; and on another occasion at

Oxford was bold enough to challenge a Fellow, "eminent for learning and

worth," and "of an ancient and respectable family in Berkshire," to

climb over a wall with him. Apparently, however, the climbing did not

actually take place, for the dignified person very properly refused to

compromise his dignity.

It is evident that this runner of races and climber of walls was very

far from being the sedentary weakling, afraid to enjoy the pleasures of

the body or face its pains, in whom popular imagination fancies it sees

the man of letters. No man was ever more fearless of {114} pain than

Johnson. The only thing he was afraid of was death. Of the extent and

even violence of that fear in him till within a few days of the actual

event, the evidence, in spite of what Sir Walter Raleigh has said, is

conclusive and overwhelming. It comes from every one who knew him.

But that was a moral and intellectual fear. Of physical fear he knew

nothing. The knife of the surgeon had terrors then which our

generation has happily forgotten. But it had none for Johnson. When

he lay dying his only fear was that his doctors, one of whom he called

"timidorum timidissimus," would spare him pain which if inflicted might

have prolonged his life. He called to them to cut deeper when they

were operating, and finally took the knife into his own hands and did

for himself what he thought the surgeon had failed to do. "I will be

conquered, I will not capitulate," were his words: and he acted on them

till the very last days were come.

Nor was this courage merely desperation in the presence of the great

Terror. He was as brave in health as in illness. He was perfectly

quiet and unconcerned during a dangerous storm between Skye and Mull;

and on being told that it was doubtful whether they would make for Mull

or Col cheerfully replied, "Col for my money." Roads in {115} those

days were not what they are now: but he never would admit that

accidents could happen and pooh-poohed them when they did. Nor was his

courage merely passive. Beauclerk did not find it so when at his

country house he saw Johnson go up to two large dogs which were

fighting and beat them till they stopped: nor did Langton when he

warned Johnson against a dangerous pool where they were bathing, only

to see Johnson swim straight into it; nor did the four ruffians who

once attacked him in the street and were surprised to find him more

than a match for the four of them. Whoever trifled with him was apt to

learn sooner than he wished that _nemo me impune lacessit_ was a saying

which was to be taken very literally from Johnson's mouth. Garrick

used to tell a story of a man who took a chair which had been placed

for Johnson at the Lichfield theatre and refused to give it up when

asked, upon which Johnson simply tossed man and chair together into the

pit. He proposed to treat Foote, the comic actor, in much the same

way. Hearing of Foote's intention to caricature him on the stage he

suddenly at dinner asked Davies, a friend of Foote's, "what was the

common price of an oak stick," and being answered sixpence, "Why then,

sir (said he), give me leave to send your servant to purchase {116} a

shilling one. I'll have a double quantity; for I am told Foote means

to take me off, as he calls it, and I am determined the fellow shall

not do it with impunity." The threat was sufficient; as Johnson said,

"he knew I would have broken his bones." Years afterwards Foote,

perhaps in half-conscious revenge, amused himself by holding Johnson up

to ridicule in a private company at Edinburgh. Unluckily for him

Boswell was present and naturally felt Foote's behaviour an act of

rudeness to himself. So he intervened and pleaded that Johnson must be

allowed to have some sterling wit, adding that he had heard him say a

very good thing about Foote himself. "Ah," replied the unwary Foote,

"my old friend Sam; no man says better things: do let us have it." On

which Boswell related how he had once said to Johnson when they were

talking of Foote, "Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?" to which

Johnson had replied, "I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an

infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an

infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject."

Boswell's story was as effective as his master's stick. There was no

more question that night of taking off Johnson: Foote had enough to do

to defend himself against the cannonade of laughter that Boswell had

brought upon him. {117} A man of the mettle Johnson shows in those

stories was certain to have no more fears about defending the public

than about defending himself. So when he thought the so-called poems

of Ossian a fabrication he said so everywhere without hesitation; and

when their editor or author Macpherson, finding other methods fail,

tried to silence him by bluster and threats, he received the reply

which is only less famous than its author's letter to Lord Chesterfield.

"MR. JAMES MACPHERSON,

"I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me

I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law

shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what

I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.

"What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I

think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons

to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy.

Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable, and what I

hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say

but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.

"SAM. JOHNSON."

{118}

The first thing then to get clear about Johnson is that there was a

very vigorous animal at the base of the mind and soul that we know in

his books and in his talk. Part of the universal interest he has

inspired lies in that. The people who put off the body in this life

may be divine, though that is far from certain, but they are apt to

affect us little because we do not feel them to be human. There is

much in Johnson--a turn for eating seven or eight peaches in the garden

before breakfast, for instance--which gives unregenerate beings like

schoolboys a feeling of confidence at once. And older persons, not yet

altogether regenerate, are apt to have a weakness for a man who was

willing to be knocked up at three in the morning by some young

roysterers, and turn out with them for a "frisk" about the streets and

taverns and down the river in a boat. The "follies of the wise" are

never altogether follies. Johnson at midnight outside the Temple

roaring with Gargantuan laughter that echoed from Temple Bar to what we

now call Ludgate Circus is a picture his wisest admirers would be

slowest to forget. The laugh and the frisk and the peaches are so many

hall-marks to assure us that the philosopher is still a man and has not

forgotten that he was once a boy: that he has always had five senses

like the rest of us; and {119} that if he bids us take a grave view of

life it is not because he knows nothing about it.

Another note of catholicity in Johnson is his wide experience of social

conditions. The man in him never for an instant disappeared in the

"gentleman." Very few of our great men of letters have ever known

poverty in the real sense of the word, in the way the really poor know

it. Johnson had, and he never forgot it. It is true that like most

people who have known what it is to be uncertain about to-morrow's

dinner he did not much care to talk about these experiences. No one

does perhaps except politicians who find them useful bids for

popularity at a mass meeting. Johnson at any rate when he had arrived

at comparatively easy social conditions frankly admitted that he did

not like "low life." His sympathy with the poor, was, as we shall see,

one of the strongest things in him, and made one of the deepest marks

in his actual life; but he never thought it necessary to indulge in

polite or political fictions about the superior virtue or wisdom of the

working class. "Poverty," he once wrote in words that come at first

sight rather startlingly from the mouth of so strictly Biblical a

Christian as he, "is a great enemy to human happiness . . . it makes

some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult." {120} "Of

riches," he said on another occasion, "it is not necessary to write the

praise." No doubt the opposition between such remarks as these, meant

as Johnson meant them, and certain sayings in the Gospels, is like the

opposition between many contrasted pairs of sayings in the New

Testament itself, more verbal than real. But it is as strong a proof

as could be given of the power and universality in the eighteenth

century of the temper which Butler called "cool and reasonable," the

temper which hated and despised "enthusiasm," that such a man as

Johnson, a man, too, who owed his religious faith to Law's _Serious

Call_, could use such words without the slightest consciousness of

their needing explanation.

The fact is that Johnson never, even in his religion, left his open eye

or his common sense behind him: and common sense told him, what a

brighter light concealed from St. Francis but the history of his Order

was to show too plainly within half a century of his death, that

poverty is at least for ordinary men no assured school of the Christian

virtues. Johnson's attitude towards the poor, in fact, included the

whole of sympathy and understanding but not one tittle of sentiment.

