CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE
CHAPTER II.
LITERARY CAREER
CHAPTER III.
JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS
CHAPTER IV.
JOHNSON AS A LITERARY DICTATOR
CHAPTER V.
THE CLOSING YEARS OF JOHNSON'S LIFE
CHAPTER VI.
JOHNSON'S WRITINGS
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE.
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709. His father, Michael
Johnson, was a bookseller, highly respected by the cathedral clergy, and
for a time sufficiently prosperous to be a magistrate of the town, and,
in the year of his son's birth, sheriff of the county. He opened a
bookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns, including Birmingham,
which was as yet unable to maintain a separate bookseller. The tradesman
often exaggerates the prejudices of the class whose wants he supplies,
and Michael Johnson was probably a more devoted High Churchman and Tory
than many of the cathedral clergy themselves. He reconciled himself with
difficulty to taking the oaths against the exiled dynasty. He was a man
of considerable mental and physical power, but tormented by
hypochondriacal tendencies. His son inherited a share both of his
constitution and of his principles. Long afterwards Samuel associated
with his childish days a faint but solemn recollection of a lady in
diamonds and long black hood. The lady was Queen Anne, to whom, in
compliance with a superstition just dying a natural death, he had been
taken by his mother to be touched for the king's evil. The touch was
ineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he ought to have been
presented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts in Rome. Disease and
superstition had thus stood by his cradle, and they never quitted him
during life. The demon of hypochondria was always lying in wait for him,
and could be exorcised for a time only by hard work or social
excitement. Of this we shall hear enough; but it may be as well to sum
up at once some of the physical characteristics which marked him through
life and greatly influenced his career.
The disease had scarred and disfigured features otherwise regular and
always impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, entirely
destroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is said,
distinguish a friend's face half a yard off, and pictures were to him
meaningless patches, in which he could never see the resemblance to
their objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for he could see
enough to condemn a portrait of himself. He expressed some annoyance
when Reynolds had painted him with a pen held close to his eye; and
protested that he would not be handed down to posterity as "blinking
Sam." It seems that habits of minute attention atoned in some degree for
this natural defect. Boswell tells us how Johnson once corrected him as
to the precise shape of a mountain; and Mrs. Thrale says that he was a
close and exacting critic of ladies' dress, even to the accidental
position of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons upon
such matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to
a "little creature." "What," he asked, "have not all insects gay
colours?" His insensibility to music was even more pronounced than his
dulness of sight. On hearing it said, in praise of a musical
performance, that it was in any case difficult, his feeling comment was,
"I wish it had been impossible!"
The queer convulsions by which he amazed all beholders were probably
connected with his disease, though he and Reynolds ascribed them simply
to habit. When entering a doorway with his blind companion, Miss
Williams, he would suddenly desert her on the step in order to "whirl
and twist about" in strange gesticulations. The performance partook of
the nature of a superstitious ceremonial. He would stop in a street or
the middle of a room to go through it correctly. Once he collected a
laughing mob in Twickenham meadows by his antics; his hands imitating
the motions of a jockey riding at full speed and his feet twisting in
and out to make heels and toes touch alternately. He presently sat down
and took out a _Grotius De Veritate_, over which he "seesawed" so
violently that the mob ran back to see what was the matter. Once in such
a fit he suddenly twisted off the shoe of a lady who sat by him.
Sometimes he seemed to be obeying some hidden impulse, which commanded
him to touch every post in a street or tread on the centre of every
paving-stone, and would return if his task had not been accurately
performed.
