Languish must have been grievously disappointed when they found that
the new volume from the circulating library was little more than a
dissertation on the author's favourite theme, the Vanity of Human
Wishes; that the Prince of Abyssinia was without a mistress, and the
princess without a lover; and that the story set the hero and the
heroine down exactly where it had taken them up. The style was the
subject of much eager controversy. The Monthly Review and the Critical
Review took different sides. Many readers pronounced the writer a
pompous pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where it was
possible to use a word of six, and who could not make a waiting woman
relate her adventures without balancing every noun with another noun,
and every epithet with another epithet. Another party, not less zealous,
cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty meaning was
expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splendour. And both the
censure and the praise were merited.
About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics; and yet the
faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism. Johnson has
frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and
place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions
of another. Yet Shakspeare has not sinned in this way more grievously
than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently
meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth century: for the Europe which
Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the inmates
of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravitation which
Newton discovered, and which was not fully received even at Cambridge
till the eighteenth century. What a real company of Abyssinians would
have been may be learned from Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, not content
with turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged
with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and
enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly
accomplished as Mrs Lennox or Mrs Sheridan, transferred the whole
domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of
polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being seen, he
introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land
where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the
indissoluble compact. "A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought
together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home,
and dream of each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the common process
of marriage." Such it may have been, and may still be, in London, but
assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties
had little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and
represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of
Delphi.
By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported himself till
the year 1762. In that year a great change in his circumstances took
place. He had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His
Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in
his works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and elaborate
Dictionary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted
bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which
was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as
a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in
language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting him.
He had with difficulty been prevented from holding up the Lord Privy
Seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word "renegade." A
pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his
country; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a
master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would
himself be pensioned. But that was a time of wonders. George the
Third had ascended the throne; and had, in the course of a few months,
disgusted many of the old friends and conciliated many of the old
enemies of his house. The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was
becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somersets and
Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was
now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's
Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and
Johnson was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of
letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a year was graciously
offered, and with very little hesitation accepted.
This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life. For the
first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging him
to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and
drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till
two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning,
without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer.
One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to perform. He had
received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shakspeare;
he had lived on those subscriptions during some years: and he could not
without disgrace omit to perform his part of the contract. His friends
repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort; and he repeatedly resolved
to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions,
month followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He
prayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as often as he
received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and trifle
away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer
and sacrament. His private notes at this time are made up of
self-reproaches. "My indolence," he wrote on Easter Eve in 1764,
"has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion has
overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year."
Easter 1765 came, and found him still in the same state. "My time," he
wrote, "has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a dream that has left
nothing behind. My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days
pass over me." Happily for his honour, the charm which held him captive
was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak
enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which haunted
a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone himself with some of his
friends, at one in the morning, to St John's Church, Clerkenwell, in
the hope of receiving a communication from the perturbed spirit. But the
spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent;
and it soon appeared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing
herself by making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill, who,
confidant in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party
spirit, was looking for some man of established fame and Tory politics
to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in three cantos, nicknamed
Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was which had been so long
promised and so liberally paid for, and directly accused the great
moralist of cheating. This terrible word proved effectual; and in
October 1765 appeared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of
Shakspeare.
This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but added
nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. The preface, though
it contains some good passages, is not in his best manner. The most
valuable notes are those in which he had an opportunity of showing
how attentively he had during many years observed human life and human
nature. The best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius.
Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister's admirable
examination of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would be difficult
to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic.
The reader may turn over play after play without finding one happy
conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of
a passage which had baffled preceding commentators. Johnson had, in his
prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted for the task
which he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been under
the necessity of taking a wider view of the English language than any of
his predecessors. That his knowledge of our literature was extensive is
indisputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very
part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an
editor of Shakspeare should be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a
negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the two
folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single passage
quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and
Ben. Even from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a
few months, have made himself well acquainted with every old play that
was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this was
a necessary preparation for the work which he had undertaken. He would
doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity in a
man who was not familiar with the works of Aeschylus and Euripides to
publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition
of Shakspeare, without having ever in his life, as far as can be
discovered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster,
Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurrilous.
Those who most loved and honoured him had little to say in praise of
the manner in which he had discharged the duty of a commentator. He
had, however, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain on his
conscience; and he sank back into the repose from which the sting of
satire had roused him. He long continued to live upon the fame which
he had already won. He was honoured by the University of Oxford with a
Doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the
King with an interview, in which his Majesty most graciously expressed
a hope that so excellent a writer would not cease to write. In the
interval, however, between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or
three political tracks, the longest of which he could have produced in
forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the life of Savage
and on Rasselas.
