of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with contempt.
In truth, there was in his character much to love, but very little to
respect. His heart was soft even to weakness: he was so generous that he
quite forgot to be just: he forgave injuries so readily that he might be
said to invite them; and was so liberal to beggars that he had nothing
left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain, sensual, frivolous,
profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him,
envy. But there is not the least reason to believe that this bad
passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful
exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation
of any of his rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not more
envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbours. His heart was on
his lips. All those small jealousies, which are but too common among men
of letters, but which a man of letters who is also a man of the world
does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a
child. When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead
of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and in the
dark, he told everybody that he was envious. "Do not, pray, do not talk
of Johnson in such terms," he said to Boswell; "you harrow up my very
soul." George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cunning to say
such a thing. They would have echoed the praises of the man whom they
envied, and then have sent to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him.
Both what was good and what was bad in Goldsmith's character was to his
associates a perfect security that he would never commit such villany.
He was neither ill natured enough, nor long headed enough, to be guilty
of any malicious act which required contrivance and disguise.
Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius, cruelly
treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with difficulties which at
last broke his heart. But no representation can be more remote from the
truth. He did, indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done
anything considerable in literature. But, after his name had appeared on
the title-page of the "Traveller," he had none but himself to blame for
his distresses. His average income, during the last seven years of
his life, certainly exceeded 400 pounds a year; and 400 pounds a year
ranked, among the incomes of that day, at least as high as 800 pounds a
year would rank at present. A single man living in the Temple with 400
pounds a year might then be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young
gentlemen of good families who were studying the law there had so much.
But all the wealth which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir
Lawrence Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not have sufficed
for Goldsmith. He spent twice as much as he had. He wore fine clothes,
gave dinners of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He had
also, it should be remembered, to the honour of his heart, though not of
his head, a guinea, or five or ten, according to the state of his purse,
ready for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in dress
or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous charities, that his
chief expense lay. He had been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the
most sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers. For a time he put off
the day of inevitable ruin by temporary expedients. He obtained advances
from booksellers, by promising to execute works which he never began.
But at length this source of supply failed. He owed more than 2000
pounds; and he saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. His
spirits and health gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which
he thought himself competent to treat. It would have been happy for him
if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by
others. Notwithstanding the degree which he pretended to have received
at Padua, he could procure no patients. "I do not practise," he once
said; "I make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends." "Pray, dear
Doctor," said Beauclerk, "alter your rule; and prescribe only for your
enemies." Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent advice, prescribed
for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady. The sick man was induced
to call in real physicians; and they at one time imagined that they had
cured the disease. Still his weakness and restlessness continued. He
could get no sleep. He could take no food. "You are worse," said one
of his medical attendants, "than you should be from the degree of fever
which you have. Is your mind at ease?" "No, it is not," were the last
recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the third of April 1774,
in his forty-sixth year. He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple;
but the spot was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten.
The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. Both these great men were
sincere mourners. Burke, when he heard of Goldsmith's death, had burst
into a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved by the news that
he had flung aside his brush and palette for the day.
A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem appeared, which
will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his two
illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned that he
sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought
upon him. He was, not long before his last illness, provoked into
retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen; and at that weapon he
proved himself a match for all his assailants together. Within a
small compass he drew with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the
characters of nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though this little
work did not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a
masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or five
likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting to that
noble gallery; and that their places were supplied by sketches of
Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and
Garrick.
Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honoured him with a cenotaph
in Westminster Abbey. Nollekens was the sculptor; and Johnson wrote the
inscription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to
posterity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of his friend. A
life of Goldsmith would have been an inestimable addition to the Lives
of the Poets. No man appreciated Goldsmith's writings more justly than
Johnson; no man was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and
habits; and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit
the peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in company
with great weaknesses. But the lists of poets to whose works Johnson was
requested by the booksellers to furnish prefaces ended with Lyttleton,
who died in 1773. The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the
purpose of excluding the person whose portrait would have most fitly
closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has been fortunate in his
biographers. Within a few years his life has been written by Mr Prior,
by Mr Washington Irving, and by Mr Forster. The diligence of Mr Prior
deserves great praise; the style of Mr Washington Irving is always
pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be assigned to the
eminently interesting work of Mr Forster.
*****
SAMUEL JOHNSON. (December 1856.)
Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English writers of the
eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was, at the
beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller
of great note in the midland counties. Michael's abilities and
attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well acquainted
with the contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the
country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him an
oracle on points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed,
there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous
churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for municipal office
by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a
Jacobite in heart. At his house, a house which is still pointed out to
every traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 18th of
September 1709. In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral
peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly
discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and
many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to
sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy
and irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous
taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents
were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this
malady. In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the
court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked and
presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest
recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a
long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which
were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady.
His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye;
and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of
his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired
knowledge with such ease and rapidity that at every school to which
he was sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he
resided at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much at
this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He
ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read
what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad
would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way: but
much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read
little Greek: for his proficiency in that language was not such that he
could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence.
But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon acquired, in the
large and miscellaneous library of which he now had the command, an
extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That Augustan delicacy of
taste which is the boast of the great public schools of England he never
possessed. But he was early familiar with some classical writers who
were quite unknown to the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton.
He was peculiarly attracted by the works of the great restorers of
learning. Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio
volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity; and
he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and
versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had paid at
least as much attention to modern copies from the antique as to the
original models.
While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking
into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better qualified
to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His
business declined; his debts increased; it was with difficulty that the
daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power
to support his son at either university; but a wealthy neighbour offered
assistance; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of very
little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the
young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they were
amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by
the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up
during many months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first
day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and
one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a
freshman of equal attainments.
At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He was poor, even
to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which
were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the
quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering looks which the members
of that aristocratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some
charitable person placed a new pair at his door; but he spurned them
away in a fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and
ungovernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty,
could have treated the academical authorities with more gross
disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate
of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of
lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit
and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny against
the discipline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was
pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and
acquirements. He had early made himself known by turning Pope's Messiah
into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly
Virgilian; but the translation found many admirers, and was read with
pleasure by Pope himself.
The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of
things, have become a Bachelor of Arts: but he was at the end of his
resources. Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been
kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen
were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731,
he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a
degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a
pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the
support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to
no more than twenty pounds.
His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle
with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but
was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind.
Before the young man left the university, his hereditary malady had
broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable
hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or
at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange
than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving
felons, and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his
mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did
not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop
down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by
suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive
an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great
circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on
touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any
chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the
omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly
torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would
stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At
another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off,
calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy
took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human
nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven
many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no
temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was afraid of
death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of
the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his
long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his
own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a
direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle
through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and
discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and,
though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to
cheer him.
With such infirmities of body and mind, this celebrated man was left, at
two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world. He remained during
about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace
and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others.
He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family,
who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of
the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts,
learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself honour by patronising
the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and
squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to
laughter or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no
way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in
Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a
country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his
haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few
guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation,
little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about
Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription
the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin
verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.
While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The
object of his passion was Mrs Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children
as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a
short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy
colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were
not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however,
whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish
ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same
room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he called her, was
the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his
admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted; for she was as poor as
himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honour,
the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The marriage,
however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved happier than might
have been expected. The lover continued to be under the illusions of the
wedding-day till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument
he placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of her
manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention
her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic,
"Pretty creature!"
His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously
than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the neighbourhood of his
native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away;
and only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was
so strange, and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must have
resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom
he called his Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of
young gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many
years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions of
laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair.
At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, determined to
seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adventurer. He set out
with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manuscript,
and two or three letters of introduction from his friend Walmesley.
Never, since literature became a calling in England, had it been a less
gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in
London. In the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit was sure
to be munificently rewarded by the government. The least that he could
expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude
for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the
treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the
other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of
whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the
booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary
part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity.
Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and
had not begun to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of
letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered
as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles
and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an
author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular,
such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library, such an
author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama
since The Beggar's Opera, was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his
best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground,
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a
Newfoundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations
and privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a
name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for employment
measured with a scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and
exclaimed, "You had better get a porter's knot, and carry trunks." Nor
was the advice bad; for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed,
and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.
Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able to form any
literary connection from which he could expect more than bread for the
day which was passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with
which Hervey, who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during
this time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years
later, "was a vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a dog
Hervey I shall love him." At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed
feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he
dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny worth of meat, and a
pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near Drury Lane.
The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured at this
time was discernible to the last in his temper and his deportment. His
manners had never been courtly. They now became almost savage. Being
frequently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts,
he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down
to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness.
Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the
sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey.
His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and alamode
beefshops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to
have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made
with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins
swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts which
his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would
have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to
ferocity. Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive,
was pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into
societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He was
repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with
him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from
talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and
brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had been
knocked down by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian
Library.