Would never from my heart.’”
No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void left by
the original. The second beauty may be equal or superior to the first;
but still it is not she.
The reasons which Mr. Croker has given for incorporating passages from
Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale with the narrative of Boswell would
vindicate the adulteration of half the classical works in the language.
If Pepys’s Diary and Mrs. Hutchinson’s Memoirs had been published a
hundred years ago, no human being can doubt that Mr. Hume would have
made great use of those books in his History of England. But would it,
on that account, be judicious in a writer of our times to publish an
edition of Hume’s History of England, in which large extracts from
Pepys and Mrs. Hutchinson should be incorporated with the original text?
Surely not. Hume’s history, be its faults what they may, is now one
great entire work, the production of one vigorous mind, working on such
materials as were within its reach. Additions made by another hand may
supply a particular deficiency, but would grievously injure the general
effect. With Boswell’s book the case is stronger. There is scarcely,
in the whole compass of literature, a book which bears interpolation so
ill. We know no production of the human mind which has so much of what
may be called the race, so much of the peculiar flavour of the soil from
which it sprang. The work could never have been written if the writer
had not been precisely what he was. His character is displayed in every
page, and {391}this display of character gives a delightful interest to
many passages which have no other interest.
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is
not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the
first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no
second. He has distanced all his competitors so decided that it is not
worth while to place them. Eclipse r first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human
intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men
that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest
men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to
give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who
knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not
having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name
as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing stock of the
whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part
of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent
man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always
earning some ridiculous nickname, and then “binding it as a crown unto
him,” not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at
the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-won,
with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell.
In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was
known by the appellation of {392}Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent
shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and
eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping
to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of
London, so curious to know every body who was talked about, that, Tory
and high Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an
introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions,
that when he had been to court, he drove to the office where his
book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the
printer’s devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man,
and such he was contented and proud to be. Every thing which another man
would have hidden, every thing the publication of which would have made
another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation
to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said, what bitter
retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil
presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking
from a drunken doze, he read the prayerbook and took a hair of the
dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away
maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his
babies because she was not scared at Johnson’s ugly face, how he was
frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as
they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork’s one
evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent
he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put
down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at
his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his
{393}bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he
proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride
and ostentations rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the
illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles
in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect
unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is
impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He
has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as
himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world
is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted
themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has
indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being
“Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come
in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary
eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason
of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have
been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest
and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness,
the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toadeating, the insensibility
to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He
was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his
own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who
never scrupled to repay the most {394}liberal hospitality by the basest
violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without
sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when
he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he
has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed
such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers,
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which
is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we
do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of
fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he
is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a
retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense
and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him
conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,
they have made him immortal.
Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly
worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of
the character of the {395}writer. Bad in themselves, they are good
dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice Shallow, the clipped
English of Dr. Cains, or the misplaced consonants of Fluellen. Of all
confessors, Boswell is the most candid. Other men who have pretended to
lay open their own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have
evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be then
most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any
man who would not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark
and tempestuous passions than proclaim all his little vanities and wild
fancies. It would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like
those of Cæsar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a daydream
like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most
men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to
be disclosed to the eve of friendship or of love, were precisely the
weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly
frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his
spirits prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His
book resembles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the
Palace of Truth.
His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be lasting; but it is
fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infamy.
We remember no other case in which the world has made so great a
distinction between a book and its author. In general, the book and
the author are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire
the author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only
exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be
interesting, instructive, eminently original: yet it has {396}brought
him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it: all the world delights
in it: yet we do not remember ever to have read or ever to have heard
any expression of respect and admiration for the man to whom we owe so
much instruction and amusement. While edition after edition of his book
was coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it,
and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and reasonable.
Sir Alexander saw that, in proportion, to the celebrity of the work,
was the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate
gentleman’s books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like those
Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his
person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr.
Croker, for example, has published two thousand five Mildred notes on
the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer whose
performance he has taken such pains to illustrate without some
expression of contempt.
