We feel considerable trepidation in beginning a life of Johnson, not
so much on account of the magnitude of the man--for in Milton, and one
or two others, we have already met his match--but on account of the
fact that the field has been so thoroughly exhausted by former
writers. It is in the shadow of Boswell, the best of all biographers,
and not in that of Johnson, that we feel ourselves at present
cowering. Yet we must try to give a rapid account of the leading
incidents in Johnson's life, as well as a short estimate of his vast,
rugged genius.
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, on the 18th of
September 1709, and was baptized the same day. His father was Michael
Johnson, a bookseller and stationer, and his mother, Sarah Ford.
Samuel was the first-born of the family. Nathaniel, who died in his
twenty-fifth year, was the second and the last. Johnson very early
began to manifest both his peculiar prejudices and his peculiar
powers. When a mere child, we see him in Lichfield Cathedral, perched
on his father's shoulders, gazing at Sacheverel, the famous Tory
preacher. We hear him, about the same time, roaring to his mother, who
had given him, a minute before, a collect in the Common Prayer-Book to
get by heart as his day's task,--"Mother, I can say it already!" His
first teacher, Dame Oliver, a widow, thought him, as she well might,
the best scholar she ever had. From her he passed into the hands of
one Tom Brown, an original, who once published a spelling-book, and
dedicated it "to the Universe!"--without permission, we presume. He
began to learn Latin first with a Mr Hawkins, and then with a Mr
Hunter, head-master of Lichfield,--a petty tyrant, although a good
scholar, under whom, to use Gay's language, Johnson was
"Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod."
At the age of fifteen, he was transferred to Stourbridge school, and
to the care of a Mr Wentworth, who "taught him a great deal." There
he remained twelve months, at the close of which he returned home, and
for two years lived in his father's house, in comparative idleness,
loitering in the fields, and reading much, but desultorily. In 1728,
being flattered with some promises of aid from a Shropshire gentleman,
named Corbet, which were never fulfilled, he went to Oxford, and was
entered as a commoner in Pembroke College. His father accompanied and
introduced him to Dr Adams, and to Jorden, who became his tutor,
recommending his son as a good scholar and a poet. Under Jorden's
care, however, he did little except translate Pope's "Messiah" into
Latin verse,--a task which he performed with great rapidity, and so
well, that Pope warmly commended it when he saw it printed in a
miscellany of poems. About this time, the hypochondriac affection,
which rendered Johnson's long life a long disease, began to manifest
itself. In the vacation of 1729, he was seized with the darkest
despondency, which he tried to alleviate by violent exercise and other
means, but in vain. It seems to have left him during a fit of
indignation at Dr Swinfen (a physician at Lichfield, who, struck by
the elegant Latinity of an account of his malady, which the sufferer
had put into his hands, showed it in all directions), but continued to
recur at frequent intervals till the close of his life. His malady was
undoubtedly of a maniacal cast, resembling Cowper's, but subdued by
superior strength of will--a Bucephalus, which it required all the
power of a Johnson to back and bridle. In his early days, he had been
piously inclined, but after his ninth year, fell into a state of
indifference to religion. This continued till he met, at Oxford, Law's
"Serious Call," which, he says, "overmatched" and compelled him to
consider the subject with earnestness. And whatever, in after years,
were the errors of his life, he never, from that hour, ceased to have
a solemn sense of the verities of the Christian religion.
At Oxford, he paid little attention to his regular tasks, but read, or
rather devoured, all the books he could lay his hands on, and began to
display his unrivalled conversational powers, being often seen
"lounging about the college gates, with a circle of young students
around him, whom he was entertaining with wit, keeping from their
studies, and sometimes rousing to rebellion against the college
discipline." He was, at this time, so miserably poor, that his shoes
were worn to tatters, and his feet appeared through them, to the
scandal of the Christ-Church men, when he occasionally visited their
college. Some compassionate individual laid a new pair at his door,
which he tossed away with indignation. At last,--his debts increasing,
his supplies diminishing, and his father becoming bankrupt,--he was,
in autumn 1731, compelled to leave college without a degree. In the
December of the same year his father died.
