JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS.
It is not till some time after Johnson had come into the enjoyment of
his pension, that we first see him through the eyes of competent
observers. The Johnson of our knowledge, the most familiar figure to all
students of English literary history had already long passed the prime
of life, and done the greatest part of his literary work. His character,
in the common phrase, had been "formed" years before; as, indeed,
people's characters are chiefly formed in the cradle; and, not only his
character, but the habits which are learnt in the great schoolroom of
the world were fixed beyond any possibility of change. The strange
eccentricities which had now become a second nature, amazed the society
in which he was for over twenty years a prominent figure. Unsympathetic
observers, those especially to whom the Chesterfield type represented
the ideal of humanity, were simply disgusted or repelled. The man, they
thought, might be in his place at a Grub Street pot-house; but had no
business in a lady's drawing-room. If he had been modest and retiring,
they might have put up with his defects; but Johnson was not a person
whose qualities, good or bad, were of a kind to be ignored. Naturally
enough, the fashionable world cared little for the rugged old giant.
"The great," said Johnson, "had tried him and given him up; they had
seen enough of him;" and his reason was pretty much to the purpose.
"Great lords and great ladies don't love to have their mouths stopped,"
especially not, one may add, by an unwashed fist.
It is easy to blame them now. Everybody can see that a saint in beggar's
rags is intrinsically better than a sinner in gold lace. But the
principle is one of those which serves us for judging the dead, much
more than for regulating our own conduct. Those, at any rate, may throw
the first stone at the Horace Walpoles and Chesterfields, who are quite
certain that they would ask a modern Johnson to their houses. The trial
would be severe. Poor Mrs. Boswell complained grievously of her
husband's idolatry. "I have seen many a bear led by a man," she said;
"but I never before saw a man led by a bear." The truth is, as Boswell
explains, that the sage's uncouth habits, such as turning the candles'
heads downwards to make them burn more brightly, and letting the wax
drop upon the carpet, "could not but be disagreeable to a lady."
He had other habits still more annoying to people of delicate
perceptions. A hearty despiser of all affectations, he despised
especially the affectation of indifference to the pleasures of the
table. "For my part," he said, "I mind my belly very studiously and very
carefully, for I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will
hardly mind anything else." Avowing this principle he would innocently
give himself the airs of a scientific epicure. "I, madam," he said to
the terror of a lady with whom he was about to sup, "who live at a
variety of good tables, am a much better judge of cookery than any
person who has a very tolerable cook, but lives much at home, for his
palate is gradually adapted to the taste of his cook, whereas, madam,
in trying by a wider range, I can more exquisitely judge." But his
pretensions to exquisite taste are by no means borne out by independent
witnesses. "He laughs," said Tom Davies, "like a rhinoceros," and he
seems to have eaten like a wolf--savagely, silently, and with
undiscriminating fury. He was not a pleasant object during this
performance. He was totally absorbed in the business of the moment, a
strong perspiration came out, and the veins of his forehead swelled. He
liked coarse satisfying dishes--boiled pork and veal-pie stuffed with
plums and sugar; and in regard to wine, he seems to have accepted the
doctrines of the critic of a certain fluid professing to be port, who
asked, "What more can you want? It is black, and it is thick, and it
makes you drunk." Claret, as Johnson put it, "is the liquor for boys,
and port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy." He
could, however, refrain, though he could not be moderate, and for all
the latter part of his life, from 1766, he was a total abstainer. Nor,
it should be added, does he ever appear to have sought for more than
exhilaration from wine. His earliest intimate friend, Hector, said that
he had never but once seen him drunk.
His appetite for more innocent kinds of food was equally excessive. He
would eat seven or eight peaches before breakfast, and declared that he
had only once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he wished. His
consumption of tea was prodigious, beyond all precedent. Hawkins quotes
Bishop Burnet as having drunk sixteen large cups every morning, a feat
which would entitle him to be reckoned as a rival. "A hardened and
shameless tea-drinker," Johnson called himself, who "with tea amuses the
evenings, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the
mornings." One of his teapots, preserved by a relic-hunter, contained
two quarts, and he professed to have consumed five and twenty cups at a
sitting. Poor Mrs. Thrale complains that he often kept her up making tea
for him till four in the morning. His reluctance to go to bed was due to
the fact that his nights were periods of intense misery; but the vast
potations of tea can scarcely have tended to improve them.
The huge frame was clad in the raggedest of garments, until his
acquaintance with the Thrales led to a partial reform. His wigs were
generally burnt in front, from his shortsighted knack of reading with
his head close to the candle; and at the Thrales, the butler stood ready
to effect a change of wigs as he passed into the dining-room. Once or
twice we have accounts of his bursting into unusual splendour. He
appeared at the first representation of _Irene_ in a scarlet waistcoat
laced with gold; and on one of his first interviews with Goldsmith he
took the trouble to array himself decently, because Goldsmith was
reported to have justified slovenly habits by the precedent of the
leader of his craft. Goldsmith, judging by certain famous suits, seems
to have profited by the hint more than his preceptor. As a rule,
Johnson's appearance, before he became a pensioner, was worthy of the
proverbial manner of Grub Street. Beauclerk used to describe how he had
once taken a French lady of distinction to see Johnson in his chambers.
On descending the staircase they heard a noise like thunder. Johnson was
pursuing them, struck by a sudden sense of the demands upon his
gallantry. He brushed in between Beauclerk and the lady, and seizing her
hand conducted her to her coach. A crowd of people collected to stare at
the sage, dressed in rusty brown, with a pair of old shoes for slippers,
a shrivelled wig on the top of his head, and with shirtsleeves and the
knees of his breeches hanging loose. In those days, clergymen and
physicians were only just abandoning the use of their official costume
in the streets, and Johnson's slovenly habits were even more marked than
they would be at present. "I have no passion for clean linen," he once
remarked, and it is to be feared that he must sometimes have offended
more senses than one.
In spite of his uncouth habits of dress and manners, Johnson claimed
and, in a sense, with justice, to be a polite man. "I look upon myself,"
he said once to Boswell, "as a very polite man." He could show the
stately courtesy of a sound Tory, who cordially accepts the principle of
social distinction, but has far too strong a sense of self-respect to
fancy that compliance with the ordinary conventions can possibly lower
his own position. Rank of the spiritual kind was especially venerable to
him. "I should as soon have thought of contradicting a bishop," was a
phrase which marked the highest conceivable degree of deference to a man
whom he respected. Nobody, again, could pay more effective compliments,
when he pleased; and the many female friends who have written of him
agree, that he could be singularly attractive to women. Women are,
perhaps, more inclined than men to forgive external roughness in
consideration of the great charm of deep tenderness in a thoroughly
masculine nature. A characteristic phrase was his remark to Miss
Monckton. She had declared, in opposition to one of Johnson's
prejudices, that Sterne's writings were pathetic: "I am sure," she said,
"they have affected me." "Why," said Johnson, smiling and rolling
himself about, "that is because, dearest, you are a dunce!" When she
mentioned this to him some time afterwards he replied: "Madam, if I had
thought so, I certainly should not have said it." The truth could not be
more neatly put.
Boswell notes, with some surprise, that when Johnson dined with Lord
Monboddo he insisted upon rising when the ladies left the table, and
took occasion to observe that politeness was "fictitious benevolence,"
and equally useful in common intercourse. Boswell's surprise seems to
indicate that Scotchmen in those days were even greater bears than
Johnson. He always insisted, as Miss Reynolds tells us, upon showing
ladies to their carriages through Bolt Court, though his dress was such
that her readers would, she thinks, be astonished that any man in his
senses should have shown himself in it abroad or even at home. Another
odd indication of Johnson's regard for good manners, so far as his
lights would take him, was the extreme disgust with which he often
referred to a certain footman in Paris, who used his fingers in place of
sugar-tongs. So far as Johnson could recognize bad manners he was polite
enough, though unluckily the limitation is one of considerable
importance.