They had the benefit of the greater part of his small income; he gave

constantly, both to those who {121} had claims on him and to those who

had none, really loving the poor, says Mrs. Thrale, "as I never yet saw

any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy," and

insisting on giving them, not merely relief, but indulgence and

pleasure. He wished them to have something more than board and

lodging, some "sweeteners of their existence," and he was not always

frightened if the sweeteners preferred were gin and tobacco. His very

home he made into a retreat, as Mrs. Thrale says with little

exaggeration, for "the lame, the blind, the sad and the sorrowful"; and

he gave these humble friends more than board and lodging, treating them

with at least as ceremonious a civility as he would have used to so

many people of fashion.

He held no theories of political or social equality; on the contrary,

he looked upon such theories as mischievous nonsense: but the respect

paid to him in his later years by great personages never made him take

a Mayfair or "county-family" view of life. He might stay at Inverary,

visit Alnwick and be invited to Chatsworth, but it took more than the

civilities of three Dukes to blind him to the fact that on a map of

humanity all the magnates in the world occupy but a small space. Even

in the days when he lived at {122} his ease in a rich man's house and,

when in his own, would dine out every day for a fortnight, he never

surrendered himself, as so many who have at last reached comfort do, to

the subtle unrealities of the drawing-room. He would not allow the

well-do-to to call themselves "the world": and when Sir Joshua said one

day that nobody wore laced coats any longer and that once everybody had

worn them, "See now," said Johnson, "how absurd that is; as if the bulk

of mankind consisted of fine gentlemen that came to him to sit for

their pictures. If every man who wears a laced coat (that he can pay

for) was extirpated, who would miss them?" So when Mrs. Thrale once

complained of the smell of cooking he told her she was a fortunate

woman never to have experienced the delight of smelling her dinner

beforehand. "Which pleasure," she answered, "is to be enjoyed in

perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge

Island of a morning!" Johnson's answer was the grave rebuke of a man

from whose mind the darker side of a prosperous world was never long

absent. "Come, come, let's have no sneering at what is serious to so

many: hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear lady, turn another way

that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge Island to wish

for {123} gratifications they are not able to obtain: you are certainly

not better than all of them: give God thanks that you are happier." It

is Mrs. Thrale who herself tells the story: and it is to her credit

that she calls Johnson's answer a just rebuke.

But Johnson's equality was that of the moralist, not that of the

politician. He was the exact opposite of a leveller, believing in the

distinction of ranks as not only a necessity of society, but an

addition to its strength and to the variety and interest of its life.

He himself scrupulously observed the formalities of social respect, and

would no doubt, like Mr. Gladstone, have repudiated with horror the

idea of being placed at dinner above the obscurest of peers. His bow

to an Archbishop is described as a studied elaboration of temporal and

spiritual homage, and he once went so far as to imply that nothing

would induce him to contradict a Bishop. There no doubt he promised

more than the presence of a stupid Bishop or a Whig Bishop would have

allowed him to perform. For no considerations of rank ever prevented

him from expressing his own opinions or trampling upon those of other

people. Except Swift, perhaps, he was the most independent man that

ever lived. Of Swift's jealous and angry arrogance he had nothing.

But he was full of what he {124} himself called "defensive pride."

That was his answer when he was accused of showing at least as much

pride as Lord Chesterfield in the affair of the Dictionary; "but mine,"

he said, "was defensive pride." He was always on his guard against the

very appearance of accepting the patronage of the great. Even

Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of snobbery in

him. At Inverary he would not let Boswell call before dinner lest it

should look like fishing for an invitation; and when he dined there the

next day and sat next the Duke, he did not refrain, even in that Whig

holy of holies, from chaffing about one of the Campbells who "had been

bred a violent Whig but afterwards kept better company and became a

Tory"! So once, when he dined at Bowood with Lord Shelburne he refused

to repeat a story at the request of his host, saying that he would not

be dragged in as story-teller to the company. And he would never give

the authority for any fact he mentioned, if the authority happened to

be a lord. Indeed he carried his sturdy independence so far that in

his last years he fancied that his company was no longer desired in

these august circles. "I never courted the great," he said; "they sent

for me, but I think they now give me up"; adding, in reply to Boswell's

polite disbelief, "No, sir; great lords and great {125} ladies don't

love to have their mouths stopped."

Here again Johnson represented the typical Englishman as foreigners

then and since have read his character. An accepter and respecter of

rank as a social fact and a political principle, he was as proud in his

way as the proudest man in the land. Tory as he was, for him every

freeborn Englishman was one of the "lords of human kind": a citizen of

no mean city, but of one in which--

". . . e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,

And learns to venerate himself as man!"

He had all an Englishman's pride in England, as was prettily seen in

his reply to Mrs. Thrale in the theatre at Versailles; "Now we are here

what shall we act, Dr. Johnson? The Englishman at Paris?" "No, no; we

will try to act Harry the Fifth"; and at bottom he thought that a free

Englishman was too great a man to be patronized by any one on earth.

But there was something better than pride at the root of his whole

attitude towards the rich and the poor; and that was his humanity.

Again and again, as one studies him, one comes back to that, his

humanity, his love of men as men. It was that which made him one of

{126} the earliest and fiercest enemies of the slave trade. So early

as 1740 he maintained the natural right of the negroes to liberty; and

he once startled "some very grave men at Oxford" by giving as his toast

"Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies."

This was his invariable attitude from first to last, and it was no mere

scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in

_Taxation No Tyranny_, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for

liberty among the drivers of negroes?" No Tory prejudices and no

sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of

common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American

rebels, describing Jamaica as "a den of tyrants and a dungeon of

slaves," and speaking indignantly of the thousands of black men "who

are now repining under English cruelty." He denounced, as not only

wicked but also absurd and foolish, the opinion common among the

"English barbarians that cultivate the southern islands of America,"

that savages are to be regarded as scarcely distinct from animals; and

he dreaded discoveries of new lands because he was always afraid they

would result in conquest and cruelty.

And this was not the public and vicarious {127} humanity with which we

are too familiar. What he preached to others he practised himself. He

loved all life and all the men and women whom he saw living it. It

takes one's breath away at first to find the grave moralist of _The

Rambler_ coolly saying to Mrs. Thrale and Fanny Burney, "Oh, I loved

Bet Flint!" just after he had frankly explained to them that that lady

was "habitually a slut and a drunkard and occasionally a thief and a

harlot." But the creature was what we call a "character," had had many

curious adventures, and had written her life in verse and brought it to

Johnson to correct, an offer which he had declined, giving her half a

crown instead which she "liked as well." He had, in fact, got below

the perhaps superficial slut and harlot to the aboriginal human being,

and that once arrived at he never forgot it. Nor did he need the

kindly humours of old acquaintance to enable him to discover it. No

moral priggishness dried up the tenderness with which he regarded the

most forlorn specimens of humanity. Boswell tells this story. "Coming

home late one night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much

exhausted that she could not walk: he took her upon his back and

carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of those

wretched females who had fallen into the lowest {128} state of vice,

poverty and disease. Instead of harshly upbraiding her he had her

taken care of with all tenderness for a long time at considerable

expense till she was restored to health, and endeavoured to put her

into a virtuous way of living." Like Mr. Gladstone, he exposed his own

character to suspicion by his kindness to such poor creatures as this.