Perhaps there was not now in broad Britain a person apparently more
helpless and hopeless than this tall, half-blind, half-mad, and wholly
miserable lad, with ragged shoes, and no degree, left suddenly
fatherless in Lichfield. But he had a number of warm friends in his
native place, such as Captain Garrick, father of the actor, and
Gilbert Walmsley, Registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, who would not
suffer him to starve outright. He had learning and genius; and he had,
moreover, under all his indolence and all his melancholy, an
indomitable resolution, which needed only to be roused to make all
obstacles melt before it. He knew that he was great and strong, and
would yet struggle into recognition. At first, however, nothing
offered save the post of usher in a school at Market-Bosworth, which
he occupied long enough to learn to loathe the occupation with all his
heart and soul, and mind and strength, but which he soon resigned, and
was again idle. He was invited next to spend some time with Mr
Hector, an early friend, who was residing in Birmingham. Here he
became acquainted with one Porter, a mercer, whose widow he afterwards
married. Here, too, he executed his first literary work,--a
translation of Lobo's "Voyage to Abyssinia," which was published in
1735, and for which he received the munificent sum of five guineas! He
had previously, without success, issued proposals for an edition of
the Latin poems of Politian; and, with a similar result, offered the
service of his pen to Edward Cave, the editor and publisher of the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, to which he afterwards became a leading
contributor.
Shortly after this, Porter dying, Johnson married the widow--a lady
more distinguished for sense, and particularly for _the_ sense to
appreciate his talents, than for personal charms, and who was twice
her husband's age. It does not seem to have been a very happy match,
although, probably, both parties loved each other better than they
imagined. He was now assisted by his wife's portion, which amounted to
£800, and opened a private academy at Echal, near Lichfield, but
obtained only three pupils,--a Mr Offely, who died early, the
celebrated David Garrick, and his brother George. At the end of a year
and a half, disgusted alike with the duties of the office, and with
his want of success in their discharge, Johnson left for London, with
David Garrick for his companion, and reached it with one letter of
introduction from Gilbert Walmsley, three acts of the tragedy of
"Irene," and (according to his fellow-traveller) threepence-halfpenny
in his pocket!
To London he had probably looked as to the great mart of genius, but
at first he met with mortifying disappointment. He made one
influential friend, however, in an officer named Henry Hervey, of whom
he said, "He was a vicious man, but very kind to me; were you to call
a dog Hervey, I shall love him." In summer he came back to Lichfield,
where he stayed three months, and finished his tragedy. He returned to
London in autumn, along with his wife, and tried, but in vain, to get
"Irene" presented on the stage. This did not happen till 1749, when
his old pupil David Garrick had become manager of Drury Lane Theatre.
In March 1738, he began to contribute to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, a
magazine he had long admired, and the original printing-place of
which--St John's Gate--he "beheld with reverence" when he first passed
it. Amidst the variety of his contributions, the most remarkable were
his "Debates in the Senate of Lilliput"--vigorous paraphrases of the
parliamentary discussions--of which Johnson finding the mere skeleton
given him by the reporters, was at the pains of clothing it with the
flesh and blood of his own powerful diction. In May of the same year
appeared his noble imitation of Juvenal, "London," which at once made
him famous. After it had been rejected by several publishers, it was
bought by Dodsley for ten guineas. It came out the same morning with
Pope's satire, entitled "1738," and excited a much greater sensation.
The buzzing question ran, "What great unknown genius can this be?" The
poem went to a second edition in a week; and Pope himself, who had
read it with pleasure, when told that its author was an obscure man
named Johnson, replied, "He will soon be _déterré_."