Johnson's claims to politeness were sometimes, it is true, put in a
rather startling form. "Every man of any education," he once said to the
amazement of his hearers, "would rather be called a rascal than accused
of deficiency in the graces." Gibbon, who was present, slily inquired of
a lady whether among all her acquaintance she could not find _one_
exception. According to Mrs. Thrale, he went even further. Dr. Barnard,
he said, was the only man who had ever done justice to his good
breeding; "and you may observe," he added, "that I am well-bred to a
degree of needless scrupulosity." He proceeded, according to Mrs.
Thrale, but the report a little taxes our faith, to claim the virtues
not only of respecting ceremony, but of never contradicting or
interrupting his hearers. It is rather odd that Dr. Barnard had once a
sharp altercation with Johnson, and avenged himself by a sarcastic copy
of verses in which, after professing to learn perfectness from different
friends, he says,--
Johnson shall teach me how to place,
In varied light, each borrow'd grace;
From him I'll learn to write;
Copy his clear familiar style,
And by the roughness of his file,
Grow, like himself, polite.
Johnson, on this as on many occasions, repented of the blow as soon as
it was struck, and sat down by Barnard, "literally smoothing down his
arms and knees," and beseeching pardon. Barnard accepted his apologies,
but went home and wrote his little copy of verses.
Johnson's shortcomings in civility were no doubt due, in part, to the
narrowness of his faculties of perception. He did not know, for he could
not see, that his uncouth gestures and slovenly dress were offensive;
and he was not so well able to observe others as to shake off the
manners contracted in Grub Street. It is hard to study a manual of
etiquette late in life, and for a man of Johnson's imperfect faculties
it was probably impossible. Errors of this kind were always pardonable,
and are now simply ludicrous. But Johnson often shocked his companions
by more indefensible conduct. He was irascible, overbearing, and, when
angry, vehement beyond all propriety. He was a "tremendous companion,"
said Garrick's brother; and men of gentle nature, like Charles Fox,
often shrank from his company, and perhaps exaggerated his brutality.
Johnson, who had long regarded conversation as the chief amusement, came
in later years to regard it as almost the chief employment of life; and
he had studied the art with the zeal of a man pursuing a favourite
hobby. He had always, as he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, made it a
principle to talk on all occasions as well as he could. He had thus
obtained a mastery over his weapons which made him one of the most
accomplished of conversational gladiators. He had one advantage which
has pretty well disappeared from modern society, and the disappearance
of which has been destructive to excellence of talk. A good talker, even
more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too
vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance. For the
formation of real proficiency in the art, friends should meet often, sit
long, and be thoroughly at ease. A modern audience generally breaks up
before it is well warmed through, and includes enough strangers to break
the magic circle of social electricity. The clubs in which Johnson
delighted were excellently adapted to foster his peculiar talent. There
a man could "fold his legs and have his talk out"--a pleasure hardly to
be enjoyed now. And there a set of friends meeting regularly, and
meeting to talk, learnt to sharpen each other's skill in all dialectic
manoeuvres. Conversation may be pleasantest, as Johnson admitted, when
two friends meet quietly to exchange their minds without any thought of
display. But conversation considered as a game, as a bout of
intellectual sword-play, has also charms which Johnson intensely
appreciated. His talk was not of the encyclopaedia variety, like that of
some more modern celebrities; but it was full of apposite illustrations
and unrivalled in keen argument, rapid flashes of wit and humour,
scornful retort and dexterous sophistry. Sometimes he would fell his
adversary at a blow; his sword, as Boswell said, would be through your
body in an instant without preliminary flourishes; and in the
excitement of talking for victory, he would use any device that came to
hand. "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, quoting a
phrase from Cibber, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down
with the butt-end of it."
Johnson's view of conversation is indicated by his remark about Burke.
"That fellow," he said at a time of illness, "calls forth all my powers.
Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me." "It is when you come close
to a man in conversation," he said on another occasion, "that you
discover what his real abilities are. To make a speech in an assembly is
a knack. Now I honour Thurlow, sir; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he fairly
puts his mind to yours."
Johnson's retorts were fair play under the conditions of the game, as it
is fair play to kick an opponent's shins at football. But of course a
man who had, as it were, become the acknowledged champion of the ring,
and who had an irascible and thoroughly dogmatic temper, was tempted to
become unduly imperious. In the company of which Savage was a
distinguished member, one may guess that the conversational fervour
sometimes degenerated into horse-play. Want of arguments would be
supplied by personality, and the champion would avenge himself by
brutality on an opponent who happened for once to be getting the best of
him. Johnson, as he grew older and got into more polished society,
became milder in his manners; but he had enough of the old spirit left
in him to break forth at times with ungovernable fury, and astonish the
well-regulated minds of respectable ladies and gentlemen.
Anecdotes illustrative of this ferocity abound, and his best
friends--except, perhaps, Reynolds and Burke--had all to suffer in turn.
On one occasion, when he had made a rude speech even to Reynolds,
Boswell states, though with some hesitation, his belief that Johnson
actually blushed. The records of his contests in this kind fill a large
space in Boswell's pages. That they did not lead to worse consequences
shows his absence of rancour. He was always ready and anxious for a
reconciliation, though he would not press for one if his first overtures
were rejected. There was no venom in the wounds he inflicted, for there
was no ill-nature; he was rough in the heat of the struggle, and in such
cases careless in distributing blows; but he never enjoyed giving pain.
None of his tiffs ripened into permanent quarrels, and he seems scarcely
to have lost a friend. He is a pleasant contrast in this, as in much
else, to Horace Walpole, who succeeded, in the course of a long life, in
breaking with almost all his old friends. No man set a higher value upon
friendship than Johnson. "A man," he said to Reynolds, "ought to keep
his friendship in constant repair;" or he would find himself left alone
as he grew older. "I look upon a day as lost," he said later in life,
"in which I do not make a new acquaintance." Making new acquaintances
did not involve dropping the old. The list of his friends is a long one,
and includes, as it were, successive layers, superposed upon each other,
from the earliest period of his life.
This is so marked a feature in Johnson's character, that it will be as
well at this point to notice some of the friendships from which he
derived the greatest part of his happiness. Two of his schoolfellows,
Hector and Taylor, remained his intimates through life. Hector survived
to give information to Boswell, and Taylor, then a prebendary of
Westminster, read the funeral service over his old friend in the Abbey.
He showed, said some of the bystanders, too little feeling. The relation
between the two men was not one of special tenderness; indeed they were
so little congenial that Boswell rather gratuitously suspected his
venerable teacher of having an eye to Taylor's will. It seems fairer to
regard the acquaintance as an illustration of that curious adhesiveness
which made Johnson cling to less attractive persons. At any rate, he did
not show the complacence of the proper will-hunter. Taylor was rector of
Bosworth and squire of Ashbourne. He was a fine specimen of the
squire-parson; a justice of the peace, a warm politician, and what was
worse, a warm Whig. He raised gigantic bulls, bragged of selling cows
for 120 guineas and more, and kept a noble butler in purple clothes and
a large white wig. Johnson respected Taylor as a sensible man, but was
ready to have a round with him on occasion. He snorted contempt when
Taylor talked of breaking some small vessels if he took an emetic.