His heart was always open to the miserable, so that Goldsmith said that

the fact of being miserable was enough to "ensure the protection of

Johnson." Sir John Hawkins says that, when some one asked him how he

could bear to have his house full of "necessitous and undeserving

people," his reply was, "If I did not assist them no one else would,

and they must be lost for want." He always declared that the true test

of a nation's civilization was the state of its poor, and specially

directed Boswell to report to him how the poor were maintained in

Holland. When his mother's old servant lay dying he went to say

good-bye to her and prayed with her, while she, as he says, "held up

her poor hands as she lay in bed with great fervour." Then, after the

prayer, "I kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain

that she had ever felt and that she hoped we should meet again in a

better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes and {129} great emotion

of tenderness, the same hope. We kissed and parted. I humbly hope to

meet again and to part no more."

Let all pictures of Johnson as a harsh and arrogant bully fade away

before this touching little scene. The truth is that at the root of

the man there was an unfailing spring of human love. One who knew him

very well said that peace and goodwill were the natural emanations of

his heart. All sorts of weakness found a friend in him. He was

markedly kind to children, especially little girls, to servants, to

animals. When he was himself in great poverty he would put pennies in

the hands of the children sleeping on doorsteps in the Strand, as he

walked home in the small hours of the morning. He left most of his

property to his negro servant Frank: and so united a delicate

consideration for Frank's feelings with an affection for his cat Hodge

that he always went out himself to buy oysters for Hodge lest Frank

should think himself insulted by being employed to wait upon a cat.

Nor did this human and social element in him show itself only in such

grave shape as hatred of slavery and tenderness to the poor. His sense

of kinship with other men was, indeed, a serious conviction held on

serious grounds. But it was also the expression of his natural good

nature, and overflowed into {130} the obvious channels of kindly

sociability which come to every man unsought, as well as into these

deeper ones of sympathy which are only found by those who seek them.

Those who know him only through Boswell are in danger of

over-accentuating the graver side of his character. In Boswell's eyes

he was primarily the sage and saint, and though he exhibits him playing

many other parts as well it is on these two that the stress is

especially laid. Other people, notably Fanny Burney, who in his last

years saw a great deal of him at the Thrales', enable us to restore the

balance. She loved and honoured him with an affection and reverence

only short of Boswell's: and her youth, cleverness and charm won

Johnson's heart as no one won it who came so late into his world. Like

Boswell she had a touch of literary genius, and luckily for us she used

it partly to write about Johnson. Hers is the most vivid picture we

have of him after Boswell's, and it is notable that she is for ever

laying stress on his gaiety. The seriousness is there, and she

thoroughly appreciated it; but the thing that strikes any one coming to

her from Boswell is the perpetual recurrence of such phrases as "Dr.

Johnson was gaily sociable," "Dr. Johnson was in high spirits, full of

mirth and sport," "Dr. Johnson was in exceeding humour." {131} On one

day in 1778 he appears in her journal as "so facetious that he

challenged Mr. Thrale to get drunk"; and the next year, when he was

seventy, she writes that he "has more fun and comical humour and love

of nonsense about him than almost anybody I ever saw." Even in 1783,

after he had had the stroke which was the beginning of the end, she

speaks of his "gaiety." The explanation is no doubt partly that Miss

Burney was a woman and saw him chiefly with women, Boswell a man who

saw him chiefly with men. Even without her genius she would not be the

first young woman whose admiring affection has seemed to an old man to

give him back his youth. And she had not only her own sudden and

surprising celebrity but all that happy ease of the Streatham life, and

the cleverness and good humour of Mrs. Thrale, to help her. No wonder

Johnson was at his brightest in such circumstances.

But his easy sociability there was no sudden revolution in his nature.

Sir John Hawkins, who, though never a very congenial companion, had

known him longer than almost any of his friends, says of him that he

was "a great contributor to the mirth of conversation." And constant

glimpses of his lighter side are caught all through Boswell, such as

that picture of him at Corrichatachin, in Skye, {132} sitting with a

young Highland lady on his knee and kissing her. We have already heard

his peals of midnight laughter ringing through the silent Strand. The

truth is that both by nature and by principle he was a very sociable

man. That is another of the elements in his permanent popularity. The

man who liked all sorts and conditions of men when he was alive has one

of the surest passports to the friendliness of posterity. Johnson,

like Walter Scott, could and did talk to everybody, or, rather, join in

any talk that anybody started; for he seldom spoke first even among his

friends. It was probably to this ease of intercourse that he owed the

stores of information with which he often surprised his hearers on all

sorts of unlikely subjects, such as on one occasion that of the various

purposes to which bones picked up in the streets by the London poor are

put, and the use of a particular paste in melting iron. But in these

casual conversations he was not consciously seeking information as

Scott partly was; he was just giving play to his natural sociability,

or perhaps deliberately acting on the principle of _humani nihil_,

which no one ever held more strongly than he.

He always condemned the cold reserve so common among Englishmen. Two

strangers of any other nation, he used to say, will find {133} some

topic of talk at once when they are thrown into an inn parlour

together: two Englishmen will go each to a different window and remain

in obstinate silence. "Sir, we as yet do not enough understand the

common rights of humanity." He boasted that he was never strange in a

strange place, and would talk at his best in a coach with perfect

strangers to their outspoken amazement and delight. At all times he

hated and dreaded being alone, both on moral and medical grounds,

having the fear of madness always before him. He said that he had only

once refused to dine out for the sake of his studies, and then he had

done nothing. He praised a tavern chair as the throne of human

felicity, better indeed, because freer, than anything to be found at a

private house; for only "a very impudent dog indeed can freely command

what is in another man's house." He loved to assert that all great

kings (among whom he curiously included Charles II, "the last King of

England who was a man of parts") had been social men; and he was the

most convinced of Londoners because it was in London that life, which

to him meant the exercise of the social and intellectual faculties, was

to be found at its eagerest and fullest. If, as Mrs. Thrale said, all

he asked for happiness was conversation it must be admitted that his

{134} standard was exacting both in quantity and quality. He never

wanted to go to bed, and if any one would stay with him, would sit

talking and drinking tea till four in the morning. Yet his

instantaneous severity in reproving inaccuracies or refuting fallacies

was so alarming that he sometimes reduced a whole company to the

silence of fear. The last thing he wished, no doubt, but it is one of

the tragedies of life that power will not be denied its exercise, even

to its own misery. But these were the rare dark moments; as a rule, as

we have seen, all who came into a room with him were entranced by the

force, variety and brilliance of his talk.

His natural turn was to be the very opposite of a killjoy; he loved not

merely to be kind to others but to be "merry" with them, Mrs. Thrale

tells us: loved to join in children's games, especially those of a

"knot of little misses," of whom he was fonder than of boys: and always

encouraged cards, dancing and similar amusements. He was by

temperament and conviction a conformer to the innocent ways of the

world: and once, when some Quaker was denouncing the vanities of dress,

he broke out, "Oh, let us not be found when our Master calls us,

ripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from

our souls and tongues! . . . Alas, sir, {135} a man who cannot get to

heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a

grey one." Though he practised some severities, such as fasting,

himself, he was altogether opposed to an austere view of life: was no

friend, he said, to making religion appear too hard, by which he

thought many good people had done harm. Though he walked with

enthusiastic reverence on any ground trodden by saints or hermits, yet

he was quite clear that retirement from the world was for ordinary men

and women both a mistake and a crime; and he regarded with special

distrust all "youthful passion for abstracted devotion." The

Carthusian silence was, of course, particularly obnoxious to the master

and lover of talk. "We read in the Gospel," he said, "of the apostles

being sent to preach, but not to hold their tongues." We all like to

find reasons of religion or philosophy in justification of our own

pleasures: and no doubt one hears the personal prejudices of the lover

of society as well as the serious thought of the student of life in the

warmth with which he denounces solitude as "dangerous to reason without

being favourable to virtue," and declares that "the solitary mortal is

certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad."