In spite of such oddities, he was not only possessed of physical power
corresponding to his great height and massive stature, but was something
of a proficient at athletic exercises. He was conversant with the
theory, at least, of boxing; a knowledge probably acquired from an uncle
who kept the ring at Smithfield for a year, and was never beaten in
boxing or wrestling. His constitutional fearlessness would have made him
a formidable antagonist. Hawkins describes the oak staff, six feet in
length and increasing from one to three inches in diameter, which lay
ready to his hand when he expected an attack from Macpherson of Ossian
celebrity. Once he is said to have taken up a chair at the theatre upon
which a man had seated himself during his temporary absence, and to have
tossed it and its occupant bodily into the pit. He would swim into pools
said to be dangerous, beat huge dogs into peace, climb trees, and even
run races and jump gates. Once at least he went out foxhunting, and
though he despised the amusement, was deeply touched by the
complimentary assertion that he rode as well as the most illiterate
fellow in England. Perhaps the most whimsical of his performances was
when, in his fifty-fifth year, he went to the top of a high hill with
his friend Langton. "I have not had a roll for a long time," said the
great lexicographer suddenly, and, after deliberately emptying his
pockets, he laid himself parallel to the edge of the hill, and
descended, turning over and over till he came to the bottom. We may
believe, as Mrs. Thrale remarks upon his jumping over a stool to show
that he was not tired by his hunting, that his performances in this kind
were so strange and uncouth that a fear for the safety of his bones
quenched the spectator's tendency to laugh.
In such a strange case was imprisoned one of the most vigorous
intellects of the time. Vast strength hampered by clumsiness and
associated with grievous disease, deep and massive powers of feeling
limited by narrow though acute perceptions, were characteristic both of
soul and body. These peculiarities were manifested from his early
infancy. Miss Seward, a typical specimen of the provincial _précieuse_,
attempted to trace them in an epitaph which he was said to have written
at the age of three.
Here lies good master duck
Whom Samuel Johnson trod on;
If it had lived, it had been good luck,
For then we had had an odd one.
The verses, however, were really made by his father, who passed them off
as the child's, and illustrate nothing but the paternal vanity. In fact
the boy was regarded as something of an infant prodigy. His great powers
of memory, characteristic of a mind singularly retentive of all
impressions, were early developed. He seemed to learn by intuition.
Indolence, as in his after life, alternated with brief efforts of
strenuous exertion. His want of sight prevented him from sharing in the
ordinary childish sports; and one of his great pleasures was in reading
old romances--a taste which he retained through life. Boys of this
temperament are generally despised by their fellows; but Johnson seems
to have had the power of enforcing the respect of his companions. Three
of the lads used to come for him in the morning and carry him in triumph
to school, seated upon the shoulders of one and supported on each side
by his companions.
After learning to read at a dame-school, and from a certain Tom Brown,
of whom it is only recorded that he published a spelling-book and
dedicated it to the Universe, young Samuel was sent to the Lichfield
Grammar School, and was afterwards, for a short time, apparently in the
character of pupil-teacher, at the school of Stourbridge, in
Worcestershire. A good deal of Latin was "whipped into him," and though
he complained of the excessive severity of two of his teachers, he was
always a believer in the virtues of the rod. A child, he said, who is
flogged, "gets his task, and there's an end on't; whereas by exciting
emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundations of
lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other." In
practice, indeed, this stern disciplinarian seems to have been specially
indulgent to children. The memory of his own sorrows made him value
their happiness, and he rejoiced greatly when he at last persuaded a
schoolmaster to remit the old-fashioned holiday-task.
Johnson left school at sixteen and spent two years at home, probably in
learning his father's business. This seems to have been the chief period
of his studies. Long afterwards he said that he knew almost as much at
eighteen as he did at the age of fifty-three--the date of the remark.
His father's shop would give him many opportunities, and he devoured
what came in his way with the undiscriminating eagerness of a young
student. His intellectual resembled his physical appetite. He gorged
books. He tore the hearts out of them, but did not study systematically.
Do you read books through? he asked indignantly of some one who expected
from him such supererogatory labour. His memory enabled him to
accumulate great stores of a desultory and unsystematic knowledge.
Somehow he became a fine Latin scholar, though never first-rate as a
Grecian. The direction of his studies was partly determined by the
discovery of a folio of Petrarch, lying on a shelf where he was looking
for apples; and one of his earliest literary plans, never carried out,
was an edition of Politian, with a history of Latin poetry from the time
of Petrarch. When he went to the University at the end of this period,
he was in possession of a very unusual amount of reading.