"Bah," said the doctor, who regarded a valetudinarian as a "scoundrel,"
"if you have so many things that will break, you had better break your
neck at once, and there's an end on't." Nay, if he did not condemn
Taylor's cows, he criticized his bulldog with cruel acuteness. "No, sir,
he is not well shaped; for there is not the quick transition from the
thickness of the fore-part to the _tenuity_--the thin part--behind,
which a bulldog ought to have." On the more serious topic of politics
his Jacobite fulminations roused Taylor "to a pitch of bellowing."
Johnson roared out that if the people of England were fairly polled
(this was in 1777) the present king would be sent away to-night, and his
adherents hanged to-morrow. Johnson, however, rendered Taylor the
substantial service of writing sermons for him, two volumes of which
were published after they were both dead; and Taylor must have been a
bold man, if it be true, as has been said, that he refused to preach a
sermon written by Johnson upon Mrs. Johnson's death, on the ground that
it spoke too favourably of the character of the deceased.
Johnson paid frequent visits to Lichfield, to keep up his old friends.
One of them was Lucy Porter, his wife's daughter, with whom, according
to Miss Seward, he had been in love before he married her mother. He was
at least tenderly attached to her through life. And, for the most part,
the good people of Lichfield seem to have been proud of their
fellow-townsman, and gave him a substantial proof of their sympathy by
continuing to him, on favourable terms, the lease of a house originally
granted to his father. There was, indeed, one remarkable exception in
Miss Seward, who belonged to a genus specially contemptible to the old
doctor. She was one of the fine ladies who dabbled in poetry, and aimed
at being the centre of a small literary circle at Lichfield. Her letters
are amongst the most amusing illustrations of the petty affectations and
squabbles characteristic of such a provincial clique. She evidently
hated Johnson at the bottom of her small soul; and, indeed, though
Johnson once paid her a preposterous compliment--a weakness of which
this stern moralist was apt to be guilty in the company of ladies--he no
doubt trod pretty roughly upon some of her pet vanities.
By far the most celebrated of Johnson's Lichfield friends was David
Garrick, in regard to whom his relations were somewhat peculiar.
Reynolds said that Johnson considered Garrick to be his own property,
and would never allow him to be praised or blamed by any one else
without contradiction. Reynolds composed a pair of imaginary dialogues
to illustrate the proposition, in one of which Johnson attacks Garrick
in answer to Reynolds, and in the other defends him in answer to Gibbon.
The dialogues seem to be very good reproductions of the Johnsonian
manner, though perhaps the courteous Reynolds was a little too much
impressed by its roughness; and they probably include many genuine
remarks of Johnson's. It is remarkable that the praise is far more
pointed and elaborate than the blame, which turns chiefly upon the
general inferiority of an actor's position. And, in fact, this seems to
have corresponded to Johnson's opinion about Garrick as gathered from
Boswell.
The two men had at bottom a considerable regard for each other, founded
upon old association, mutual services, and reciprocal respect for
talents of very different orders. But they were so widely separated by
circumstances, as well as by a radical opposition of temperament, that
any close intimacy could hardly be expected. The bear and the monkey are
not likely to be intimate friends. Garrick's rapid elevation in fame and
fortune seems to have produced a certain degree of envy in his old
schoolmaster. A grave moral philosopher has, of course, no right to look
askance at the rewards which fashion lavishes upon men of lighter and
less lasting merit, and which he professes to despise. Johnson, however,
was troubled with a rather excessive allowance of human nature. Moreover
he had the good old-fashioned contempt for players, characteristic both
of the Tory and the inartistic mind. He asserted roundly that he looked
upon players as no better than dancing-dogs. "But, sir, you will allow
that some players are better than others?" "Yes, sir, as some dogs dance
better than others." So when Goldsmith accused Garrick of grossly
flattering the queen, Johnson exclaimed, "And as to meanness--how is it
mean in a player, a showman, a fellow who exhibits himself for a
shilling, to flatter his queen?" At another time Boswell suggested that
we might respect a great player. "What! sir," exclaimed Johnson, "a
fellow who claps a hump upon his back and a lump on his leg and cries,
'_I am Richard III._'? Nay, sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he
does two things: he repeats and he sings; there is both recitation and
music in his performance--the player only recites."
Such sentiments were not very likely to remain unknown to Garrick nor to
put him at ease with Johnson, whom, indeed, he always suspected of
laughing at him. They had a little tiff on account of Johnson's Edition
of Shakspeare. From some misunderstanding, Johnson did not make use of
Garrick's collection of old plays. Johnson, it seems, thought that
Garrick should have courted him more, and perhaps sent the plays to his
house; whereas Garrick, knowing that Johnson treated books with a
roughness ill-suited to their constitution, thought that he had done
quite enough by asking Johnson to come to his library. The revenge--if
it was revenge--taken by Johnson was to say nothing of Garrick in his
Preface, and to glance obliquely at his non-communication of his
rarities. He seems to have thought that it would be a lowering of
Shakspeare to admit that his fame owed anything to Garrick's exertions.
Boswell innocently communicated to Garrick a criticism of Johnson's upon
one of his poems--
I'd smile with the simple and feed with the poor.
"Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," was Johnson's
tolerably harmless remark. Garrick, however, did not like it, and when
Boswell tried to console him by saying that Johnson gored everybody in
turn, and added, "_foenum habet in cornu_." "Ay," said Garrick
vehemently, "he has a whole mow of it." The most unpleasant incident
was when Garrick proposed rather too freely to be a member of the Club.
Johnson said that the first duke in England had no right to use such
language, and said, according to Mrs. Thrale, "If Garrick does apply,
I'll blackball him. Surely we ought to be able to sit in a society like
ours--
'Unelbowed by a gamester, pimp, or player!'"
Nearly ten years afterwards, however, Johnson favoured his election, and
when he died, declared that the Club should have a year's widowhood. No
successor to Garrick was elected during that time.
Johnson sometimes ventured to criticise Garrick's acting, but here
Garrick could take his full revenge. The purblind Johnson was not, we
may imagine, much of a critic in such matters. Garrick reports him to
have said of an actor at Lichfield, "There is a courtly vivacity about
the fellow;" when, in fact, said Garrick, "he was the most vulgar
ruffian that ever went upon boards."
In spite of such collisions of opinion and mutual criticism, Johnson
seems to have spoken in the highest terms of Garrick's good qualities,
and they had many pleasant meetings. Garrick takes a prominent part in
two or three of the best conversations in Boswell, and seems to have put
his interlocutors in specially good temper. Johnson declared him to be
"the first man in the world for sprightly conversation." He said that
Dryden had written much better prologues than any of Garrick's, but that
Garrick had written more good prologues than Dryden. He declared that it
was wonderful how little Garrick had been spoilt by all the flattery
that he had received. No wonder if he was a little vain: "a man who is
perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived: so many
bellows have blown the fuel, that one wonders he is not by this time
become a cinder!" "If all this had happened to me," he said on another
occasion, "I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking
before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way. Consider, if
all this had happened to Cibber and Quin, they'd have jumped over the
moon. Yet Garrick speaks to us," smiling. He admitted at the same time
that Garrick had raised the profession of a player. He defended Garrick,
too, against the common charge of avarice. Garrick, as he pointed out,
had been brought up in a family whose study it was to make fourpence go
as far as fourpence-halfpenny. Johnson remembered in early days drinking
tea with Garrick when Peg Woffington made it, and made it, as Garrick
grumbled, "as red as blood." But when Garrick became rich he became
liberal. He had, so Johnson declared, given away more money than any man
in England.
After Garrick's death, Johnson took occasion to say, in the _Lives of
the Poets_, that the death "had eclipsed the gaiety of nations and
diminished the public stock of harmless pleasures." Boswell ventured to
criticise the observation rather spitefully. "Why _nations_? Did his
gaiety extend further than his own nation?" "Why, sir," replied Johnson,
"some imagination must be allowed. Besides, we may say _nations_ if we
allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety--which they have
not." On the whole, in spite of various drawbacks, Johnson's reported
observations upon Garrick will appear to be discriminative, and yet, on
the whole, strongly favourable to his character. Yet we are not quite
surprised that Mrs. Garrick did not respond to a hint thrown out by
Johnson, that he would be glad to write the life of his friend.