But real as the social element in Johnson {136} was, and important as

the remembrance of it is for a corrective of the too solemn portrait of

him for which Boswell gives some excuse, it never got the mastery of

him. In the ordinary way the life of the pre-eminently social man or

woman gradually disappears in a dancing sunshine of sociability. The

butterfly finds crossing and recrossing other butterflies in the airy,

flowery spaces of the world such a pleasant business that it asks no

more: above all, it does not care to ask the meaning of a thing so easy

and agreeable as day to day existence. The pleasures and the business

that lie on life's surface, the acquaintances and half friends that are

encountered there, are enough for it: and the crowded empty days glide

by as easily and as imperceptibly as a boatful of dreaming idlers

drifting on unawares till the pace suddenly quickens for a moment, and

almost before the speed wakens them they are struggling hopelessly in

the whirlpool at the bottom of the fall. But, for Johnson, society had

no sleeping potion strong enough to overcome his ever-wakeful sense of

the issues of life. Underneath all the "gaiety" that Miss Burney liked

to record, there was one of the gravest of men, a man whose religion

had a strong "Day of Judgment" element in it, who believed as literally

as Bunyan in heaven {137} and hell as the alternative issues of life,

except that he allowed himself some Catholic latitude of hope as to

that third possibility which provides the most human of the three

divisions of Dante's great poem. Most people, even the most strictly

orthodox, would now say that Johnson's religion contained too much

consciousness of the Divine Judgment and too little of the Divine Love.

But at least the fear of God, which was to him a thing so real and

awful, had nothing in it of the attitude, so common in all ages and all

religions of the world, which attempts to delude or defeat or buy off

the hostility of a capricious despot by means of money, or magical

arts, or a well devised system of celestial alliances. In Johnson it

came simply from the sense of sin and issued in the desire to live

better. He was as ethically minded as any one in that moralizing

century: only that he added to ethics the faith in God and conviction

of sin which have a power on life unknown to mere moral philosophy. He

lived among good men, mainly, but men, for the most part, whose

intellectual attitude towards the Christian faith was one of

detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not

be his attitude. He was the last man in the world to be content with

anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking {138} was to him a

pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He

was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He

might have been either Hume or Butler, either Wesley or Gibbon, but he

was certain not to be, what the average cultivated man in his day was,

a respectable but unenthusiastic and unconvinced conformer.

Conventional acquiescence is easy provided a man does not choose to

think or inquire; but, as Carlyle said, that would not do for Johnson:

he always zealously recommended and practised inquiry. The result was

what is well known. His mind settled definitely on the opposite side

to Hume and Gibbon: the Christian religion became intensely real to

him, sometimes, it almost seems, the nightmare of his life, often its

comfort and strength, present, at any rate, audibly and visibly, in

every company where he was; for no man was ever so little ashamed of

his religion as Johnson. It was the principle of his life in public as

well as in private. Hence that spectacle which Carlyle found so

memorable, of "Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire able to purify

and fortify his soul, and hold real Communion with the Highest, in the

Church of St. Clement Danes; a thing to be looked at with pity,

admiration, awe."

That church still remains; the least altered, {139} perhaps, with the

possible exception of the house in Gough Square, of all the buildings

which once had the body of Johnson inside them; a place of pilgrimage

for many Johnsonians who, refusing to be driven away by the commonplace

window which officially honours his memory, are grateful to find the

seat he used to occupy marked out for their veneration: and not

altogether ungrateful even for the amateur statue which stands in the

churchyard, looking towards his beloved Fleet Street. There were

performed the central acts of those half tragic Good Fridays, those

self-condemning Easter Days, recorded in his private note-books: there,

on the Good Friday of 1773, he took Boswell with him, and Boswell

observed, what he said he should never forget, "the tremulous

earnestness with which Johnson pronounced the awful petition in the

Litany: 'In the hour of death, and at the day of judgment, good Lord

deliver us.'"

We now know more in some ways about his religious life than his friends

did, because we have the private prayers he wrote for his own use, the

sermons he composed for others, and a few notes, chiefly of a religious

kind, describing his doings and feelings on certain days of his life.

But all the evidence, private and public, points the same way. His

prayers are among the best in English, pulsing {140} and throbbing with

earnest faith and fear, yet entirely free from the luscious

sentimentality of so many modern religious compositions. He was in the

habit of making special prayers for all important occasions: he made

them, for instance, sometimes before he entered upon new literary

undertakings, as in the case of _The Rambler_; and he took Boswell into

the Church at Harwich and prayed with him before he saw him off for

Utrecht. No one who was with him on such occasions failed to be

impressed by his profound and awe-inspiring sincerity. Mrs. Thrale

says that when he repeated the _Dies Irae_ "he never could pass the

stanza ending _Tantus labor non sit cassus_ without bursting into a

flood of tears"; and another witness records how one night at a dinner

where some one quoted the nineteenth psalm his worn and harsh features

were transformed, and "his face was almost as if it had been the face

of an angel" as he recited Addison's noble version of that psalm.

Phrases that came unbidden to his voice or pen show the same constant

sense of this life as a thing to be lived in the sight and presence of

Eternity. When at Boswell's request he sends him a letter of advice,

one of his sentences is "I am now writing, and you, when you read this,

are reading, under the Eye of Omnipresence." {141} So on one occasion

he said, "The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a

clearer view of infinite purity"; and he would quote Law's remark that

"every man knows something worse of himself than he is sure of in

others." Such sayings do not come to the lips of men to whom the life

of the spirit and the conscience is not a daily and hourly reality.

That it was to Johnson; and no one understands him who does not lay

stress on it. It does not always appear in such grave guise as in

these instances, but it is always there. We may take our leave of it

as we see it in simpler and happier shape in Boswell's account of

himself and Johnson sharing a bedroom at Glen Morrison. "After we had

offered up our private devotions and had chatted a little from our

beds, Dr. Johnson said 'God bless us both for Jesus Christ's sake!

Good-night.' I pronounced 'Amen.' He fell asleep immediately."

A serious conviction held by a human being is generally found to be an

inner citadel surrounded by a network of prejudices. It was only

Johnson's intimate friends who were admitted into the central fortress

of his faith: the rest of the world saw it plainly indeed, but did not

get nearer than the girdle of defensive prejudices outside, and to them

they {142} often got nearer than they liked. Whether people discovered

that Johnson was a Christian or not, they were quite certain to

discover that he was a Churchman. His High Church and Tory guns were

always ready for action, and Lord Auchinleck is perhaps the only

recorded assailant who succeeded in silencing them. The praise he gave

to the dearest of his friends, "He hated a fool, he hated a rogue, and

he hated a Whig: he was a very good hater," was exactly applicable to

himself. For us the word Whig has come to mean a dignified aristocrat

who, by the pressure of family tradition, maintains a painful

association with vulgar Radicals: for Johnson it meant a rebel against

the principle of authority. From that point of view he was accustomed

to say with perfect justice that the first Whig was the Devil. His

sallies at the general expense of the enemies of "Church and King" must

not be confused with those on many other subjects, as, for instance, on

the Scotch, which were partly humorous in intention as well as in

expression. He trounced the Scotch to annoy Boswell and amuse himself.