But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. The influence
exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with whom he lived,
and indirectly on the whole literary world, was altogether without a
parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He
had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humour, immense knowledge of
literature and of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. As
respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which
dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely
balanced period of the Rambler. But in his talk there was no pompous
triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in "osity" and
"ation". All was simplicity, ease, and vigour. He uttered his short,
weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a justness
and energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather increased than
diminished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic
gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally
ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his
desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. To
discuss questions of taste, of learning, casuistry, in language so exact
and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration
of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he
said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the
overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject, on a
fellow-passenger in a stage coach, or on the person who sate at the same
table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so
brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose
abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to
send him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed
themselves into a club, which gradually became a formidable power in the
commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new
books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell
off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service
of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange
when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in
the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and
light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence and
political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian,
and Jones, the greatest linguist, of the age. Garrick brought to the
meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his
consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among the most constant attendants
were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together
by friendship, but of widely different characters and habits; Bennet
Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the
orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham
Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world,
his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such a
society was not easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson predominated.
Burke might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which others were
under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not generally a
very patient listener, was content to take the second part when Johnson
was present; and the club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is
to this day popularly designated as Johnson's Club.
Among the members of this celebrated body was one to whom it has owed
the greater part of its celebrity, yet who was regarded with little
respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat
among them. This was James Boswell, a young Scotch lawyer, heir to an
honourable name and a fair estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore,
weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were
acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he had no wit,
no humour, no eloquence, is apparent from his writings. And yet his
writings are read beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern Cross,
and are likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as
a living or as a dead language. Nature had made him a slave and an
idolater. His mind resembles those creepers which the botanists call
parasites, and which can subsist only by clinging round the stems and
imbibing the juices of stronger plants. He must have fastened himself on
somebody. He might have fastened himself on Wilkes, and have become the
fiercest patriot in the Bill of Rights Society. He might have fastened
himself on Whitfield, and have become the loudest field preacher among
the Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself on
Johnson. The pair might seem ill matched. For Johnson had early been
prejudiced against Boswell's country. To a man of Johnson's strong
understanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adulation of
Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson
hated to be questioned; and Boswell was eternally catechising him on
all kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as
"What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?"
Johnson was a water drinker; and Boswell was a wine-bibber, and indeed
little better than a habitual sot. It was impossible that there should
be perfect harmony between two such companions. Indeed, the great man
was sometimes provoked into fits of passion in which he said things
which the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every
quarrel, however, was soon made up. During twenty years the disciple
continued to worship the master: the master continued to scold the
disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends ordinarily
resided at a great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the
Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to
London. During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson,
to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects
about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and to fill
quarto note books with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way
were gathered the materials out of which was afterwards constructed the
most interesting biographical work in the world.
Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection less
important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his happiness,
than his connection with Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent
brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding,
rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those
clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women, who are
perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do or
say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales became
acquainted with Johnson; and the acquaintance ripened fast into
friendship. They were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of
his conversation. They were flattered by finding that a man so widely
celebrated, preferred their house to any other in London. Even the
peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilised society, his
gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange
way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which
he devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, his
frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the interest which
his new associates took in him. For these things were the cruel marks
left behind by a life which had been one long conflict with disease and
with adversity. In a vulgar hack writer such oddities would have excited
only disgust. But in a man of genius, learning, and virtue their effect
was to add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apartment
at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the
villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large part of every year he
passed in those abodes, abodes which must have seemed magnificent and
luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which he had generally
been lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the
astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called "the endearing elegance of
female friendship." Mrs Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him,
and, if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends
by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he
was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses.
No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly
ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting
to his sick-room. He requited her kindness by an affection pure as the
affection of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry, which,
though awkward, must have been more flattering than the attentions of a
crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and
Maccaroni. It should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during
about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He
accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton,
once to Wales, and once to Paris. But he had at the same time a house in
one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street. In the
garrets was his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books,
falling to pieces and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes,
but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie, or
a leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling
uninhabited during his long absences. It was the home of the most
extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought together.
At the head of the establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named
Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and her
poverty. But, in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum
to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs Desmoulins, whose family
he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room was found for the
daughter of Mrs Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was
generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host
called Polly. An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed
coal-heavers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of
bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper,
completed this strange menagerie. All these poor creatures were at
constant war with each other, and with Johnson's negro servant Frank.
Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their hostilities from the servant
to the master, complained that a better table was not kept for them, and
railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape
to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who was generally
the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt to
resent anything which looked like a slight on the part of a purse-proud
bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from
mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse,
insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne
and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs Desmoulins,
Polly, and Levett, continued to torment him and to live upon him.