At Oxford, Johnson acquired the friendship of Dr. Adams, afterwards
Master of Pembroke and author of a once well-known reply to Hume's
argument upon miracles. He was an amiable man, and was proud to do the
honours of the university to his old friend, when, in later years,
Johnson revisited the much-loved scenes of his neglected youth. The
warmth of Johnson's regard for old days is oddly illustrated by an
interview recorded by Boswell with one Edwards, a fellow-student whom he
met again in 1778, not having previously seen him since 1729. They had
lived in London for forty years without once meeting, a fact more
surprising then than now. Boswell eagerly gathered up the little scraps
of college anecdote which the meeting produced, but perhaps his best
find was a phrase of Edwards himself. "You are a philosopher, Dr.
Johnson," he said; "I have tried, too, in my time to be a philosopher;
but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in." The phrase,
as Boswell truly says, records an exquisite trait of character.
Of the friends who gathered round Johnson during his period of struggle,
many had vanished before he became well known. The best loved of all
seems to have been Dr. Bathurst, a physician, who, failing to obtain
practice, joined the expedition to Havannah, and fell a victim to the
climate (1762). Upon him Johnson pronounced a panegyric which has
contributed a proverbial phrase to the language. "Dear Bathurst," he
said, "was a man to my very heart's content: he hated a fool and he
hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig; he was a _very good hater_." Johnson
remembered Bathurst in his prayers for years after his loss, and
received from him a peculiar legacy. Francis Barker had been the negro
slave of Bathurst's father, who left him his liberty by will. Dr.
Bathurst allowed him to enter Johnson's service; and Johnson sent him
to school at considerable expense, and afterwards retained him in his
service with little interruption till his own death. Once Barker ran
away to sea, and was discharged, oddly enough, by the good offices of
Wilkes, to whom Smollett applied on Johnson's behalf. Barker became an
important member of Johnson's family, some of whom reproached him for
his liberality to the nigger. No one ever solved the great problem as to
what services were rendered by Barker to his master, whose wig was "as
impenetrable by a comb as a quickset hedge," and whose clothes were
never touched by the brush.
Among the other friends of this period must be reckoned his biographer,
Hawkins, an attorney who was afterwards Chairman of the Middlesex
Justices, and knighted on presenting an address to the King. Boswell
regarded poor Sir John Hawkins with all the animosity of a rival author,
and with some spice of wounded vanity. He was grievously offended, so at
least says Sir John's daughter, on being described in the _Life of
Johnson_ as "Mr. James Boswell" without a solitary epithet such as
celebrated or well-known. If that was really his feeling, he had his
revenge; for no one book ever so suppressed another as Boswell's Life
suppressed Hawkins's. In truth, Hawkins was a solemn prig, remarkable
chiefly for the unusual intensity of his conviction that all virtue
consists in respectability. He had a special aversion to "goodness of
heart," which he regarded as another name for a quality properly called
extravagance or vice. Johnson's tenacity of old acquaintance introduced
him into the Club, where he made himself so disagreeable, especially, as
it seems, by rudeness to Burke, that he found it expedient to invent a
pretext for resignation. Johnson called him a "very unclubable man,"
and may perhaps have intended him in the quaint description: "I really
believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; though, to be sure, he is
rather penurious, and he is somewhat mean; and it must be owned he has
some degree of brutality, and is not without a tendency to savageness
that cannot well be defended."
In a list of Johnson's friends it is proper to mention Richardson and
Hawkesworth. Richardson seems to have given him substantial help, and
was repaid by favourable comparisons with Fielding, scarcely borne out
by the verdict of posterity. "Fielding," said Johnson, "could tell the
hour by looking at the clock; whilst Richardson knew how the clock was
made." "There is more knowledge of the heart," he said at another time,
"in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_." Johnson's
preference of the sentimentalist to the man whose humour and strong
sense were so like his own, shows how much his criticism was biassed by
his prejudices; though, of course, Richardson's external decency was a
recommendation to the moralist. Hawkesworth's intimacy with Johnson
seems to have been chiefly in the period between the _Dictionary_ and
the pension. He was considered to be Johnson's best imitator; and has
vanished like other imitators. His fate, very doubtful if the story
believed at the time be true, was a curious one for a friend of
Johnson's. He had made some sceptical remarks as to the efficacy of
prayer in his preface to the South Sea Voyages; and was so bitterly
attacked by a "Christian" in the papers, that he destroyed himself by a
dose of opium.
Two younger friends, who became disciples of the sage soon after the
appearance of the _Rambler_, are prominent figures in the later circle.
One of these was Bennet Langton, a man of good family, fine scholarship,
and very amiable character. His exceedingly tall and slender figure was
compared by Best to the stork in Raphael's cartoon of the Miraculous
Draught of Fishes. Miss Hawkins describes him sitting with one leg
twisted round the other as though to occupy the smallest possible space,
and playing with his gold snuff-box with a mild countenance and sweet
smile. The gentle, modest creature was loved by Johnson, who could warm
into unusual eloquence in singing his praises. The doctor, however, was
rather fond of discussing with Boswell the faults of his friend. They
seem to have chiefly consisted in a certain languor or sluggishness of
temperament which allowed his affairs to get into perplexity. Once, when
arguing the delicate question as to the propriety of telling a friend of
his wife's unfaithfulness, Boswell, after his peculiar fashion, chose to
enliven the abstract statement by the purely imaginary hypothesis of Mr.
and Mrs. Langton being in this position. Johnson said that it would be
useless to tell Langton, because he would be too sluggish to get a
divorce. Once Langton was the unconscious cause of one of Johnson's
oddest performances. Langton had employed Chambers, a common friend of
his and Johnson's, to draw his will. Johnson, talking to Chambers and
Boswell, was suddenly struck by the absurdity of his friend's appearing
in the character of testator. His companions, however, were utterly
unable to see in what the joke consisted; but Johnson laughed
obstreperously and irrepressibly: he laughed till he reached the Temple
Gate; and when in Fleet Street went almost into convulsions of hilarity.
Holding on by one of the posts in the street, he sent forth such peals
of laughter that they seemed in the silence of the night to resound from
Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.
Not long before his death, Johnson applied to Langton for spiritual
advice. "I desired him to tell me sincerely in what he thought my life
was faulty." Langton wrote upon a sheet of paper certain texts
recommending Christian charity; and explained, upon inquiry, that he was
pointing at Johnson's habit of contradiction. The old doctor began by
thanking him earnestly for his kindness; but gradually waxed savage and
asked Langton, "in a loud and angry tone, What is your drift, sir?" He
complained of the well-meant advice to Boswell, with a sense that he had
been unjustly treated. It was a scene for a comedy, as Reynolds
observed, to see a penitent get into a passion and belabour his
confessor.
Through Langton, Johnson became acquainted with the friend whose manner
was in the strongest contrast to his own. Topham Beauclerk was a man of
fashion. He was commended to Johnson by a likeness to Charles II., from
whom he was descended, being the grandson of the first Duke of St.