He trounced Whigs, Quakers and Presbyterians because he loved authority

both in Church and State. These latter outbursts represented definite

opinions which were held, as usually happens, with all the {143} more

passion because reason had not been allowed to play her full part in

their maturing. Johnson could hold no views to which he had not been

able to supply a rational foundation: but in these matters passion had

been given a free hand in the superstructure.

In this way his Tory outbursts have a smack of life about them not

always to be found in the utterances of sages. High Tories were not

often seen in the intellectual London world of these days: they were to

be found rather in country parsonages and college common-rooms. In

London Whiggery sat enthroned and complacent. It is, therefore, with a

pleasant sense of the fluttering of Whig dovecotes that we watch

Johnson, always, as Miss Burney said, the first man in any company in

which he appeared, startling superior persons by taking the high Tory

tone. He once astonished an old gentleman to whose niece he was

talking by saying to her, "My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite"; and

answered the uncle's protest by saying, "Why, sir, I meant no offence

to your niece, I meant her a great compliment. A Jacobite, sir,

believes in the divine right of kings. He that believes in the divine

right of kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the

divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of

Bishops believes in the {144} divine authority of the Christian

religion. Therefore, sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a

Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig: for _Whiggism is a negation of

all principle_." But it was not often that his Toryism expressed

itself in anything so like a chain of reasoning as this. As a rule, it

appears rather in those conversational sallies, so pleasantly

compounded of wrath, humour, and contempt, which are the most

remembered thing about him. It provides some of the most

characteristic; as the dry answer to Boswell who expressed his surprise

at having met a Staffordshire Whig, a being whom he had not supposed to

exist, "Sir, there are rascals in all countries"; or the answer Garrick

got when he asked him "Why did not you make me a Tory, when we lived so

much together?" "Why," said Johnson, pulling a heap of half-pence from

his pocket, "did not the King make these guineas?" Or the true story

he liked to tell of Boswell who, he said, "in the year 1745 was a fine

boy, wore a white cockade, and prayed for King James, till one of his

uncles gave him a shilling on condition that he should pray for King

George, which he accordingly did. So you see that _Whigs of all ages

are made the same way_." In the same vein is his pleasant good-bye to

Burke at Beaconsfield before the election of 1774. {145} "Farewell, my

dear sir, I wish you all the success which can possibly be wished

you--_by an honest man_." Even the fiercer outburst about Patriotism

(that is according to the meaning of the word in those days, the

pretence of preferring the interests of the people to those of the

Crown), "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," gains an added

piquancy from the fact that it was uttered at "The Club" under the

nominal though absentee chairmanship of Charles Fox, soon to be the

greatest of "patriots," and in the actual presence of Burke.

But as a rule the fiercest assaults were reserved for Presbyterians and

Dissenters in whom political and ecclesiastical iniquity were united.

When he was walking in the ruins of St. Andrews and some one asked

where John Knox was buried, he broke out "I hope in the highway. I

have been looking at his reformations." And he wished a dangerous

steeple not to be taken down, "for," said he, "it may fall on some of

the posterity of John Knox: and no great matter!" So when he and

Boswell went to the Episcopal church at Montrose he gave "a shilling

extraordinary" to the Clerk, saying, "He belongs to an honest church,"

and when Boswell rashly reminded him that Episcopalians were only

dissenters, that is, only _tolerated_, in Scotland, he brought down

upon {146} himself the crushing retort, "Sir, we are here as Christians

in Turkey." These ingeniously exact analogies were always a favourite

weapon with him; and perhaps the most brilliant of them all is one he

used on this same subject in reply to Robertson, who said to him in

London, "Dr. Johnson, allow me to say that in one respect I have the

advantage of you; when you were in Scotland you would not come to hear

any of our preachers, whereas, when I am here, I attend your public

worship without scruple, and, indeed, with great satisfaction." "Why,

sir," said Johnson, "that is not so extraordinary: the King of Siam

sent ambassadors to Louis the Fourteenth: but Louis the Fourteenth sent

none to the King of Siam." This topic also enjoys another distinction.

It is one of many proofs of the superlative excellence of Johnson's

talk that it cannot be imitated. Hundreds of clever men have made the

attempt, but, with the exception of a single sentence, not one of these

manufactured utterances could impose for an instant upon a real

Johnsonian. That single exception deals with this same

anti-Presbyterian prejudice. It is variously inscribed to Thorold

Rogers and to Birkbeck Hill, the most Johnsonian of all men. It

supposes that Boswell and Johnson are walking in Oxford, and Boswell,

endowed with {147} the gift of prophecy, asks Johnson what he would say

if he were told that a hundred years after his death the Oxford

University Press would allow his Dictionary to be re-edited by a Scotch

Presbyterian. "Sir," replies Johnson, "to be facetious it is not

necessary to be indecent." Here and here alone is something which

might deceive the very elect.

In several of these last utterances the bias is as much anti-Scotch as

anti-Presbyterian. Of course Johnson, as his _Journey to the Western

Islands_ amply proves, had no serious feeling against Scotchmen as

Scotchmen like the settled convictions which made him dislike

Presbyterians. But then, as always, the Scot had a specially "gude

conceit" of himself and a clannish habit of pushing the interest of his

brother Scots wherever he went, so that it was commonly thought that to

let a Scot into your house or business was not only to let in one

conceited fellow, but to be certain of half a dozen more to follow.

The English were then still so far from their present admiring

acceptance of Scotsmen as their ordinary rulers in Church and State

that they had not even begun to think of them as their equals.

Scotland was at that time a very poor country, and the poor relation

has {148} never been a popular character anywhere. Consequently

Englishmen--and who was ever more English than Johnson?--commonly saw

in the newly arrived Scot a pauper and an upstart come to live upon his

betters: and they revenged themselves in the manner natural to rich

relations. To Johnson's tongue, too, the Scots offered the important

additional temptations of being often Whigs, oftener still

Presbyterians, and always the countrymen of Boswell. This last was

probably the one which he found it most impossible to resist. Happily

Boswell had the almost unique good sense to enjoy a good thing even at

the expense of his country or himself. It is to him, or perhaps at

him, that the majority of these Scotch witticisms were uttered: it is

by him that nearly all of them are recorded, from the original sally

which was the first sentence he heard from Johnson's lips, in reply to

his "Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help

it." "That, sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen

cannot help"--to the famous reply at the Wilkes dinner, when some one

said "Poor old England is lost,"--"Sir, it is not so much to be

lamented that old England is lost as that the Scotch have found it."

On this topic Johnson would always let {149} himself go. Again and

again the generous connoisseurship of Boswell describes not only the

witticism but the joyous gusto with which it was uttered. On no

subject is the great talker's amazing ingeniousness of retort more

conspicuous. When Boswell most justly criticized the absurd

extravagance of his famous sentence about the death of Garrick

eclipsing the gaiety of nations, Johnson replied, "I could not have

said more nor less. It is the truth; _eclipsed_, not _extinguished_;

and his death _did_ eclipse; it was like a storm." _Boswell_. "But

why nations? Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?"