Famous as he had now become, he continued poor; and tired to death of
slaving for the booksellers, he applied, through the influence of Pope
and Lord Gower, to procure a degree from Dublin, that it might aid him
in his application for a school at Appleby, in Leicestershire. In
this, however, he failed, and had to persevere for many years more in
the ill-paid drudgery of authorship--meditating a translation of
"Father Paul's History," which was never executed--writing in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ lives of Böerhaave and Father Paul, &c., &c.,
&c.--and published separately "Marmor Norfolciense," a disguised
invective against Sir Robert Walpole, the obnoxious premier of the
day. About this time he became intimate with the notorious Richard
Savage, and with him spent too many of his private hours. Both were
poor, both proud, both patriotic, both at that time lovers of
pleasure, and they became for a season inseparable; often
perambulating the streets all night, engaged now, we fear, in low
revels, and now in high talk, and sometimes determined to stand by
their country when they could stand by nothing else. Yet, if Savage
for a season corrupted Johnson, he also communicated to him much
information, and at last left himself in legacy, as one of the best
subjects to one of the greatest masters of moral anatomy. In 1744,
Johnson rolled off from his powerful pen, with as much ease as a thick
oak a thunder-shower, the sounding sentences which compose the "Life
of Savage," and which shall for ever perpetuate the memory and the
tale of that "unlucky rascal." It is a wasp preserved in the richest
amber. The whole reads like one sentence, and is generally read at one
sitting. Sir Joshua Reynolds, meeting it in a country inn, began to
read it while standing with his arm leaning on a chimney-piece, and
was not able to lay it aside till he had finished it, when he found
his arm totally benumbed. In 1745, Johnson issued proposals for a new
edition of Shakspeare, but laid them aside for a time, owing to the
great expectations entertained of the edition then promised by
Warburton.
For several years, except a few trifles in the _Gentleman's Magazine_,
and his famous "Prologue delivered at the Opening of Drury Lane
Theatre," he seems to have written nothing. But in 1745 appeared the
prospectus of his most laborious undertaking, the "English
Dictionary." This continued his principal occupation for some years,
and, as Boswell truly observes, "served to relieve his constitutional
melancholy by the steady, yet not oppressive, employment it secured
him." In its unity, too, and gigantic size, the task seemed fitted for
the powers of so strong a man; and although he says he dismissed it at
last with "frigid tranquillity," he had no doubt felt its influence
during the time to be at once that of a protecting guardian and of an
inspiring genius. In 1749, he published his "Vanity of Human Wishes,"
for which he received the sum of fifteen guineas,--a miserable
recompense for a poem which Byron pronounces "sublime," and which is
as true as it is magnificent in thought, and terse in language. In the
same year, Garrick had "Irene" acted, but it was "damned" the first
night, although it dragged on heavily for eight nights more. When the
author was asked how he felt at its ill-success, he replied, "Like the
Monument!" How different from Addison, walking restlessly, and
perspiring with anxiety behind the scenes, while the fate of "Cato"
was hanging in the balance!
In 1750 he began his "Rambler," and carried it on with only tolerable
success till 1752. The world has long ago made up its mind on the
merits and defects of this periodical, its masculine thought and
energetic diction, alternating with disguised common-place and (as he
would have said himself) "turgescent tameness"--its critical and
fictitious papers, often so rich in fancy, and felicitous in
expression, mixed with others which exhibit "bulk without spirit
vast," and are chiefly remarkable for their bold, bad innovations on
that English tongue of which the author was piling up the standard
Dictionary. Many have dwelt severely on Johnson's inequalities,
without attending to their cause; that was unquestionably the "body of
death" which hung so heavily upon his system, and rendered writing at
times a positive torment. Let his fastidious critics remember that he
never spent a single day, of which he could say that he was entirely
well, and free from pain, and that his spirits were often so
depressed, that he was more than once seen on his knees, praying God
to preserve his understanding.
A great calamity now visited his household. This was the death of his
wife. She expired on the 17th of March 1752. She had been married to
him sixteen years; and notwithstanding the difference of age, and
other causes of disagreement, he seems to have loved her with
sincerity, and to have lamented her death with deep and long-continued
sorrow. He relaxed not, however, an instant in his literary labours,
continued the preparation of his Dictionary, and contributed a few
lively and vigorous papers to the "Adventurer"--a paper, edited by Dr
Hawkesworth, a writer of some talent, who did his best to tower up to
the measure and stature of the "Rambler."