Alban's. Beauclerk was a man of literary and scientific tastes. He
inherited some of the moral laxity which Johnson chose to pardon in his
ancestor. Some years after his acquaintance with Boswell he married Lady
Diana Spencer, a lady who had been divorced upon his account from her
husband, Lord Bolingbroke. But he took care not to obtrude his faults of
life, whatever they may have been, upon the old moralist, who
entertained for him a peculiar affection. He specially admired
Beauclerk's skill in the use of a more polished, if less vigorous, style
of conversation than his own. He envied the ease with which Beauclerk
brought out his sly incisive retorts. "No man," he said, "ever was so
free when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that expressed
that it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed
that it had come." When Beauclerk was dying (in 1780), Johnson said,
with a faltering voice, that he would walk to the extremity of the
diameter of the earth to save him. Two little anecdotes are expressive
of his tender feeling for this incongruous friend. Boswell had asked him
to sup at Beauclerk's. He started, but, on the way, recollecting
himself, said, "I cannot go; but _I do not love Beauclerk the less_."
Beauclerk had put upon a portrait of Johnson the inscription,--
Ingenium ingens
Inculto latet hoc sub corpore.
Langton, who bought the portrait, had the inscription removed. "It was
kind in you to take it off," said Johnson; and, after a short pause,
"not unkind in him to put it on."
Early in their acquaintance, the two young men, Beau and Lanky, as
Johnson called them, had sat up one night at a tavern till three in the
morning. The courageous thought struck them that they would knock up the
old philosopher. He came to the door of his chambers, poker in hand,
with an old wig for a nightcap. On hearing their errand, the sage
exclaimed, "What! is it you, you dogs? I'll have a frisk with you." And
so Johnson with the two youths, his juniors by about thirty years,
proceeded to make a night of it. They amazed the fruiterers in Covent
Garden; they brewed a bowl of bishop in a tavern, while Johnson quoted
the poet's address to Sleep,--
"Short, O short, be then thy reign,
And give us to the world again!"
They took a boat to Billingsgate, and Johnson, with Beauclerk, kept up
their amusement for the following day, when Langton deserted them to go
to breakfast with some young ladies, and Johnson scolded him for
leaving his friends "to go and sit with a parcel of wretched _unidea'd_
girls." "I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house,"
said Garrick when he heard of this queer alliance; and he told Johnson
that he would be in the _Chronicle_ for his frolic. "He _durst_ not do
such a thing. His wife would not let him," was the moralist's retort.
Some friends, known to fame by other titles than their connexion with
Johnson, had by this time gathered round them. Among them was one, whose
art he was unable to appreciate, but whose fine social qualities and
dignified equability of temper made him a valued and respected
companion. Reynolds had settled in London at the end of 1752. Johnson
met him at the house of Miss Cotterell. Reynolds had specially admired
Johnson's _Life of Savage_, and, on their first meeting, happened to
make a remark which delighted Johnson. The ladies were regretting the
loss of a friend to whom they were under obligations. "You have,
however," said Reynolds, "the comfort of being relieved from a burden of
gratitude." The saying is a little too much like Rochefoucauld, and too
true to be pleasant; but it was one of those keen remarks which Johnson
appreciated because they prick a bubble of commonplace moralizing
without demanding too literal an acceptation. He went home to sup with
Reynolds and became his intimate friend. On another occasion, Johnson
was offended by two ladies of rank at the same house, and by way of
taking down their pride, asked Reynolds in a loud voice, "How much do
you think you and I could get in a week, if we both worked as hard as we
could?" "His appearance," says Sir Joshua's sister, Miss Reynolds,
"might suggest the poor author: as he was not likely in that place to be
a blacksmith or a porter." Poor Miss Reynolds, who tells this story,
was another attraction to Reynolds' house. She was a shy, retiring
maiden lady, who vexed her famous brother by following in his steps
without his talents, and was deeply hurt by his annoyance at the
unintentional mockery. Johnson was through life a kind and judicious
friend to her; and had attracted her on their first meeting by a
significant indication of his character. He said that when going home to
his lodgings at one or two in the morning, he often saw poor children
asleep on thresholds and stalls--the wretched "street Arabs" of the
day--and that he used to put pennies into their hands that they might
buy a breakfast.
Two friends, who deserve to be placed beside Reynolds, came from Ireland
to seek their fortunes in London. Edmund Burke, incomparably the
greatest writer upon political philosophy in English literature, the
master of a style unrivalled for richness, flexibility, and vigour, was
radically opposed to Johnson on party questions, though his language
upon the French Revolution, after Johnson's death, would have satisfied
even the strongest prejudices of his old friend. But he had qualities
which commended him even to the man who called him a "bottomless Whig,"
and who generally spoke of Whigs as rascals, and maintained that the
first Whig was the devil. If his intellect was wider, his heart was as
warm as Johnson's, and in conversation he merited the generous applause
and warm emulation of his friends. Johnson was never tired of praising
the extraordinary readiness and spontaneity of Burke's conversation. "If
a man," he said, "went under a shed at the same time with Burke to avoid
a shower, he would say, 'This is an extraordinary man.' Or if Burke went
into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, 'We have
had an extraordinary man here.'" When Burke was first going into
Parliament, Johnson said in answer to Hawkins, who wondered that such a
man should get a seat, "We who know Mr. Burke, know that he will be one
of the first men in the country." Speaking of certain other members of
Parliament, more after the heart of Sir John Hawkins, he said that he
grudged success to a man who made a figure by a knowledge of a few
forms, though his mind was "as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet;"
but then he did not grudge Burke's being the first man in the House of
Commons, for he would be the first man everywhere. And Burke equally
admitted Johnson's supremacy in conversation. "It is enough for me," he
said to some one who regretted Johnson's monopoly of the talk on a
particular occasion, "to have rung the bell for him."
The other Irish adventurer, whose career was more nearly moulded upon
that of Johnson, came to London in 1756, and made Johnson's
acquaintance. Some time afterwards (in or before 1761) Goldsmith, like
Johnson, had tasted the bitterness of an usher's life, and escaped into
the scarcely more tolerable regions of Grub Street. After some years of
trial, he was becoming known to the booksellers as a serviceable hand,
and had two works in his desk destined to lasting celebrity. His
landlady (apparently 1764) one day arrested him for debt. Johnson,
summoned to his assistance, sent him a guinea and speedily followed. The
guinea had already been changed, and Goldsmith was consoling himself
with a bottle of Madeira. Johnson corked the bottle, and a discussion of
ways and means brought out the manuscript of the _Vicar of Wakefield_.
Johnson looked into it, took it to a bookseller, got sixty pounds for
it, and returned to Goldsmith, who paid his rent and administered a
sound rating to his landlady.
The relation thus indicated is characteristic; Johnson was as a rough
but helpful elder brother to poor Goldsmith, gave him advice, sympathy,
and applause, and at times criticised him pretty sharply, or brought
down his conversational bludgeon upon his sensitive friend. "He has
nothing of the bear but his skin," was Goldsmith's comment upon his
clumsy friend, and the two men appreciated each other at bottom. Some of
their readers may be inclined to resent Johnson's attitude of
superiority. The admirably pure and tender heart, and the exquisite
intellectual refinement implied in the _Vicar_ and the _Traveller_,
force us to love Goldsmith in spite of superficial foibles, and when
Johnson prunes or interpolates lines in the _Traveller_, we feel as
though a woodman's axe was hacking at a most delicate piece of carving.
The evidence of contemporary observers, however, must force impartial
readers to admit that poor Goldsmith's foibles were real, however amply
compensated by rare and admirable qualities. Garrick's assertion, that
he "wrote like an angel but talked like poor Poll," expresses the
unanimous opinion of all who had actually seen him. Undoubtedly some of
the stories of his childlike vanity, his frankly expressed envy, and his
general capacity for blundering, owe something to Boswell's feeling that
he was a rival near the throne, and sometimes poor Goldsmith's humorous
self-assertion may have been taken too seriously by blunt English wits.