_Johnson_. "Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed. Besides

nations may be said--if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have

gaiety--which they have not." So when Johnson said the Scotch had none

of the luxuries or conveniences of life before the Union, and added,

"laughing," says Boswell, "with as much glee as if Monboddo had been

present," "We have taught you and we'll do the same in time to all

barbarous nations--to the Cherokees--and at last to the

Ourang-outangs," Boswell tried to meet him by saying "We had wine

before the Union." But this only got him into worse trouble. "No,

sir, you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not

make you drunk." {150} _Boswell_. "I assure you, sir, there was a

great deal of drunkenness." _Johnson_. "No, sir; there were people

who died of dropsies which they contracted in trying to get drunk."

This was said as they sailed along the shores of Skye; and of course

the whole tour in Scotland afforded many opportunities for such jests.

There was the wall at Edinburgh which by tradition was to fall upon

some very learned man, but had been taken down some time before

Johnson's visit: "They have been afraid it never would fall," said he.

There was St. Giles's at Edinburgh, which provoked the chaffing aside

to Robertson, "Come, let me see what was once a church." There were

the beauties of Glasgow of which Adam Smith boasted, and provoked the

famous question "Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?" There was

the supposed treelessness of Scotland, on which he dwells in the

_Journey_, and which once led him to question whether there was a tree

between Edinburgh and the English border older than himself; and to

reply to Boswell's suggestion that he ought to be whipped at every tree

over 100 years old in that space, "I believe I might submit to it for a

baubee!" It led also to the pleasantry in which he emphasized his

conviction that the oak stick he had brought from London was stolen and

not {151} merely lost when it disappeared in Mull; "Consider, sir, the

value of such a _piece of timber_ here."

To-day we think of Scotland as one of the most beautiful countries in

the world and go there in thousands for that reason. But that was not

why Johnson went. He had little pleasure in any landscape scenery, and

none in that of moors and mountains. Indeed nobody had in those days

except Gray. And Gray was the last man in whose company Johnson was

likely to be found differing from his contemporaries. So that though

he saw much of what is finest in the noble scenery of Scotland, it

hardly drew from him a single word of wonder or delight: and his only

remembered allusion to it is the well-known sally hurled ten years

earlier at the Scotsman in London who thought to get on safe ground for

the defence of his country by speaking of her "noble wild prospects,"

but only drew upon himself the answer, "I believe, sir, you have a

great many. Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is

remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell

you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road

that leads him to London!"

So dangerous it always was to put a phrase into Johnson's mouth! So

dangerous above {152} all to try to make him prefer anything to his

beloved London. Perhaps no nation in the world has cared so little

about its capital city as the English. When one thinks of the

passionate affection lavished on Athens, Rome, Paris, even, strange as

it seems to us, on Madrid, one is tempted to accuse the English of dull

disloyalty to their own noble capital city. London played, at any rate

till the French Revolution, a far more important part in English life

than any other capital in the life of any other country. In the reign

of Charles II, according to Macaulay, it was seventeen times as large

as Bristol, then the second city in the Kingdom; a relative position

unique in Europe. And all through our history it had led the nation in

politics as well as in commerce. Yet of the best of all tributes to

greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little.

There is Milton's noble burst of eloquence in the _Areopagitica_, but

that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and

politics of London at a particular moment. Spenser's beautiful

allusion in the _Prothalamion_ to "mery London my most kyndly nurse"

and to the "sweet Thames" whom he invites to "run softely till I end my

song" is among the few tributes of personal affection paid by our poets

to the great city. And it is still true {153} to-day that the tutelary

genius of London is none of the great poets: it is Samuel Johnson. At

this moment, as these pages are being written, the railway stations of

London are filled with picture advertisements of the attractions of the

great city. And who is the central figure in the picture that deals

with central London! Not Shakespeare or Milton, but Johnson. The

worn, rather sad face, more familiar to Englishmen than that of any

other man of letters, with the wig and brown coat to make recognition

certain, is chosen as the most useful for their purpose by advertisers

probably innocent of any literature, but astute enough in knowing what

will attract the people.

Johnson's love of London, however, was of his own sort, quite unlike

that of Charles Lamb for instance, or that of such a man as Sir Walter

Besant. He cared nothing for architecture, and little for history.

Still less had his feeling anything to do with the commercial greatness

of London. He had a scholar's contempt for traders as people without

ideas fit for rational conversation. The man who scoffed at the

"boobies of Birmingham" as unworthy of notice in comparison with the

gownsmen of Oxford or even the cathedral citizens of Lichfield, whose

experience of commercial men made him declare that "trade could not be

{154} managed by those who manage it if it had much difficulty," was

not likely to have his imagination fired by talk about London as the

centre of the world's commerce. What he cared about was a very

different thing. He thought of London as the place in all the world

where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store

his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but

grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the

self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because

there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his

superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument:

but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes,

and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual

pleasures which to him were the only real pleasures, and which made

London for him a heaven upon earth. "He who is tired of London is

tired of life," he said on one occasion; and on another, when some one

remarked that many people were content to live in the country, he

replied, "Sir, it is in the intellectual as in the physical world; we

are told by natural philosophers that a body is at rest in the place

that is fit for it: they who are content to live in the country are fit

for the country." He was not one of them: {155} he wanted Charing

Cross and its "full tide of human existence," and thought that any one

who had once experienced "the full flow of London talk" must, if he

retired to the country, "either be contented to turn baby again and

play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a

little pond, and die for want of his usual food." He was more than

once offered good country livings if he would take orders, but he knew

that he would find the "insipidity and uniformity" of country life

intolerable: and he stayed on to become the greatest of Londoners.

There is probably to this day no book, not a professed piece of

topography, which mentions the names of so many London streets, squares

and churches, as Boswell's _Life of Johnson_. Many sights that Johnson

saw we can still see exactly as he saw them; many, of course, have

disappeared; and many are so utterly changed as to be unrecognizable.

The young poet may still stand where he and Goldsmith stood in Poets'

Corner and say in his heart with Johnson--

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."

But when he goes on as they did to Temple Bar, he will find that

ancient monument retired into the country and certainly {156} nothing

whatever to remind him of the Jacobite heads still mouldering on it,

which gave occasion to Goldsmith's witty turning of his Tory friend's

quotation--

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur ISTIS."

But on that holy ground the Johnsonian will hardly miss even Temple

Bar. For most of Johnson's haunts and homes, the Mitre and the Cock,

the Churches of St. Clement and of the Temple, his houses in Johnson's

Court and Gough Square, are or were all hard by: and the memory will be

far too busy to allow room for the disappointments and lamentations of

the eye.