During this time Johnson was filling his house with a colony of poor
dependants,--such as Mrs Anna Williams, a soured female poetaster; and
Levet, a tenth-rate medical peripatetic, who, as well as Hodge, the
great lexicographer's cat, and Francis Barber, his black servant, now
share in his immortality,--besides becoming acquainted with such men
of eminence as Reynolds, the inimitable painter; Bennet Langton, the
amiable and excellent country-gentleman; and Beauclerk, the smart and
witty "man about town." In 1755 (exactly a hundred years ago), Johnson
chastised Lord Chesterfield for his mean, finessing conduct to him
about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius,"
for its noble and condensed scorn,--a scorn which "burns frore," cold
performing the effect of fire--and which reached that callous Lord,
under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited
Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A.
which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in
fine, issued his Dictionary, the work of eight years, and which,
undoubtedly, is the truest monument of his talent, industry, and
general capacity, if not of the richness of his invention, or of the
strength of his genius. He had obtained for it only the sum of £1575,
which was all spent in the progress of the work; and he was compelled
again to become a contributor to the periodical press, writing
copiously and characteristically to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, the
_Universal Visitor_, and the _Literary Magazine_. In 1756, he was
arrested for a debt of £5, 18s., but was relieved by Richardson, the
novelist. In the same year he resumed his intention of an edition of
Shakspeare, of which he issued proposals, and which he promised to
finish in little more than a year, although nine years were to elapse
ere it saw the light. In 1758, he began the "Idler," which reached the
103d No., and was considered lighter and more agreeable than the
"Rambler." He has seldom written anything so powerful as his fable of
"The Vultures." In 1759, his mother died, at the age of ninety,--an
event which deeply affected him. Soon after this, and to defray the
expenses of her funeral, he wrote his brilliant tale of "Rasselas," in
the evenings of a single week,--a rare feat of readiness and rapid
power, reminding one of Byron writing the "Corsair" in a fortnight,
and of Sir Walter Scott finishing "Guy Mannering" in three weeks.
There are perhaps more invention and more fancy in "Rasselas" than in
any of his works, although a gloom, partly the shadow of his mother's
death, and partly springing from his own temperament, rests too
heavily on its pages. He received one hundred guineas for the
copyright. In 1762, the Earl of Bute, both as a reward for past
services, and as a prepayment of future, bestowed on him a pension of
£300 for life. This raised a clamour against him, which he treated
with silent contempt.
In 1763 occurred what was really a most important event in Johnson's
life,--his acquaintance with Boswell,--who attached himself to him
with a devotion reminding one more of the canine species than of man,
sacrificed to him much of his time, his feelings, his very
individuality, and became qualified to write a biography, in which
fulness, interest, minute detail, and dramatic skill have never been
equalled or approached. In 1764, Johnson founded the celebrated
"Literary Club,"--perhaps the most remarkable cluster of distinguished
men that ever existed; and in 1765 he was created LL.D. by Trinity
College, Dublin. In 1765, too, he published his "Shakspeare;" and he
became intimate with the Thrales,--the husband being a great brewer in
Southwark; the wife, a lady of literary tastes, better known as Madame
Piozzi, the author of "Anecdotes of Dr Johnson;" both distinguished
for their attachment to him. He was often domesticated in their house
for months together. In 1767 he had an interview with George III., in
the library of the Queen's house; which, because Johnson preserved his
self-possession, and talked with his usual precision and power, has
been recounted by Boswell as if it had been a conversation with an
apostle or an angel. In 1770 he did some work for his pension in a
pamphlet entitled the "False Alarm," defending the conduct of the
Ministry in the case of the Middlesex election. In 1771 he wrote
another political pamphlet, entitled "Thoughts on the late
Transactions respecting Falklands' Islands;" and five years later
appeared "Taxation no Tyranny,"--an elaborate defence of the American
war. Johnson was too dogmatic, and too fiercely passionate for a good
political writer; and these productions added nothing to his fame, and
increased the number of his enemies.