One may doubt, for example, whether he was really jealous of a puppet
tossing a pike, and unconscious of his absurdity in saying "Pshaw! I
could do it better myself!" Boswell, however, was too good an observer
to misrepresent at random, and he has, in fact, explained very well the
true meaning of his remarks. Goldsmith was an excitable Irishman of
genius, who tumbled out whatever came uppermost, and revealed the
feelings of the moment with utter want of reserve. His self-controlled
companions wondered, ridiculed, misinterpreted, and made fewer hits as
well as fewer misses. His anxiety to "get in and share," made him,
according to Johnson, an "unsocial" companion. "Goldsmith," he said,
"had not temper enough for the game he played. He staked too much. A man
might always get a fall from his inferior in the chances of talk, and
Goldsmith felt his falls too keenly." He had certainly some trials of
temper in Johnson's company. "Stay, stay," said a German, stopping him
in the full flow of his eloquence, "Toctor Johnson is going to say
something." An Eton Master called Graham, who was supping with the two
doctors, and had got to the pitch of looking at one person, and talking
to another, said, "Doctor, I shall be glad to see _you_ at Eton." "I
shall be glad to wait on you," said Goldsmith. "No," replied Graham,
"'tis not you I mean, Doctor Minor; 'tis Doctor Major there." Poor
Goldsmith said afterwards, "Graham is a fellow to make one commit
suicide."
Boswell who attributes some of Goldsmith's sayings about Johnson to
envy, said with probable truth that Goldsmith had not more envy than
others, but only spoke of it more freely. Johnson argued that we must be
angry with a man who had so much of an odious quality that he could not
keep it to himself, but let it "boil over." The feeling, at any rate,
was momentary and totally free from malice; and Goldsmith's criticisms
upon Johnson and his idolators seem to have been fair enough. His
objection to Boswell's substituting a monarchy for a republic has
already been mentioned. At another time he checked Boswell's flow of
panegyric by asking, "Is he like Burke, who winds into a subject like a
serpent?" To which Boswell replied with charming irrelevance, "Johnson
is the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle." The last of
Goldsmith's hits was suggested by Johnson's shaking his sides with
laughter because Goldsmith admired the skill with which the little
fishes in the fable were made to talk in character. "Why, Dr. Johnson,
this is not so easy as you seem to think," was the retort, "for if you
were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales."
In spite of sundry little sparrings, Johnson fully appreciated
Goldsmith's genius. Possibly his authority hastened the spread of public
appreciation, as he seemed to claim, whilst repudiating Boswell's too
flattering theory that it had materially raised Goldsmith's position.
When Reynolds quoted the authority of Fox in favour of the _Traveller_,
saying that his friends might suspect that they had been too partial,
Johnson replied very truly that the _Traveller_ was beyond the need of
Fox's praise, and that the partiality of Goldsmith's friends had always
been against him. They would hardly give him a hearing. "Goldsmith," he
added, "was a man who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any
other man could do." Johnson's settled opinion in fact was that embodied
in the famous epitaph with its "nihil tetigit quod non ornavit," and,
though dedications are perhaps the only literary product more generally
insincere than epitaphs, we may believe that Goldsmith too meant what he
said in the dedication of _She Stoops to Conquer_. "It may do me some
honour to inform the public that I have lived many years in intimacy
with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to inform them that
the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most
unaffected piety."
Though Johnson was thus rich in friendship, two connexions have still
to be noticed which had an exceptional bearing upon his fame and
happiness. In January, 1765, he made the acquaintance of the Thrales.
Mr. Thrale was the proprietor of the brewery which afterwards became
that of Barclay and Perkins. He was married in 1763 to a Miss Hester
Lynch Salisbury, who has become celebrated from her friendship with
Johnson.[1] She was a woman of great vivacity and independence of
character. She had a sensitive and passionate, if not a very tender
nature, and enough literary culture to appreciate Johnson's intellectual
power, and on occasion to play a very respectable part in conversation.
She had far more Latin and English scholarship than fell to the lot of
most ladies of her day, and wit enough to preserve her from degenerating
like some of the "blues," into that most offensive of beings--a feminine
prig. Her marriage had been one of convenience, and her husband's want
of sympathy, and jealousy of any interference in business matters,
forced her, she says, to take to literature as her sole resource. "No
wonder," she adds, "if I loved my books and children." It is, perhaps,
more to be wondered at that her children seem to have had a rather
subordinate place in her affections. The marriage, however, though not
of the happiest, was perfectly decorous. Mrs. Thrale discharged her
domestic duties irreproachably, even when she seems to have had some
real cause of complaint. To the world she eclipsed her husband, a solid
respectable man, whose mind, according to Johnson, struck the hours very
regularly, though it did not mark the minutes.
[Footnote 1: Mrs. Thrale was born in 1740 or 1741, probably the latter.
Thrale was born in 1724.]
The Thrales were introduced to Johnson by their common friend, Arthur
Murphy, an actor and dramatist, who afterwards became the editor of
Johnson's works. One day, when calling upon Johnson, they found him in
such a fit of despair that Thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing his
hand before it. The pair then joined in begging Johnson to leave his
solitary abode, and come to them at their country-house at Streatham. He
complied, and for the next sixteen years a room was set apart for him,
both at Streatham and in their house in Southwark. He passed a large
part of his time with them, and derived from the intimacy most of the
comfort of his later years. He treated Mrs. Thrale with a kind of
paternal gallantry, her age at the time of their acquaintance being
about twenty-four, and his fifty-five. He generally called her by the
playful name of "my mistress," addressed little poems to her, gave her
solid advice, and gradually came to confide to her his miseries and
ailments with rather surprising frankness. She flattered and amused him,
and soothed his sufferings and did something towards humanizing his
rugged exterior. There was one little grievance between them which
requires notice. Johnson's pet virtue in private life was a rigid regard
for truth. He spoke, it was said of him, as if he was always on oath. He
would not, for example, allow his servant to use the phrase "not at
home," and even in the heat of conversation resisted the temptation to
give point to an anecdote. The lively Mrs. Thrale rather fretted against
the restraint, and Johnson admonished her in vain. He complained to
Boswell that she was willing to have that said of her, which the best of
mankind had died rather than have said of them. Boswell, the faithful
imitator of his master in this respect, delighted in taking up the
parable. "Now, madam, give me leave to catch you in the fact," he said
on one occasion; "it was not an old woman, but an old man whom I
mentioned, as having told me this," and he recounts his check to the
"lively lady" with intense complacency. As may be imagined, Boswell and
Mrs. Thrale did not love each other, in spite of the well-meant efforts
of the sage to bring about a friendly feeling between his disciples.
It is time to close this list of friends with the inimitable Boswell.
James Boswell, born in 1740, was the eldest son of a Whig laird and lord
of sessions. He had acquired some English friends at the Scotch
universities, among whom must be mentioned Mr. Temple, an English
clergyman. Boswell's correspondence with Temple, discovered years after
his death by a singular chance, and published in 1857, is, after the
Life of Johnson, one of the most curious exhibitions of character in the
language. Boswell was intended for the Scotch bar, and studied civil law
at Utrecht in the winter of 1762. It was in the following summer that he
made Johnson's acquaintance.