But of course the great characteristic of Johnson is neither love of

London nor hatred of Presbyterians, nor any of the other things we have

been talking about; it is the love and power of talk. We cannot

estimate talk nearly as accurately as we estimate writing: so much that

belongs to the word spoken is totally lost when it becomes a word

recorded: the light in the eye, the brow raised in scorn or anger, the

moving lips whose amusement or contempt is a picture before it is a

sound, the infinitely varying weight and tone of the human voice: all

that is gone or seen only {157} very darkly through the glass of

description. But since the talk itself as written down and the manner

of it as described are all we have to judge by: and since as long as we

are alive and awake we cannot avoid judging the things and people that

interest us, we inevitably form opinions about talkers as well as about

writers: and the best opinion of those who know English is undoubtedly

that Johnson is the greatest of all recorded talkers. The best of all

is very possibly some obscure genius who _caret vate sacro_: but

Johnson with the invaluable help of Boswell has beaten him and all the

others. What is the essence of his superiority? Not wisdom or

profundity certainly. There, of course, he would be immeasurably

surpassed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is

probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of

talkers. Of course his talk comes to us chiefly through the medium of

a man of transcendent genius; and Plato may have transcended his master

as well as other things. But on the whole all the evidence goes to

show that the talk of Socrates was the force which set ideas in motion,

which modified the whole subsequent moral and intellectual life of

Greece and Rome, and through them of the world; in fact, that the

spoken word of Socrates has played a greater {158} part in the world

than any written word whatsoever, except the Gospels and the Koran,

both themselves, it may be noted, the record of a spoken word greater

than the written book. Beside anything of this kind Johnson sinks of

course into entire insignificance. But as an artist in talk, that is a

man who talked well for the pleasure of it, as an end in itself, and

whose talk was heard gladly as a thing of triumph and delight, bringing

with it its own justification, he probably far surpassed Socrates. If

he, too, had got to his trial he probably would have been as scornful

as Socrates of the judgment of popular opinion. But he never would

have got there, not only because he was too conservative to deny the

established divinities, but because he was so entertaining that

everybody liked listening to him, whatever he denied or affirmed.

Socrates, on the other hand, was evidently something of a bore, with a

bore's unrelieved earnestness and inopportune persistence. His saying

about "letting the talk lead us where it will," is an exact description

of Johnson's practice, but nothing could be less like his own. He is

always relentlessly guiding it towards a particular goal, from the path

to which he will not have it for a moment diverted. Johnson, on the

other hand, takes no thought whatever for the argumentative {159}

morrow, never starts a subject, never sets out to prove anything. He

talks as an artist paints, just for the joy of doing what he is

conscious of doing well. The talk, like the picture, is its own

sufficient reward.

The same sort of inferiority puts other famous talkers, Coleridge for

instance, and Luther, below Johnson. They had too much purpose in

their talk to be artists about it. The endless eloquence of the

Highgate days, to say nothing about the greater days before Highgate,

was a powerful element in that revival of a spiritual or metaphysical,

as opposed to a merely sensational, philosophy which has been going on

ever since. No such results can be attributed to Johnson's talk. But

talk is one thing and preaching another: and the final criticism on

Coleridge as a talker was given once for all in Charles Lamb's

well-known answer to his friend's question: "Did you ever hear me

preach, Charles?" "Never heard you do anything else." Luther again,

though much more of a human being than Coleridge and apparently a

livelier talker, was, after all, the leader of one of the greatest

movements the world has ever seen, and like his disciple, Johnson's

friend John Wesley, no doubt had no time to fold his legs, and have his

talk out. Besides leaders of movements are necessarily somewhat narrow

men. For {160} them there is only one thing of importance in the

world, and their talk inevitably lacks variety. That, on the other

hand, is one of the three great qualities in which Johnson's talk is

supreme. Without often aiming at being instructive it is not only

nearly always interesting but with an amazing variety of interest. The

theologian, the moral philosopher, the casuist, the scholar, the

politician, the economist, the lawyer, the clergyman, the schoolmaster,

the author, above all the amateur of life, all find in it abundance of

food for their own particular tastes. Each of them--notably for

instance, the political economist--may sometimes find Johnson mistaken;

not one will ever find him dull. On every subject he has something to

say which makes the reader's mind move faster than before, if it be but

in disagreement. Reynolds, who had heard plenty of good talkers,

thought no one could ever have exceeded Johnson in the capacity of

talking well on any subject that came uppermost. His mere knowledge

and information were prodigious. If a stranger heard him talk about

leather he would imagine him to have been bred a tanner, or if about

the school philosophy, he would suppose he had spent his life in the

study of Scotus and Aquinas. No doubt the variety was a long way from

universality. Johnson was too {161} human for the dulness of

omniscience. He had his dislikes as well as predilections. The least

affected of men, he particularly disliked the then common fashion of

dragging Greek and Roman history into conversation. He said that he

"never desired to hear of the Punic War while he lived," and when Fox

talked of Catiline he "thought of Tom Thumb." So when Boswell used an

illustration from Roman manners he put him down with, "Why we know very

little about the Romans."

Wide as the country he could cover was, he is always coming back to his

favourite topic, which can only be described as life; how it is lived

and how it ought to be; life as a spectacle and life as a moral and

social problem. That by itself makes a sufficiently varied field for

talk. But real as his variety was, it is still not the most remarkable

thing about his talk. Where he surpassed all men was in the readiness

with which he could put what he possessed to use. Speaking of the

extraordinary quickness with which he "flew upon" any argument, Boswell

once said to Sir Joshua, "he has no formal preparation, no flourishing

with the sword; he is through your body in an instant." Sometimes he

condescended to achieve this by mere rudeness, as once when, being hard

pressed in an argument about the passions, he said, "Sir, {162} there

is one passion I advise you to be careful of. When you have drunk that

glass don't drink another." But the notion, which one hears

occasionally expressed, that his principal argumentative weapon was

rudeness is an entire mistake. Every impartial reader of Boswell will

admit that the rudeness of his retorts where it exists is entirely

swallowed up and forgotten in their aptness, ingenuity and wit. He was

rude sometimes, no doubt; as, for instance, to the unfortunate young

man who went to him for advice as to whether he should marry, and got

for an answer, "Sir, I would advise no man to marry who is not likely

to propagate understanding." But, human nature being what it is,

sympathy for the victim is in such cases commonly extinguished in

delighted admiration of the punishment. That will be still more

whole-hearted when the victim is obviously a bore, like the gentleman

who annoyed Johnson by persisting in spite of discouragement in an

argument about the future life of brutes, till at last he gave the

fatal opportunity by asking, "with a serious metaphysical pensive

face," "But, really, sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't

know what to think of him;" to which Johnson, "rolling with joy at the

thought which beamed in his eye," replied, "True, sir, and when we see

a very foolish {163} fellow, we don't know what to think of _him_."

Conversation would be a weariness of the flesh if one might never

answer a fool according to his folly: and such answers are not to be

called rude when the rudeness, if such there be, is only one ingredient

in a compound of which the principal parts are humour and felicity.

And, of course, even this measure of rudeness is only present

occasionally, while the amazing exactness of felicity seldom fails.

Who does not envy the readiness of mind which instantly provided him

with the exact analogy which he used to crush Boswell's plea for the

Methodist undergraduates expelled from Oxford in 1768? "But was it not

hard, sir, to expel them, for I am told they were good beings?" "I

believe they might be good beings: but they were not fit to be in the

University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we

turn her out of a garden." Note that, as usual with Johnson,--and that

is the astonishing thing--the illustration, however far-fetched, is not

merely humorous but exactly to the point. Plenty of men can compose

such retorts at leisure: the unique Johnsonian gift was that he had

them at his instant command. Or take one other illustration; a

compliment this time, and one of the swiftest as well as happiest on

record. Mrs. Siddons came to see him the {164} year before he died,

and when she entered his room there was no chair for her. Another man

would have been embarrassed by such a circumstance combined with such a

visitor. Not so Johnson, who turned the difficulty into a triumph by

simply saying with a smile, "Madam, you who so often occasion a want of

seats to other people, will the more readily excuse the want of one

yourself."

