We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and Lockhart’s
“Life” which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the four big grey
volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print edition of
Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” I emphasize the large print, for that is
the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English Classics which
come now into the market. With subjects which are in the least archaic
or abstruse you need good clear type to help you on your way. The other
is good neither for your eyes nor for your temper. Better pay a little
more and have a book that is made for use.
That book interests me—fascinates me—and yet I wish I could join
heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully has
enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to “clear one’s
mind of cant” upon the subject, for when you have been accustomed to
look at him through the sympathetic glasses of Macaulay or of Boswell,
it is hard to take them off, to rub one’s eyes, and to have a good
honest stare on one’s own account at the man’s actual words, deeds, and
limitations. If you try it you are left with the oddest mixture of
impressions. How could one express it save that this is John Bull taken
to literature—the exaggerated John Bull of the caricaturists—with every
quality, good or evil, at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a
kindly heart, the explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular
narrowness, the want of sympathy and insight, the rudeness of
perception, the positiveness, the overbearing bluster, the strong
deep-seated religious principle, and every other characteristic of the
cruder, rougher John Bull who was the great grandfather of the present
good-natured Johnnie.
If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his
huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
the whole world with his hero worship. It was most natural that he
should himself admire him. The relations between the two men were
delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a safe
basis from which any third person could argue. When they met, Boswell
was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth year. The one
was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and
impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation with his
fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was bound to
exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed
criticism far more difficult than it would be between ordinary father
and son. Up to the end this was the unbroken relation between them.
It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but it
is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the language.
He had some great and rare literary qualities. One was a clear and
vivid style, more flexible and Saxon than that of his great model.
Another was a remarkable discretion which hardly once permitted a fault
of taste in this whole enormous book where he must have had to pick his
steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They say that he was a fool
and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so with a pen in his hand.
Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson, where he ventured some
little squeak of remonstrance, before the roaring “No, sir!” came to
silence him, there are few in which his views were not, as experience
proved, the wiser. On the question of slavery he was in the wrong. But
I could quote from memory at least a dozen cases, including such vital
subjects as the American Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious
Toleration, and so on, where Boswell’s views were those which survived.
But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those little
things that you want to know. How often you read the life of a man and
are left without the remotest idea of his personality. It is not so
here. The man lives again. There is a short description of Johnson’s
person—it is not in the Life, but in the Tour to the Hebrides, the very
next book upon the shelf, which is typical of his vivid portraiture.
May I take it down, and read you a paragraph of it?—
“His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic,
and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of
the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of
King’s evil. He was now in his sixty-fourth year and was become a
little dull of hearing. His sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so
much does mind govern and even supply the deficiencies of organs that
his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and
sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of
palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive
contractions of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’ dance.
He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons
of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black
worsted stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets which
might almost have held the two volumes of his folio dictionary, and he
carried in his hand a large English oak stick.”
You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
that it is not Mr. Boswell’s fault—and it is but one of a dozen equally
vivid glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just these
pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts and his
groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and his tricks
with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate the reader,
and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than his writings
could have done.
For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life
to-day? Not “Rasselas,” surely—that stilted romance. “The Lives of the
Poets” are but a succession of prefaces, and the “Ramblers” of
ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a
huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to
genius. “London” has a few vigorous lines, and the “Journey to the
Hebrides” some spirited pages. This, with a number of political and
other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely it must be
admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant place in
English literature, and that we must turn to his humble, much-ridiculed
biographer for the real explanation.
And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such
distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this is
a sign of a narrow finality—impossible to the man of sympathy and of
imagination, who sees the other side of every question and understands
what a little island the greatest human knowledge must be in the ocean
of infinite possibilities which surround us. Look at the results. Did
ever any single man, the very dullest of the race, stand convicted of
so many incredible blunders? It recalls the remark of Bagehot, that if
at any time the views of the most learned could be stamped upon the
whole human race the result would be to propagate the most absurd
errors. He was asked what became of swallows in the winter. Rolling and
wheezing, the oracle answered: “Swallows,” said he, “certainly sleep
all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together by flying round
and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie
in the bed of a river.” Boswell gravely dockets the information.
However, if I remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of
Selborne had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are
Johnson’s misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one
would have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
would seem monstrous to a modern taste. “Shakespeare,” he said, “never
wrote six consecutive good lines.” He would only admit two good verses
in Gray’s exquisite “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,” where it
would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. “Tristram Shandy”
would not live. “Hamlet” was gabble. Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” was
poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except “A Tale of a Tub.”
Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume,
Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be honest men.
And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I suppose
even in those days they were reactionary. “A poor man has no honour.”
“Charles the Second was a good King.” “Governments should turn out of
the Civil Service all who were on the other side.” “Judges in India
should be encouraged to trade.” “No country is the richer on account of
trade.” (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the company when this
proposition was laid down!) “A landed proprietor should turn out those
tenants who did not vote as he wished.” “It is not good for a labourer
to have his wages raised.” “When the balance of trade is against a
country, the margin _must_ be paid in current coin.” Those were a few
of his convictions.