Perhaps the fundamental quality in Boswell's character was his intense
capacity for enjoyment. He was, as Mr. Carlyle puts it, "gluttonously
fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a
stomachic character." His love of good living and good drink would have
made him a hearty admirer of his countryman, Burns, had Burns been
famous in Boswell's youth. Nobody could have joined with more thorough
abandonment in the chorus to the poet's liveliest songs in praise of
love and wine. He would have made an excellent fourth when "Willie
brewed a peck of malt, and Rab and Allan came to see," and the drinking
contest for the Whistle commemorated in another lyric would have excited
his keenest interest. He was always delighted when he could get Johnson
to discuss the ethics and statistics of drinking. "I am myself," he
says, "a lover of wine, and therefore curious to hear whatever is
remarkable concerning drinking." The remark is _à propos_ to a story of
Dr. Campbell drinking thirteen bottles of port at a sitting. Lest this
should seem incredible, he quotes Johnson's dictum. "Sir, if a man
drinks very slowly and lets one glass evaporate before he takes another,
I know not how long he may drink." Boswell's faculty for making love was
as great as his power of drinking. His letters to Temple record with
amusing frankness the vicissitudes of some of his courtships and the
versatility of his passions.
Boswell's tastes, however, were by no means limited to sensual or
frivolous enjoyments. His appreciation of the bottle was combined with
an equally hearty sensibility to more intellectual pleasures. He had not
a spark of philosophic or poetic power, but within the ordinary range of
such topics as can be discussed at a dinner-party, he had an abundant
share of liveliness and intelligence. His palate was as keen for good
talk as for good wine. He was an admirable recipient, if not an
originator, of shrewd or humorous remarks upon life and manners. What in
regard to sensual enjoyment was mere gluttony, appeared in higher
matters as an insatiable curiosity. At times this faculty became
intolerable to his neighbours. "I will not be baited with what and why,"
said poor Johnson, one day in desperation. "Why is a cow's tail long?
Why is a fox's tail bushy?" "Sir," said Johnson on another occasion,
when Boswell was cross-examining a third person about him in his
presence. "You have but two subjects, yourself and me. I am sick of
both." Boswell, however, was not to be repelled by such a retort as
this, or even by ruder rebuffs. Once when discussing the means of
getting a friend to leave London, Johnson said in revenge for a previous
offence, "Nay, sir, we'll send you to him. If your presence doesn't
drive a man out of his house, nothing will." Boswell was "horribly
shocked," but he still stuck to his victim like a leech, and pried into
the minutest details of his life and manners. He observed with
conscientious accuracy that though Johnson abstained from milk one
fast-day, he did not reject it when put in his cup. He notes the
whistlings and puffings, the trick of saying "too-too-too" of his idol:
and it was a proud day when he won a bet by venturing to ask Johnson
what he did with certain scraped bits of orange-peel. His curiosity was
not satisfied on this occasion; but it would have made him the prince of
interviewers in these days. Nothing delighted him so much as rubbing
shoulders with any famous or notorious person. He scraped acquaintance
with Voltaire, Wesley, Rousseau, and Paoli, as well as with Mrs. Rudd, a
forgotten heroine of the _Newgate Calendar_. He was as eager to talk to
Hume the sceptic, or Wilkes the demagogue, as to the orthodox Tory,
Johnson; and, if repelled, it was from no deficiency in daring. In 1767,
he took advantage of his travels in Corsica to introduce himself to Lord
Chatham, then Prime Minister. The letter moderately ends by asking,
"_Could your lordship find time to honour me now and then with a
letter?_ I have been told how favourably your lordship has spoken of me.
To correspond with a Paoli and with a Chatham is enough to keep a young
man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame." No other young man of
the day, we may be sure, would have dared to make such a proposal to the
majestic orator.
His absurd vanity, and the greedy craving for notoriety at any cost,
would have made Boswell the most offensive of mortals, had not his
unfeigned good-humour disarmed enmity. Nobody could help laughing, or be
inclined to take offence at his harmless absurdities. Burke said of him
that he had so much good-humour naturally, that it was scarcely a
virtue. His vanity, in fact, did not generate affectation. Most vain men
are vain of qualities which they do not really possess, or possess in a
lower degree than they fancy. They are always acting a part, and become
touchy from a half-conscious sense of the imposture. But Boswell seems
to have had few such illusions. He thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoyed
his own peculiarities, and thought his real self much too charming an
object to be in need of any disguise. No man, therefore, was ever less
embarrassed by any regard for his own dignity. He was as ready to join
in a laugh at himself as in a laugh at his neighbours. He reveals his
own absurdities to the world at large as frankly as Pepys confided them
to a journal in cypher. He tells us how drunk he got one night in Skye,
and how he cured his headache with brandy next morning; and what an
intolerable fool he made of himself at an evening party in London after
a dinner with the Duke of Montrose, and how Johnson in vain did his best
to keep him quiet. His motive for the concession is partly the wish to
illustrate Johnson's indulgence, and, in the last case, to introduce a
copy of apologetic verses to the lady whose guest he had been. He
reveals other weaknesses with equal frankness. One day, he says, "I
owned to Johnson that I was occasionally troubled with a fit of
narrowness." "Why, sir," said he, "so am I. _But I do not tell it_."
Boswell enjoys the joke far too heartily to act upon the advice.
There is nothing, however, which Boswell seems to have enjoyed more
heartily than his own good impulses. He looks upon his virtuous
resolution with a sort of aesthetic satisfaction, and with the glow of a
virtuous man contemplating a promising penitent. Whilst suffering
severely from the consequences of imprudent conduct, he gets a letter of
virtuous advice from his friend Temple. He instantly sees himself
reformed for the rest of his days. "My warm imagination," he says,
"looks forward with great complacency on the sobriety, the
healthfulness, and worth of my future life." "Every instance of our
doing those things which we ought not to have done, and leaving undone
those things which we ought to have done, is attended," as he elsewhere
sagely observes, "with more or less of what is truly remorse;" but he
seems rather to have enjoyed even the remorse. It is needless to say
that the complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution
vanished like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told
Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate
sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and
of daring resolution so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest of
the [purely hypothetical] battle." "Sir," replied Johnson, "I should
never hear it, if it made me such a fool." Elsewhere he expresses a wish
to "fly to the woods," or retire into a desert, a disposition which
Johnson checked by one of his habitual gibes at the quantity of easily
accessible desert in Scotland. Boswell is equally frank in describing
himself in situations more provocative of contempt than even drunkenness
in a drawing-room. He tells us how dreadfully frightened he was by a
storm at sea in the Hebrides, and how one of his companions, "with a
happy readiness," made him lay hold of a rope fastened to the masthead,
and told him to pull it when he was ordered. Boswell was thus kept
quiet in mind and harmless in body.
This extreme simplicity of character makes poor Boswell loveable in his
way. If he sought notoriety, he did not so far mistake his powers as to
set up for independent notoriety.[1] He was content to shine in
reflected light: and the affectations with which he is charged seem to
have been unconscious imitations of his great idol. Miss Burney traced
some likeness even in his dress. In the later part of the _Life_ we meet
phrases in which Boswell is evidently aping the true Johnsonian style.
So, for example, when somebody distinguishes between "moral" and
"physical necessity;" Boswell exclaims, "Alas, sir, they come both to
the same thing. You may be as hard bound by chains when covered by
leather, as when the iron appears." But he specially emulates the
profound melancholy of his hero. He seems to have taken pride in his
sufferings from hypochondria; though, in truth, his melancholy diverges
from Johnson's by as great a difference as that which divides any two
varieties in Jaques's classification. Boswell's was the melancholy of a
man who spends too much, drinks too much, falls in love too often, and
is forced to live in the country in dependence upon a stern old parent,
when he is longing for a jovial life in London taverns. Still he was
excusably vexed when Johnson refused to believe in the reality of his
complaints, and showed scant sympathy to his noisy would-be
fellow-sufferer. Some of Boswell's freaks were, in fact, very trying.
Once he gave up writing letters for a long time, to see whether Johnson
would be induced to write first. Johnson became anxious, though he
half-guessed the truth, and in reference to Boswell's confession gave
his disciple a piece of his mind. "Remember that all tricks are either
knavish or childish, and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon
the constancy of a friend as upon the chastity of a wife."