Meanwhile he was beginning to feel the pressure of poverty. His father's
affairs were probably getting into disorder. One anecdote--it is one
which it is difficult to read without emotion--refers to this period.
Many years afterwards, Johnson, worn by disease and the hard struggle of
life, was staying at Lichfield, where a few old friends still survived,
but in which every street must have revived the memories of the many who
had long since gone over to the majority. He was missed one morning at
breakfast, and did not return till supper-time. Then he told how his
time had been passed. On that day fifty years before, his father,
confined by illness, had begged him to take his place to sell books at a
stall at Uttoxeter. Pride made him refuse. "To do away with the sin of
this disobedience, I this day went in a post-chaise to Uttoxeter, and
going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head
and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had
formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the
inclemency of the weather; a penance by which I trust I have propitiated
Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy to my father." If
the anecdote illustrates the touch of superstition in Johnson's mind, it
reveals too that sacred depth of tenderness which ennobled his
character. No repentance can ever wipe out the past or make it be as
though it had not been; but the remorse of a fine character may be
transmuted into a permanent source of nobler views of life and the
world.
There are difficulties in determining the circumstances and duration of
Johnson's stay at Oxford. He began residence at Pembroke College in
1728. It seems probable that he received some assistance from a
gentleman whose son took him as companion, and from the clergy of
Lichfield, to whom his father was known, and who were aware of the son's
talents. Possibly his college assisted him during part of the time. It
is certain that he left without taking a degree, though he probably
resided for nearly three years. It is certain, also, that his father's
bankruptcy made his stay difficult, and that the period must have been
one of trial.
The effect of the Oxford residence upon Johnson's mind was
characteristic. The lad already suffered from the attacks of melancholy,
which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity. At Oxford, Law's
_Serious Call_ gave him the strong religious impressions which remained
through life. But he does not seem to have been regarded as a gloomy or
a religious youth by his contemporaries. When told in after years that
he had been described as a "gay and frolicsome fellow," he replied, "Ah!
sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for
frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my
literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority."
Though a hearty supporter of authority in principle, Johnson was
distinguished through life by the strongest spirit of personal
independence and self-respect. He held, too, the sound doctrine,
deplored by his respectable biographer Hawkins, that the scholar's life,
like the Christian's, levelled all distinctions of rank. When an
officious benefactor put a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them
away with indignation. He seems to have treated his tutors with a
contempt which Boswell politely attributed to "great fortitude of mind,"
but Johnson himself set down as "stark insensibility." The life of a
poor student is not, one may fear, even yet exempt from much bitterness,
and in those days the position was far more servile than at present. The
servitors and sizars had much to bear from richer companions. A proud
melancholy lad, conscious of great powers, had to meet with hard
rebuffs, and tried to meet them by returning scorn for scorn.
Such distresses, however, did not shake Johnson's rooted Toryism. He
fully imbibed, if he did not already share, the strongest prejudices of
the place, and his misery never produced a revolt against the system,
though it may have fostered insolence to individuals. Three of the most
eminent men with whom Johnson came in contact in later life, had also
been students at Oxford. Wesley, his senior by six years, was a fellow
of Lincoln whilst Johnson was an undergraduate, and was learning at
Oxford the necessity of rousing his countrymen from the religious
lethargy into which they had sunk. "Have not pride and haughtiness of
spirit, impatience, and peevishness, sloth and indolence, gluttony and
sensuality, and even a proverbial uselessness been objected to us,
perhaps not always by our enemies nor wholly without ground?" So said
Wesley, preaching before the University of Oxford in 1744, and the words
in his mouth imply more than the preacher's formality. Adam Smith,
Johnson's junior by fourteen years, was so impressed by the utter
indifference of Oxford authorities to their duties, as to find in it an
admirable illustration of the consequences of the neglect of the true
principles of supply and demand implied in the endowment of learning.