In 1773 he fulfilled his long-cherished purpose of visiting Scotland
and the Hebrides, the story of which trip he told afterwards in his
usual rotund and massive style, and which was recounted with far more
liveliness and verisimilitude by Boswell. In 1774 he lost Goldsmith,
who had long been his friend, whom he had counselled, rebuked,
assisted, loved, and laughed at, and at whose death he was deeply
grieved. In 1775, the publication of his "Tour to the Hebrides"
brought him in collision with the _perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_, and
especially with James Macpherson, to whom Johnson sent a letter which
crushed him like a catapult. Macpherson, as well as Rob Roy, was only
strong on his native heath, and off it was no match for old Sam, whose
prejudices, passions, and gigantic powers, combined to make him
altogether irresistible in a literary duel. The same year, the
University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws;
and in the close of it, he paid a visit, along with the Thrales,
to Paris.
In 1776 nothing remarkable occurred in his history, unless it were the
interview which Boswell so admirably manoeuvred to bring about between
him and Jack Wilkes. Everybody remembers how well the bear and the
monkey for the time agreed, and how both turned round to snub the
spaniel, who had been the medium of their introduction to each other.
In 1777 he was requested by the London booksellers to prefix prefaces
to the "English Poets," part of which was issued the next year, and
the rest in 1780 and 1781, as the "Lives of English Poets." This work
has generally been regarded as Johnson's masterpiece. It nowhere,
indeed, displays so much of the creative, the inventive, the poetical,
as his "Rasselas," and many of his smaller tales and fictions. Its
judgments, too, have been often and justly controverted. The book is,
undoubtedly, a storehouse of his prejudices, as well as of his wisdom.
Its treatment of Milton, the man, for instance, is insufferably
insolent, although ample justice is done to Milton, the poet of the
"Paradise Lost." Some poetasters he has overpraised, and some true but
minor poets he has thrust down too far in the scale. But the work, as
a whole, is full of inextinguishable life, and has passages verging on
the eloquence and power of genius. A piece of stern, sober, yet broad
and animated composition, rather careless in dates, and rather cursory
in many of its criticisms, it displays unequalled force of thought,
and pointed vigour of style, and when taken in connexion with the age
of the author (seventy), is altogether marvellous. Truly there were
"giants in those days," and this was a Briareus.
For the details of his later life, his conversations, growing
weakness, little journeys, unconquerable love of literature, &c., we
must refer our readers to Boswell's teeming narrative. In 1783, he had
a stroke of palsy, which deprived him for a time of speech. That
returned to him, however, but a complication of complaints, including
asthma, sciatica, and dropsy, began gradually to undermine his
powerful frame. He continued to the last to cherish the prospect of a
tour to Italy, but never accomplished his purpose. Death had all along
been his great object of dread, and its fast approaches were regarded
with unmitigated terror. "Cut deeper," he cried to the physicians who
were operating on his limbs; "cut deeper; I don't care for pain, but I
fear death." He fixed all his dying hope upon the Cross, and
recommended Clarke's Sermons as fullest on the doctrine of a
Propitiation. He spoke of the Bible and of the Sabbath with the
warmest feelings of belief and respect. At last, on the 13th day of
December 1784, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, this great, good
man, whose fears had subsided, and who had become as a little child,
fell asleep in Jesus. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, on Monday,
December 20th, and his funeral was attended by the most distinguished
men of the day.
Perhaps no literary man ever exerted, during his lifetime, the same
personal influence as Samuel Johnson. Shelley used to call Byron the
"Byronic Energy," from a sense of his exceeding power. The author of
"Rasselas" was the "Johnsonian Energy;" and the demon within him, if
not so ethereal and terrible as Byron's, was far more massive, equally
strong, and in conversation, at least, much more ready to do his work.
First-rate conversation generally springs from a desire to shine, or
from the effort of a full mind to relieve itself, or from exuberant
animal spirits, or from deep-seated misery. In Johnson it sprang from
a combination of all these causes. He went to conversation as to an
arena--his mind was richly-stored, even to overflowing--in company his
spirits uniformly rose--and yet there was always at his heart a burden
of wretchedness, seeking solace, not in silence, but in speech. Hence,
with the exception of Burke, no one ever matched him in talk; and
Burke, we imagine, although profounder in thought, more varied in
learning, and more brilliant in imagination, seldom fairly pitted
himself against Johnson. He was a younger man, and held the sage in
too much reverence to encounter him often with any deliberate and
determined purpose of contest. He frequently touched the shield of the
general challenger, not with the sharp, but with the butt-end of his
lance. He said, on one occasion, when asked why he had not talked more
in Johnson's company, "Oh! it is enough for me to have rung the
bell to him!"
