of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly
enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own.
When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like
a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine
philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity
as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote
the happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The 5
horror which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale,
plum-porridge, mince-pies, and dancing-bears, excited his contempt.
To the arguments urged by some very worthy people against
showy dress he replied with admirable sense and spirit, "Let
us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace 10
off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls
and tongues. Alas! sir, the man who cannot get to heaven in
a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey
one." Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as
unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his 15
zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths
altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity.
He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once committed
the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he
thought it his duty to pass several months without joining in 20
public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not
been ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety
of his neighbours was somewhat singular. "Campbell," said
he, "is a good man, a pious man. I am afraid he has not
been in the inside of a church for many years; but he never 25
passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he has
good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many
pious robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could
easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after
Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about 30
seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose religious
mummeries only aggravated his guilt. But a man who
took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated
must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles.
Johnson could easily see that those persons who looked on
a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful, deemed most ignobly
of the attributes of God and of the ends of revelation. But
with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed
any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption 5
of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns.
21. Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of
patriotism. Nobody saw more clearly the error of those who
regarded liberty, not as a means, but as an end, and who
proposed to themselves, as the object of their pursuit, the 10
prosperity of the state as distinct from the prosperity of the
individuals who compose the state. His calm and settled opinion
seems to have been that forms of government have little or no
influence on the happiness of society. This opinion, erroneous
as it is, ought at least to have preserved him from all 15
intemperance on political questions. It did not, however, preserve
him from the lowest, fiercest, and most absurd extravagances of
party-spirit, from rants which, in every thing but the diction,
resembled those of Squire Western. He was, as a politician,
half ice and half fire. On the side of his intellect he was a 20
mere Pococurante, far too apathetic about public affairs, far too
sceptical as to the good or evil tendency of any form of polity.
His passions, on the contrary, were violent even to slaying
against all who leaned to Whiggish principles. The well-known
lines which he inserted in Goldsmith's Traveller express 25
what seems to have been his deliberate judgment:
"How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!"
He had previously put expressions very similar into the mouth
of Rasselas. It is amusing to contrast these passages with the 30
torrents of raving abuse which he poured forth against the
Long Parliament and the American Congress. In one of the
conversations reported by Boswell this inconsistency displays
itself in the most ludicrous manner.
22. "Sir Adam Ferguson," says Boswell, "suggested that
luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty.
JOHNSON: 'Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half
a guinea to live under one form of government rather than
another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. 5
Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private
man. What Frenchman is prevented passing his life as he
pleases?' SIR ADAM: 'But, sir, in the British constitution it
is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as
to preserve a balance against the crown.' JOHNSON: 'Sir, I 10
perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of
the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough.'"
23. One of the old philosophers, Lord Bacon tells us, used
to say that life and death were just the same to him. "Why,
then," said an objector, "do you not kill yourself?" The 15
philosopher answered, "Because it is just the same." If
the difference between two forms of government be not
worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can
be viler than Toryism, or how the crown can have too little
power. If the happiness of individuals is not affected by 20
political abuses, zeal for liberty is doubtless ridiculous. But
zeal for monarchy must be equally so. No person would
have been more quick-sighted than Johnson to such a contradiction
as this in the logic of an antagonist.
24. The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, 25
in his own time, regarded with superstitious veneration, and, in
our time, are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt.
They are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding.
The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted
fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits, 30
he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have
enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him.
25. How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises
so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of
the great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency
may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages.
Those writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in
arguing on their wretched data, that a modern reader is perpetually
at a loss to comprehend how such minds came by 5
such data. Not a flaw in the superstructure of the theory
which they are rearing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are
blind to the obvious unsoundness of the foundation. It is
the same with some eminent lawyers. Their legal arguments
are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies 10
and the most refined distinctions. The principles of
their arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-book
and the reports being once assumed as the foundations of
reasoning, these men must be allowed to be perfect masters
of logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates on which 15
their whole system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the
fundamental maxims of that system which they have passed
their lives in studying, these very men often talk the language
of savages or of children. Those who have listened to a man
of this class in his own court, and who have witnessed the skill 20
with which he analyses and digests a vast mass of evidence, or
reconciles a crowd of precedents which at first sight seem
contradictory, scarcely know him again when, a few hours later,
they hear him speaking on the other side of Westminster
Hall in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely believe 25
that the paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a storm
of coughing, and which do not impose on the plainest country
gentleman, can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous
intellect which had excited their admiration under the same
roof, and on the same day. 30
26. Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not
like a legislator. He never examined foundations where a
point was already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested
on pure assumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent
or an authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason
drawn from the nature of things. He took it for granted that
the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he
had been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and
which he had himself written with success, was the best kind 5
of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid
it down as an undeniable proposition that during the latter
part of the seventeenth century, and the earlier part of the
eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant progress
of improvement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope, had 10
been, according to him, the great reformers. He judged of
all works of the imagination by the standard established among
his own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have
been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the
Æneid a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed he well might 15
have thought so; for he preferred Pope's Iliad to Homer's.