Gibbon, his junior by twenty-eight years, passed at Oxford the "most
idle and unprofitable" months of his whole life; and was, he said, as
willing to disclaim the university for a mother, as she could be to
renounce him for a son. Oxford, as judged by these men, was remarkable
as an illustration of the spiritual and intellectual decadence of a body
which at other times has been a centre of great movements of thought.
Johnson, though his experience was rougher than any of the three, loved
Oxford as though she had not been a harsh stepmother to his youth. Sir,
he said fondly of his college, "we are a nest of singing-birds." Most of
the strains are now pretty well forgotten, and some of them must at all
times have been such as we scarcely associate with the nightingale.
Johnson, however, cherished his college friendships, delighted in paying
visits to his old university, and was deeply touched by the academical
honours by which Oxford long afterwards recognized an eminence scarcely
fostered by its protection. Far from sharing the doctrines of Adam
Smith, he only regretted that the universities were not richer, and
expressed a desire which will be understood by advocates of the
"endowment of research," that there were many places of a thousand a
year at Oxford.
On leaving the University, in 1731, the world was all before him. His
father died in the end of the year, and Johnson's whole immediate
inheritance was twenty pounds. Where was he to turn for daily bread?
Even in those days, most gates were barred with gold and opened but to
golden keys. The greatest chance for a poor man was probably through the
Church. The career of Warburton, who rose from a similar position to a
bishopric might have been rivalled by Johnson, and his connexions with
Lichfield might, one would suppose, have helped him to a start. It would
be easy to speculate upon causes which might have hindered such a
career. In later life, he more than once refused to take orders upon the
promise of a living. Johnson, as we know him, was a man of the world;
though a religious man of the world. He represents the secular rather
than the ecclesiastical type. So far as his mode of teaching goes, he is
rather a disciple of Socrates than of St. Paul or Wesley. According to
him, a "tavern-chair" was "the throne of human felicity," and supplied
a better arena than the pulpit for the utterance of his message to
mankind. And, though his external circumstances doubtless determined his
method, there was much in his character which made it congenial.
Johnson's religious emotions were such as to make habitual reserve
almost a sanitary necessity. They were deeply coloured by his
constitutional melancholy. Fear of death and hell were prominent in his
personal creed. To trade upon his feelings like a charlatan would have
been abhorrent to his masculine character; and to give them full and
frequent utterance like a genuine teacher of mankind would have been to
imperil his sanity. If he had gone through the excitement of a Methodist
conversion, he would probably have ended his days in a madhouse.
Such considerations, however, were not, one may guess, distinctly
present to Johnson himself; and the offer of a college fellowship or of
private patronage might probably have altered his career. He might have
become a learned recluse or a struggling Parson Adams. College
fellowships were less open to talent then than now, and patrons were
never too propitious to the uncouth giant, who had to force his way by
sheer labour, and fight for his own hand. Accordingly, the young scholar
tried to coin his brains into money by the most depressing and least
hopeful of employments. By becoming an usher in a school, he could at
least turn his talents to account with little delay, and that was the
most pressing consideration. By one schoolmaster he was rejected on the
ground that his infirmities would excite the ridicule of the boys. Under
another he passed some months of "complicated misery," and could never
think of the school without horror and aversion. Finding this situation
intolerable, he settled in Birmingham, in 1733, to be near an old
schoolfellow, named Hector, who was apparently beginning to practise as
a surgeon. Johnson seems to have had some acquaintances among the
comfortable families in the neighbourhood; but his means of living are
obscure. Some small literary work came in his way. He contributed essays
to a local paper, and translated a book of Travels in Abyssinia. For
this, his first publication, he received five guineas. In 1734 he made
certain overtures to Cave, a London publisher, of the result of which I
shall have to speak presently. For the present it is pretty clear that
the great problem of self-support had been very inadequately solved.