[Footnote 1: The story is often told how Boswell appeared at the
Stratford Jubilee with "Corsica Boswell" in large letters on his hat.
The account given apparently by himself is sufficiently amusing, but the
statement is not quite fair. Boswell not unnaturally appeared at a
masquerade in the dress of a Corsican chief, and the inscription on his
hat seems to have been "Viva la Libertà."]
In other ways Boswell was more successful in aping his friend's
peculiarities. When in company with Johnson, he became delightfully
pious. "My dear sir," he exclaimed once with unrestrained fervour, "I
would fain be a good man, and I am very good now. I fear God and honour
the king; I wish to do no ill and to be benevolent to all mankind."
Boswell hopes, "for the felicity of human nature," that many experience
this mood; though Johnson judiciously suggested that he should not trust
too much to impressions. In some matters Boswell showed a touch of
independence by outvying the Johnsonian prejudices. He was a warm
admirer of feudal principles, and especially held to the propriety of
entailing property upon heirs male. Johnson had great difficulty in
persuading him to yield to his father's wishes, in a settlement of the
estate which contravened this theory. But Boswell takes care to declare
that his opinion was not shaken. "Yet let me not be thought," he adds,
"harsh or unkind to daughters; for my notion is that they should be
treated with great affection and tenderness, and always participate of
the prosperity of the family." His estimate of female rights is
indicated in another phrase. When Mrs. Knowles, the Quaker, expressed a
hope that the sexes would be equal in another world, Boswell replied,
"That is too ambitious, madam. _We_ might as well desire to be equal
with the angels." Boswell, again, differed from Johnson--who, in spite
of his love of authority, had a righteous hatred for all recognized
tyranny--by advocating the slave-trade. To abolish that trade would, he
says, be robbery of the masters and cruelty to the African savages. Nay,
he declares, to abolish it would be
To shut the gates of mercy on mankind!
Boswell was, according to Johnson, "the best travelling companion in the
world." In fact, for such purposes, unfailing good-humour and readiness
to make talk at all hazards are high recommendations. "If, sir, you were
shut up in a castle and a new-born baby with you, what would you do?" is
one of his questions to Johnson,--_à propos_ of nothing. That is
exquisitely ludicrous, no doubt; but a man capable of preferring such a
remark to silence helps at any rate to keep the ball rolling. A more
objectionable trick was his habit not only of asking preposterous or
indiscreet questions, but of setting people by the ears out of sheer
curiosity. The appearance of so queer a satellite excited astonishment
among Johnson's friends. "Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?"
asked some one. "He is not a cur," replied Goldsmith; "he is only a bur.
Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of
sticking." The bur stuck till the end of Johnson's life. Boswell visited
London whenever he could, and soon began taking careful notes of
Johnson's talk. His appearance, when engaged in this task long
afterwards, is described by Miss Burney. Boswell, she says, concentrated
his whole attention upon his idol, not even answering questions from
others. When Johnson spoke, his eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant
his ear almost on the Doctor's shoulder; his mouth dropped open to
catch every syllable; and he seemed to listen even to Johnson's
breathings as though they had some mystical significance. He took every
opportunity of edging himself close to Johnson's side even at
meal-times, and was sometimes ordered imperiously back to his place like
a faithful but over-obtrusive spaniel.
It is hardly surprising that Johnson should have been touched by the
fidelity of this queer follower. Boswell, modestly enough, attributes
Johnson's easy welcome to his interest in all manifestations of the
human mind, and his pleasure in an undisguised display of its workings.
The last pleasure was certainly to be obtained in Boswell's society. But
in fact Boswell, though his qualities were too much those of the
ordinary "good fellow," was not without virtues, and still less without
remarkable talents. He was, to all appearance, a man of really generous
sympathies, and capable of appreciating proofs of a warm heart and a
vigorous understanding. Foolish, vain, and absurd in every way, he was
yet a far kindlier and more genuine man than many who laughed at him.
His singular gifts as an observer could only escape notice from a
careless or inexperienced reader. Boswell has a little of the true
Shaksperian secret. He lets his characters show themselves without
obtruding unnecessary comment. He never misses the point of a story,
though he does not ostentatiously call our attention to it. He gives
just what is wanted to indicate character, or to explain the full
meaning of a repartee. It is not till we compare his reports with those
of less skilful hearers, that we can appreciate the skill with which the
essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by
a few telling touches. We are tempted to fancy that we have heard the
very thing, and rashly infer that Boswell was simply the mechanical
transmitter of the good things uttered. Any one who will try to put
down the pith of a brilliant conversation within the same space, may
soon satisfy himself of the absurdity of such an hypothesis, and will
learn to appreciate Boswell's powers not only of memory but artistic
representation. Such a feat implies not only admirable quickness of
appreciation, but a rare literary faculty. Boswell's accuracy is
remarkable; but it is the least part of his merit.
The book which so faithfully reflects the peculiarities of its hero and
its author became the first specimen of a new literary type. Johnson
himself was a master in one kind of biography; that which sets forth a
condensed and vigorous statement of the essentials of a man's life and
character. Other biographers had given excellent memoirs of men
considered in relation to the chief historical currents of the time. But
a full-length portrait of a man's domestic life with enough picturesque
detail to enable us to see him through the eyes of private friendship
did not exist in the language. Boswell's originality and merit may be
tested by comparing his book to the ponderous performance of Sir John
Hawkins, or to the dreary dissertations, falsely called lives, of which
Dugald Stewart's _Life of Robertson_ may be taken for a type. The writer
is so anxious to be dignified and philosophical that the despairing
reader seeks in vain for a single vivid touch, and discovers even the
main facts of the hero's life by some indirect allusion. Boswell's
example has been more or less followed by innumerable successors; and we
owe it in some degree to his example that we have such delightful books
as Lockhart's _Life of Scott_ or Mr. Trevelyan's _Life of Macaulay_. Yet
no later biographer has been quite as fortunate in a subject; and
Boswell remains as not only the first, but the best of his class.
One special merit implies something like genius. Macaulay has given to
the usual complaint which distorts the vision of most biographers the
name of _lues Boswelliana_. It is true that Boswell's adoration of his
hero is a typical example of the feeling. But that which distinguishes
Boswell, and renders the phrase unjust, is that in him adoration never
hindered accuracy of portraiture. "I will not make my tiger a cat to
please anybody," was his answer to well-meaning entreaties of Hannah
More to soften his accounts of Johnson's asperities. He saw
instinctively that a man who is worth anything loses far more than he
gains by such posthumous flattery. The whole picture is toned down, and
the lights are depressed as well as the shadows. The truth is that it is
unscientific to consider a man as a bundle of separate good and bad
qualities, of which one half may be concealed without injury to the
rest. Johnson's fits of bad temper, like Goldsmith's blundering, must be
unsparingly revealed by a biographer, because they are in fact
expressions of the whole character. It is necessary to take them into
account in order really to understand either the merits or the
shortcomings. When they are softened or omitted, the whole story becomes
an enigma, and we are often tempted to substitute some less creditable
explanation of errors for the true one. We should not do justice to
Johnson's intense tenderness, if we did not see how often it was masked
by an irritability pardonable in itself, and not affecting the deeper
springs of action. To bring out the beauty of a character by means of
its external oddities is the triumph of a kindly humourist; and Boswell
would have acted as absurdly in suppressing Johnson's weaknesses, as
Sterne would have done had he made Uncle Toby a perfectly sound and
rational person. But to see this required an insight so rare that it is
wanting in nearly all the biographers who have followed Boswell's
steps, and is the most conclusive proof that Boswell was a man of a
higher intellectual capacity than has been generally admitted.