He pronounced that, after Hoole's translation of Tasso, Fairfax's
would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in
our fine old English ballads, and always spoke with the most
provoking contempt of Percy's fondness for them. Of the 20
great original works of imagination which appeared during
his time, Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration.
He could see little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's
Travels, or in Tristram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of
Indolence, he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation, 25
of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed
on the Creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore.
Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill
was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for the trash
of Macpherson was indeed just; but it was, we suspect, 30
just by chance. He despised the Fingal for the very reason
which led many men of genius to admire it. He despised it,
not because it was essentially commonplace, but because it
had a superficial air of originality.
27. He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions
fashioned on his own principles. But when a deeper philosophy
was required, when he undertook to pronounce judgment
on the works of those great minds which "yield homage
only to eternal laws," his failure was ignominious. He criticised 5
Pope's Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on
Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us for the
most part as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer
himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that
ever lived. 10
28. Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects can be
compared only to that strange nervous feeling which made him
uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre
tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs
to English epitaphs is an instance. An English epitaph, he 15
said, would disgrace Smollett. He declared that he would not
pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English epitaph
on Goldsmith. What reason there can be for celebrating a
British writer in Latin, which there was not for covering the
Roman arches of triumph with Greek inscriptions, or for 20
commemorating the deeds of the heroes of Thermopylæ in
Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine.
29. On men and manners, at least on the men and manners
of a particular place and a particular age, Johnson had
certainly looked with a most observant and discriminating eye. 25
His remarks on the education of children, on marriage, on
the economy of families, on the rules of society, are always
striking, and generally sound. In his writings, indeed, the
knowledge of life which he possessed in an eminent degree is
very imperfectly exhibited. Like those unfortunate chiefs of 30
the middle ages who were suffocated by their own chain-mail
and cloth of gold, his maxims perish under that load of words
which was designed for their defence and their ornament.
But it is clear from the remains of his conversation, that he
had more of that homely wisdom which nothing but experience
and observation can give than any writer since the time
of Swift. If he had been content to write as he talked, he
might have left books on the practical art of living superior
to the Directions to Servants. 5
30. Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on
literature, indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness
as for strength. He was no master of the great science
of human nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but
the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant 10
with all the forms of life and all the shades of moral
and intellectual character which were to be seen from Islington
to the Thames, and from Hyde-Park corner to Mile-end green.
But his philosophy stopped at the first turnpike-gate. Of the
rural life of England he knew nothing; and he took it for 15
granted that every body who lived in the country was either
stupid or miserable. "Country gentlemen," said he, "must
be unhappy; for they have not enough to keep their lives in
motion"; as if all those peculiar habits and associations which
made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the 20
world to himself had been essential parts of human nature.
Of remote countries and past times he talked with wild and
ignorant presumption. "The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes,"
he said to Mrs. Thrale, "were a people of brutes, a
barbarous people." In conversation with Sir Adam Ferguson 25
he used similar language. "The boasted Athenians," he said,
"were barbarians. The mass of every people must be barbarous
where there is no printing." The fact was this: he saw that
a Londoner who could not read was a very stupid and brutal
fellow: he saw that great refinement of taste and activity of 30
intellect were rarely found in a Londoner who had not read
much; and, because it was by means of books that people
acquired almost all their knowledge in the society with which
he was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest
and clearest evidence, that the human mind can be cultivated
by means of books alone. An Athenian citizen might possess
very few volumes; and the largest library to which he had
access might be much less valuable than Johnson's bookcase
in Bolt Court. But the Athenian might pass every morning 5
in conversation with Socrates, and might hear Pericles speak
four or five times every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles
and Aristophanes: he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias
and the paintings of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses
of Æschylus: he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the 10
street reciting the Shield of Achilles or the Death of Argus:
he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance,
revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under a liberal
and generous discipline: he was a judge, compelled every day
to weigh the effect of opposite arguments. These things were 15
in themselves an education, an education eminently fitted, not,
indeed, to form exact or profound thinkers, but to give quickness
to the perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to the
expression, and politeness to the manners. All this was overlooked.
An Athenian who did not improve his mind by reading 20
was, in Johnson's opinion, much such a person as a
Cockney who made his mark, much such a person as black
Frank before he went to school, and far inferior to a parish
clerk or a printer's devil.