Having no money and no prospects, Johnson naturally married. The
attractions of the lady were not very manifest to others than her
husband. She was the widow of a Birmingham mercer named Porter. Her age
at the time (1735) of the second marriage was forty-eight, the
bridegroom being not quite twenty-six. The biographer's eye was not
fixed upon Johnson till after his wife's death, and we have little in
the way of authentic description of her person and character. Garrick,
who had known her, said that she was very fat, with cheeks coloured both
by paint and cordials, flimsy and fantastic in dress and affected in her
manners. She is said to have treated her husband with some contempt,
adopting the airs of an antiquated beauty, which he returned by
elaborate deference. Garrick used his wonderful powers of mimicry to
make fun of the uncouth caresses of the husband, and the courtly
Beauclerc used to provoke the smiles of his audience by repeating
Johnson's assertion that "it was a love-match on both sides." One
incident of the wedding-day was ominous. As the newly-married couple
rode back from church, Mrs. Johnson showed her spirit by reproaching
her husband for riding too fast, and then for lagging behind. Resolved
"not to be made the slave of caprice," he pushed on briskly till he was
fairly out of sight. When she rejoined him, as he, of course, took care
that she should soon do, she was in tears. Mrs. Johnson apparently knew
how to regain supremacy; but, at any rate, Johnson loved her devotedly
during life, and clung to her memory during a widowhood of more than
thirty years, as fondly as if they had been the most pattern hero and
heroine of romantic fiction.
Whatever Mrs. Johnson's charms, she seems to have been a woman of good
sense and some literary judgment. Johnson's grotesque appearance did not
prevent her from saying to her daughter on their first introduction,
"This is the most sensible man I ever met." Her praises were, we may
believe, sweeter to him than those of the severest critics, or the most
fervent of personal flatterers. Like all good men, Johnson loved good
women, and liked to have on hand a flirtation or two, as warm as might
be within the bounds of due decorum. But nothing affected his fidelity
to his Letty or displaced her image in his mind. He remembered her in
many solemn prayers, and such words as "this was dear Letty's book:" or,
"this was a prayer which dear Letty was accustomed to say," were found
written by him in many of her books of devotion.
Mrs. Johnson had one other recommendation--a fortune, namely, of
£800--little enough, even then, as a provision for the support of the
married pair, but enough to help Johnson to make a fresh start. In 1736,
there appeared an advertisement in the _Gentleman's Magazine_. "At
Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded and
taught the Latin and Greek languages by Samuel Johnson." If, as seems
probable, Mrs. Johnson's money supplied the funds for this venture, it
was an unlucky speculation.
Johnson was not fitted to be a pedagogue. Success in that profession
implies skill in the management of pupils, but perhaps still more
decidedly in the management of parents. Johnson had little
qualifications in either way. As a teacher he would probably have been
alternately despotic and over-indulgent; and, on the other hand, at a
single glance the rough Dominie Sampson would be enough to frighten the
ordinary parent off his premises. Very few pupils came, and they seem to
have profited little, if a story as told of two of his pupils refers to
this time. After some months of instruction in English history, he asked
them who had destroyed the monasteries? One of them gave no answer; the
other replied "Jesus Christ." Johnson, however, could boast of one
eminent pupil in David Garrick, though, by Garrick's account, his master
was of little service except as affording an excellent mark for his
early powers of ridicule. The school, or "academy," failed after a year
and a half; and Johnson, once more at a loss for employment, resolved to
try the great experiment, made so often and so often unsuccessfully. He
left Lichfield to seek his fortune in London. Garrick accompanied him,
and the two brought a common letter of introduction to the master of an
academy from Gilbert Walmsley, registrar of the Prerogative Court in
Lichfield. Long afterwards Johnson took an opportunity in the _Lives of
the Poets_, of expressing his warm regard for the memory of his early
friend, to whom he had been recommended by a community of literary
tastes, in spite of party differences and great inequality of age.
Walmsley says in his letter, that "one Johnson" is about to accompany
Garrick to London, in order to try his fate with a tragedy and get
himself employed in translation. Johnson, he adds, "is a very good
scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy
writer."
The letter is dated March 2nd, 1737. Before recording what is known of
his early career thus started, it will be well to take a glance at the
general condition of the profession of Literature in England at this
period.