The third great quality of Johnson's talk is its style. His command of

language was such as that he seems never to have been at a loss; never

to have fumbled, or hesitated, or fallen back upon the second best

word; he saw instantly the point he wanted to make, and was instantly

ready with the best words in which to make it. It was said of him that

all his talk could be written down and printed without a correction.

That would, indeed, be double-edged praise to give to most men: but

with Johnson it is absolutely true without being in the least damaging.

For his talk is always talk, not writing or preaching; and it is always

his own. That dictum of Horace which he and Wilkes discussed at the

famous dinner at Dilly's, _Difficile est proprie communia dicere_,

gives the exact praise of Johnson as a talker. There are few things

more difficult than to put the truths of common sense in {165} such a

way as to make them your own. To do so is one of the privileges of the

masters of style. Few people have had more of it than Johnson. His

prose, spoken or written, is altogether wanting in some of the greatest

elements of style: it has no music, no mystery, no gift of suggestion,

very little of the higher sort of imagination, nothing at all of what

we have been taught to call the Celtic side of the English mind. But

in this particular power of making the old new, and the commonplace

individual, Johnson is among the great masters. And he shows it in his

talk even more than in his writings. All that he says has that supreme

mark of style; it cannot be translated without loss. The only

indisputable proof of an author possessing style is his being

unquotable except in his own words. If a paraphrase will do he may

have learning, wisdom, profundity, what you will, but style he has not.

Style is the expression of an individual, appearing once and only once

in the world; it is Keats or Carlyle or Swinburne: it never has been

and never will be anybody else.

Its presence in Johnson is painfully brought home to any one who tries

to quote his good things without the assistance of a very accurate

verbal memory. Even when he says such a thing as "This is wretched

stuff, sir," the words manage to have style because {166} they express

his convictions in a way which is his, and no one else's. This is

taking it at its lowest, of course; when we go a little further and

take a sentence like the famous remark about Ossian, "Sir, a man might

write such stuff for ever if he would abandon his mind to it," the

sting in the word "abandon" is the sort of thing which other people

devise at their desks, but which Johnson has ready on his lips for

immediate use. So again, he seems to have been able not only to find

the most telling word in a moment, but to put his thought in the most

telling shape. Many people then and since disliked and disapproved of

Bolingbroke. But has there ever, then or at any other time, been a man

who could find such language for his disapproval as Johnson? "Sir, he

was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss

against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution

to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman

to draw the trigger after his death." It is at once as devastating as

a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a smaller way, is his

criticism of a smaller man. Dr. Adams, talking of Newton, Bishop of

Bristol, whom Johnson disliked, once said, "I believe his

_Dissertations on the Prophecies_ is his great {167} work," Johnson's

instant answer was, "Why, sir, it is Tom's great work; but how far it

is great, or how much of it is Tom's, are other questions." How

mercilessly perfect! A thousand years of preparation could not have

put it more shortly or more effectively. It both does the business in

hand and gives expression to himself; nor is there in it a superfluous

syllable; all of which is, again, another way of saying that it has

style. And he did not need the stimulus of personal feeling to give

him this energy of speech. The same gift is seen when he "_communia

dicit_," when he is uttering some general reflection, the common wisdom

of mankind. Molière said, "Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve."

Johnson might have used the same words with a slightly different

meaning. He excelled all men in recoining the gold of common sense in

his own mind. All the world has said "humanum est errare": but the

saying is newborn when Johnson clinches an argument with, "No, sir; a

fallible being will fail somewhere." So on a hundred other

commonplaces of discussion one may find him, all through Boswell's

pages, adding that unanalysable something of himself in word or thought

which makes the ancient dry bones stir again to life. "It is better to

live rich than to die rich"; "no man is a hypocrite in his {168}

pleasures"; "it is the business of a wise man to be happy"; "he that

runs against time has an antagonist not subject to casualties"; "the

great excellence of a writer is to put into his book as much as his

book will hold"; "there are few ways in which a man can be more

innocently employed than in getting money"; "no woman is the worse for

sense and knowledge"; but "supposing a wife to be of a studious or

argumentative turn it would be very troublesome; for instance--if a

woman should continually dwell upon the subject of the Arian heresy";

"a man should keep his friendship always in repair"; "to cultivate

kindness is a valuable part of the business of life"; "every man is to

take existence on the terms on which it is given to him"; "the man who

talks to unburden his mind is the man to delight you"; "No, sir, let

fanciful men do as they will, depend upon it it is difficult to disturb

the system of life."

The man who thinks, as Taine thought, that sayings of this sort are

mere commonplaces, will never understand Johnson: he may give up the

attempt at once. The true commonplace is like the money of a

spendthrift heir: his guineas come and go without his ever thinking for

a moment where they came from or whither they go. But Johnson's

commonplaces had been consciously earned and were {169} deliberately

spent; he had made them himself, and when he handed them on to others

he handed himself on with them. Taine may perhaps be excused; for it

may require some knowledge of English to be sure of detecting the

personal flavour Johnson gave to his generalizations: but the

Englishman who misses it shows that he has mistaken the ornaments of

literature for its essence and exposes himself to the same criticism as

a man who cannot recognize a genius unless he is eccentric. Johnson

could break out in conversation as well as in his books into a noble

eloquence all his own; such a phrase as "poisoning the sources of

eternal truth," rises spontaneously to his lips when his indignation is

aroused. His free language disdained to be confined within any park

palings of pedantry. Some of his most characteristic utterances owe

their flavour to combining the language of the schools with the

language of the tavern: as when he said of that strange inmate of his

house, Miss Carmichael, "Poll is a stupid slut. I had some hopes of

her at first: but when I talked to her tightly and closely I could make

nothing of her; she was wiggle waggle, and I could never persuade her

to be categorical." He was the very antipodes of a retailer of other

men's thoughts in other men's words: {170} every chapter of Boswell

brings its evidence of Johnsonian eloquence, of Johnsonian quaintness,

raciness, and abundance, of the surprising flights of his fancy, of the

inexhaustible ingenuity of his arguments and illustrations. No talk

the world has ever heard is less like the talk of a commonplace man.

Yet the supreme quality of it is not the ingenuity or the oddness or

the wit: it is the thing Taine missed, the sovereign sanity of the

Johnsonian common sense. Bagehot once said that it was the business of

the English Prime Minister to have more common sense than any man.

Johnson is the Prime Minister of literature; or perhaps, rather, of

life. Not indeed for a time of revolution. For that we should have to

go to some one less unwilling to "disturb the system of life." But for

ordinary times, and in the vast majority of matters all times are

ordinary, Johnson is the man. The Prime Minister is not the whole of

the body politic, of course: and there are purposes for which we need

people with more turn than Johnson for starting and pressing new ideas:

but these will come best from below the gangway; and they will be none

the worse in the end for having had to undergo the formidable criticism

of a Prime Minister whose first article of faith is that the King's

government must be carried on. The {171} slow-moving centrality of

Johnson's mind, not to be diverted by any far-looking whimsies from the

daily problem of how life was to be lived, is not the least important

of the qualities that have given him his unique position in the respect

and affection of the English race.