In all Johnson's works you see the traces of the triumphant
conversationalist--of one who has met with few to contradict, and
scarcely one to rival him. Hence the dogmatic strength and certainty,
and hence, too, the one-sidedness and limitation of much of his
writings. He does not "allow for the wind." He seems to anticipate no
reply, and to defy all criticism. One is tempted to quote the words of
Solomon, "He that is first in his own cause seemeth just, but his
neighbour cometh and searcheth him." No such searching seems ever to
have entered into Johnson's apprehensions. His sentences roll forth
like the laws of the Medes and Persians; his praise alights with the
authoritativeness of a sun-burst on a mountain; summit; and when he
blames, he seems to add, like an ancient doomster, the words, "I
pronounce for doom." With Burke, it was very different. Accustomed to
parliamentary debate in its vicissitudes and interchange--gifted, too,
with a prophetic insight into coming objections, which "cast their
shadows before," and with an almost diseased subtlety of thinking, he
binds up his answers to opponents with every thesis he propounds; and
his paragraphs sometimes remind you of the plan of generals in great
emergencies, putting foot soldiers on the same saddles with
cavalry--they seem to _ride double_.
This is not the place, nor have we room, to dilate on Johnson's
obvious merits and faults--his straight-forward sincerity--his strong
manly sense--the masterly force with which he grasps all his
subjects--the measured fervour of his style--the precision and
vivacity of his shorter sentences--the grand swell and sonorousness of
his longer; on his frequent monotony--his _sesguipedalia verba_--the
"timorous meaning" which sometimes lurks under his "boldest words;" or
on the deep _chiaroscuro_ which discolours all his pictures of man,
nature, society, and human life. We have now only to speak of his
poetry. That is, unfortunately, small in amount, although its quality
is so excellent as to excite keen regret that he had not, as he once
intended, written many more pieces in the style of "London," and the
"Vanity of Human Wishes." In these, the model of his mere manner is
Pope, although coloured by Juvenal, his Latin original; but the matter
and spirit are intensely his own. In "London," satire seems swelling
out of itself into something stronger and statelier--it is the
apotheosis of that kind of poetry. You see in it a mind purer and
sterner than Dryden's, or Pope's, or Churchill's, or even Juvenal's;
"doing well to be angry" with a degenerate age, and a false, cowardly
country, of which he deems himself unworthy to be a citizen. If there
is rather too much of the _saeva indignatio_, which Swift speaks of as
lacerating his heart, it is a nobler and less selfish ire than his,
and the language and verse which it inspires are full of the very soul
of dignity. In the "Vanity of Human Wishes," he becomes one of those
"hunters whose game is man" (to use the language of Soame Jenyns, in
that essay on "The Origin of Evil," which Johnson, in the _Literary
Review_, so mercilessly lashed); and from assailing premiers,
parliaments, and the vices of London and England, he passes, in a very
solemn spirit, to expose the vain hopes, wishes, and efforts of
humanity at large. Parts of this poem are written more in sorrow than
in anger, and parts more in anger than in sorrow. The portraits of
Wolsey, Bacon, and Charles the Twelfth, are admirable in their
execution, and in their adaptation to the argument of the piece; and
the last paragraph, for truth and masculine energy is unsurpassed, we
believe, in the whole compass of ethical poetry. We are far from
assenting to the statement we once heard ably and elaborately
advocated, "that there had been no _strong_ poetry in Britain since
the two satires of Johnson;" and we are still further from classing
their author with the Shakspeares, Miltons, Wordsworths, and
Coleridges of song; but we are nevertheless prepared, not only for the
sake of these two satires, of his prologue, and of some other pieces
in verse, but on account of the general spirit of much of his prose,
to pronounce him potentially, if not actually, a great poet.
* * * * *