And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion. In
our more generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider those of
Johnson! When they were all eliminated there was not so very much left.
He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He detested Nonconformists (a
young lady who joined them was “an odious wench”). He loathed
Americans. So he walked his narrow line, belching fire and fury at
everything to the right or the left of it. Macaulay’s posthumous
admiration is all very well, but had they met in life Macaulay would
have contrived to unite under one hat nearly everything that Johnson
abominated.
It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong
principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal
interests demanded it. This is one of the weak points of his record. In
his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by which
the State imposed slavery upon hirelings. When he wrote the unfortunate
definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable contingency,
but when George III., either through policy or charity, offered him one
a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting it. One would have
liked to feel that the violent expression of his convictions
represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts in this instance
seem against it.
He was a great talker—but his talk was more properly a monologue. It
was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from his
subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man who
could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most vital
questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views, or Burke
his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common ground of
philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he could not argue
he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: “If his pistol missed fire,
he would knock you down with the butt end.” In the face of that
“rhinoceros laugh” there was an end of gentle argument. Napoleon said
that all the other kings would say “Ouf!” when they heard he was dead,
and so I cannot help thinking that the older men of Johnson’s circle
must have given a sigh of relief when at last they could speak freely
on that which was near their hearts, without the danger of a scene
where “Why, no, sir!” was very likely to ripen into “Let us have no
more on’t!” Certainly one would like to get behind Boswell’s account,
and to hear a chat between such men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the
difference in the freedom and atmosphere of the Club on an evening when
the formidable Doctor was not there, as compared to one when he was.
No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not make due
allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and early middle
age. His spirit was as scarred as his face. He was fifty-three when the
pension was given him, and up to then his existence had been spent in
one constant struggle for the first necessities of life, for the daily
meal and the nightly bed. He had seen his comrades of letters die of
actual privation. From childhood he had known no happiness. The half
blind gawky youth, with dirty linen and twitching limbs, had always,
whether in the streets of Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the
coffee-houses of London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement.
With a proud and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have
brought some bitter humiliation. Such an experience must either break a
man’s spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that
roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which
caused Boswell’s father to christen him “Ursa Major.” If his nature was
in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had gone to
the rending of it. His good was innate, his evil the result of a
dreadful experience.
And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He had
read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not merely
in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read, but with
every particular of place and date. If it were poetry, he could quote
it by the page, Latin or English. Such a memory has its enormous
advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect. With the
mind so crammed with other people’s goods, how can you have room for
any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I think, often
fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other exceptions. The
slate must be clear before you put your own writing upon it. When did
Johnson ever discover an original thought, when did he ever reach
forward into the future, or throw any fresh light upon those enigmas
with which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the past, he had space for
nothing else. Modern developments of every sort cast no first herald
rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France a few years before the
greatest cataclysm that the world has ever known, and his mind,
arrested by much that was trivial, never once responded to the
storm-signals which must surely have been visible around him. We read
that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him over his brewery and
supplied him with statistics as to his output of beer. It was the same
foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the drums to drown Louis’ voice at
the scaffold. The association shows how near the unconscious sage was
to the edge of that precipice and how little his learning availed him
in discerning it.
He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would think,
could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In either
case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent sense of
piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top. His brain,
working within its own limitations, was remarkable. There is no more
wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of Scotch law,
as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the Scotch judges.
That an outsider with no special training should at short notice write
such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and reason, is, I think,
as remarkable a _tour de force_ as literature can show.
Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must count
for much. His was a large charity, and it came from a small purse. The
rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge in which several
strange battered hulks found their last moorings. There were the blind
Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams, and the colourless Mrs. De
Moulins, all old and ailing—a trying group amid which to spend one’s
days. His guinea was always ready for the poor acquaintance, and no
poet was so humble that he might not preface his book with a dedication
whose ponderous and sonorous sentences bore the hall-mark of their
maker. It is the rough, kindly man, the man who bore the poor
street-walker home upon his shoulders, who makes one forget, or at
least forgive, the dogmatic pedantic Doctor of the Club.
There is always to me something of interest in the view which a great
man takes of old age and death. It is the practical test of how far the
philosophy of his life has been a sound one. Hume saw death afar, and
met it with unostentatious calm. Johnson’s mind flinched from that
dread opponent. His letters and his talk during his latter years are
one long cry of fear. It was not cowardice, for physically he was one
of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived. There were no limits to
his courage. It was spiritual diffidence, coupled with an actual belief
in the possibilities of the other world, which a more humane and
liberal theology has done something to soften. How strange to see him
cling so desperately to that crazy body, with its gout, its asthma, its
St. Vitus’ dance, and its six gallons of dropsy! What could be the
attraction of an existence where eight hours of every day were spent
groaning in a chair, and sixteen wheezing in a bed? “I would give one
of these legs,” said he, “for another year of life.” None the less,
when the hour did at last strike, no man could have borne himself with
more simple dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent
him how you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without
getting some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some
insight into human learning or character, which should leave you a
better and a wiser man.