31. Johnson's friends have allowed that he carried to a 25
ridiculous extreme his unjust contempt for foreigners. He
pronounced the French to be a very silly people, much behind
us, stupid, ignorant creatures. And this judgment he formed
after having been at Paris about a month, during which he
would not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an 30
advantage over him in conversation. He pronounced them,
also, to be an indelicate people, because a French footman
touched the sugar with his fingers. That ingenious and
amusing traveller, M. Simond, has defended his countrymen
very successfully against Johnson's accusation, and has pointed
out some English practices which, to an impartial spectator,
would seem at least as inconsistent with physical cleanliness
and social decorum as those which Johnson so bitterly reprehended.
To the sage, as Boswell loves to call him, it never 5
occurred to doubt that there must be something eternally
and immutably good in the usages to which he had been
accustomed. In fact, Johnson's remarks on society beyond
the bills of mortality, are generally of much the same kind
with those of honest Tom Dawson, the English footman in 10
Dr. Moore's Zeluco. "Suppose the king of France has no
sons, but only a daughter, then, when the king dies, this here
daughter, according to that there law, cannot be made queen,
but the next near relative, provided he is a man, is made king,
and not the last king's daughter, which, to be sure, is very 15
unjust. The French foot-guards are dressed in blue, and all
the marching regiments in white, which has a very foolish
appearance for soldiers; and as for blue regimentals, it is
only fit for the blue horse or the artillery."
32. Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a 20
state of society completely new to him; and a salutary suspicion
of his own deficiencies seems on that occasion to have
crossed his mind for the first time. He confessed, in the
last paragraph of his Journey, that his thoughts on national
manners were the thoughts of one who had seen but little, of 25
one who had passed his time almost wholly in cities. This
feeling, however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that to
the last he entertained a fixed contempt for all those modes
of life and those studies which tend to emancipate the mind
from the prejudices of a particular age or a particular nation. 30
Of foreign travel and of history he spoke with the fierce and
boisterous contempt of ignorance. "What does a man learn
by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling? What
did Lord Charlemont learn in his travels, except that there
was a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?" History was,
in his opinion, to use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an
old almanack: historians could, as he conceived, claim no
higher dignity than that of almanack-makers; and his favourite
historians were those who, like Lord Hailes, aspired to no 5
higher dignity. He always spoke with contempt of Robertson.
Hume he would not even read. He affronted one of
his friends for talking to him about Catiline's conspiracy, and
declared that he never desired to hear of the Punic war again
as long as he lived. 10
33. Assuredly one fact which does not directly affect our
own interests, considered in itself, is no better worth knowing
than another fact. The fact that there is a snake in a pyramid,
or the fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps, are in themselves
as unprofitable to us as the fact that there is a green 15
blind in a particular house in Threadneedle Street, or the
fact that a Mr. Smith comes into the city every morning on
the top of one of the Blackwall stages. But it is certain that
those who will not crack the shell of history will never get at
the kernel. Johnson, with hasty arrogance, pronounced the 20
kernel worthless, because he saw no value in the shell. The
real use of travelling to distant countries and of studying the
annals of past times is to preserve men from the contraction
of mind which those can hardly escape whose whole communion
is with one generation and one neighbourhood, who 25
arrive at conclusions by means of an induction not sufficiently
copious, and who therefore constantly confound exceptions
with rules, and accidents with essential properties. In
short, the real use of travelling and of studying history is to
keep men from being what Tom Dawson was in fiction, and 30
Samuel Johnson in reality.
34. Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears
far greater in Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation
appears to have been quite equal to his writings in
matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked,
he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural
expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for
the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his
books are written in a learned language, in a language which 5
nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, in a language in
which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love,
in a language in which nobody ever thinks. It is clear that
Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he
wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were 10
simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication
he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese.
His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original
of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the
translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. 15
"When we were taken up stairs," says he in one of his letters,
"a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us
was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journey as
follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose
started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from 20
the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. "The
Rehearsal," he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to
keep it sweet"; then, after a pause, "it has not vitality
enough to preserve it from putrefaction."
35. Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, 25
when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers,
for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of
Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit
easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle,
and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always 30
offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
36. The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to
all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it
is almost superfluous to point them out. It is well known
that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those
strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which
the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that
he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own
speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and 5
Latin, and which therefore, even when lawfully naturalised,
must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with
the king's English. His constant practice of padding out a
sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the
bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, 10
constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the
ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his
harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and
easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to
the expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities 15
have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his
assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.
37. Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly,
"If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you
would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely 20
ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether
he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an
empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he
wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech,
like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him 25
under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely
as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay
Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her
relations in such terms as these: "I was surprised, after the
civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure 30
and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if
well conducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of
care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every
face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle
Tranquilla informs us, that she "had not passed the earlier
part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of
triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the
murmurs of envy and the gratulations of applause, had been
attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, 5
and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the
obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of
love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats
with a worse grace. The reader may well cry out,
with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman has 10
a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler."[19]