An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the malignity of the
most malignant satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his thoughtless
loquacity. Having himself no sensibility to derision and contempt, he
took it for granted that all others were equally callous. He was not
ashamed to exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a common
tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of poverty, and to tell a
hundred stories of his own pertness and folly, and of the insults which
his pertness and folly brought upon him. It was natural that he should
show little discretion in cases in which the feelings or the honour of
others might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such stories
respecting persons whom he professed {397}to love and revere. He would
infallibly have made his hero as contemptible as he has made himself,
had not his hero really possessed some moral and intellectual qualities
of a very high order. The best proof that Johnson was really an
extraordinary man is that his character, instead of being degraded, has,
on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all his vices and
weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than they ever were exposed by
Churchill or by Ken-rick.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other
man in history. Every thing about him, his coat, his wig, his figure,
his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus’s dance, his rolling walk, his
blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation
of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with
plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the
posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps
of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutter-ings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous,
acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his
insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all
are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded
from childhood. But we have no minute information respecting those years
of Johnson’s life during which his character and his manners became
immutably fixed. We know him, not as he was known to the men of his own
generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been.
That celebrated club of {398}which he was the most distinguished member
contained few persons who could remember a time when his fame was not
fully established and his habits completely formed. He had made himself
a name in literature while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. He
was about twenty years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton,
about thirty years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about
forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham.
Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of
our knowledge respecting him, never saw him till long after he was fifty
years old, till most of his great works had become classical, and till
the pension bestowed on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty.
Of those eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the
close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew him
during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the capital,
was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during those years,
David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.
Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of
a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. It was a dark night
between two sunny days. The age of patronage had passed away. The age
of general curiosity and intelligence had not arrived. The number of
readers is at present so great that a popular author may subsist in
comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the reigns of
William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, even such men
as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live like
gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the
natural demand for literature was, at the close of the {399}seventeenth
and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, more than made up by
artificial encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premiums.
There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of literary merit
were so splendid, at which men who could write well found such easy
admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the highest
honours of the state. The chiefs of both the great parties into which
the kingdom was divided patronised literature with emulous munificence.
Congreve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for
his first comedy with places which made him independent for life. Smith,
though his Hippolytus and Phædra failed, would have been consoled with
three hundred a year but for his own folly. Rowe was not only Poet
Laureate, but also land-surveyor of the customs in the port of London,
clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the
Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the
Commissions of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative
Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of
Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed
in embassies of high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life
as apprentice to a silk mercer, became a secretary of legation at
five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second,
and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his introduction
into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his Auditorship of the
Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of the queen,
would have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand,
passed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that
ingenious {400}writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of
stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a commissioner
of the customs, and auditor of the imprest. Tickell was secretary to the
Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was secretary of state.
This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, by the
magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier in the court of
Charles the Second who possessed talents for composition which were
independent of the aid of a coronet. Montague owed his elevation to the
favour of Dorset, and imitated through the whole course of his life
the liberality to which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory
leaders, Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of
the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But soon after
the accession of the house of Hanover a change took place. The supreme
power passed to a man who cared little for poetry or eloquence. The
importance of the House of Commons was constantly on the increase.
The government was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary
support much of that patronage which had been employed in fostering
literary merit; and Walpole was by no means inclined to divert any part
of the fund of corruption to purposes which he considered as idle.
He had eminent talents for government and for debate. But he had paid
little attention to books, and felt little respect for authors. One of
the coarse jokes of his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far
more pleasing to him than Thomson’s Seasons or Richardson’s Pamela. He
had observed that some of the distinguished writers whom the favour of
Halifax had turned into statesmen had been mere encumbrances {401}to
their party, dawdlers in office, and mutes in Parliament. During the
whole course of his administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a
single man of genius. The best writers of the age gave all their support
to the opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent which,
after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust war, overthrew
the minister to make room for men less able and equally immoral. The
opposition could reward its eulogists with little more than promises and
caresses. St. James’s would give nothing: Leicester house had nothing to
give.
Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary career, a writer
had little to hope from the patronage of powerful individuals. The
patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable
subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low that
a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little
more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine
had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured
the good ears. The season of rich harvests was over, and the period of
famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be
summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like
a scarecrow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly
qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in
the King’s Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the
poorest pitied him; and they well might pity him. For if their condition
was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their
sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pairs of
stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten
hours a day for {402}the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs
from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to
St. George’s Fields, and from St. George’s Fields to the alleys behind
St. Martin’s church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of
a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a
parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived
thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the
Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, and would
have been entrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he
had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less
munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.
As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of life has
its peculiar temptations. The literary character, assuredly, has always
had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these
faults were now superadded the faults which are commonly found in men
whose livelihood is precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the
trial of severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the
beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched
lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. If
good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain
to be abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night
or a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged,
unwashed poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the
images of which his mind had been haunted while he was sleeping amidst
the cinders and eating potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A
week of taverns soon qualified him for another year of night-cellars.
{403}Such was the life of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others.
Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying
in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats
because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking Champagne and Tokay
with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house
in Porridge island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford
to taste; they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and
frugal life with the same aversion which an old gipsy or a Mohawk hunter
feels for a stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities of
civilised communities. They were as untameable, as much wedded to their
desolate freedom, as the wild ass. They could no more be broken into
the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to serve and
abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like beasts of a still
fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered to their necessities. To
assist them was impossible; and the most benevolent of mankind at length
became weary of giving relief which was dissipated with the wildest
profusion as soon as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the
wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might have supplied
him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of
sensuality, and, before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was
again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin
of beef at a subterraneous cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum
in their houses, those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and
taverns. All order was destroyed; all business was suspended. The most
good-natured host {404}began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man
of genius in distress when he heard his guest roaring for fresh punch at
five o’clock in the morning.
A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had been raised above
poverty by the active patronage which, in his youth, both the great
political parties had extended to his Homer. Young had received the only
pension ever bestowed, to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert
Walpole, as the reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many
poets who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in particular
and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the means of
subsistence from their political friends. Richardson, like a man of
sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him, which his novels, admirable
as they are, would scarcely have done. But nothing could be more
deplorable than the state even of the ablest men, who at that time
depended for subsistence on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding,
and Thomson, were certainly four of the most distinguished persons that
England produced during the eighteenth century. It is well known that
they were all four arrested for debt.
Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson plunged in his
twenty-eighth year. From that time till he was three or four and fifty,
we have little information respecting him; little, we mean, compared
with the full and accurate information which we possess respecting his
proceedings and habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at
length from cock-lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the
polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pension sufficient
for his wants had been conferred on him: and he came forth to astonish
a generation with which {405}he had almost as little in common as with
Frenchmen or Spaniards.
In his early years he had occasionally seen the great: hut he had seen
them as a beggar. He now came among them as a companion. The demand for
amusement and instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been
gradually increasing. The price of literary labour had risen; and those
rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth to associate were
for the most part persons widely different from those who had walked
about with him all night in the streets for want of a lodging. Burke,
Robertson, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir
William Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distinguished
writers of what may be called the second generation of the Johnsonian
age. Of these men Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace the
stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson first came up
to London, was common among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt
the pressure of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted into
the most respectable society on an equal footing. They were men of quite
a different species from the dependents of Curll and Osborne.
Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past age, the last
survivor of the genuine race of Grub Street hacks; the last of that
generation of authors whose abject misery and whose dissolute manners
had furnished inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From
nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his
manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his
moral character, some peculiarities appalling {406}to the civilised
beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity
of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous
exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange
abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence,
contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his
manners In society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he
lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An
original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full
information concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should
probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for
the most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which
he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind
the screen at St. John’s Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged
clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during
a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he
should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had
accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste
pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he
tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his
forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely
ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large
tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral
disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and
Boyse. The roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be
expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long
tried by the bitterest {407}calamities, by the want of meat, of fire,
and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of
booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by
that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are
the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the
heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly
pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural
that, in the exercise of his power, he should be “eo immitior, quia
tolera-verat,” that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and
humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For
severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent
relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a
delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of suffering which he
could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick
and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place
of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other
asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his
benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous;
and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded
affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was
not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that every body
ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was
angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for
grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These
were, in his phrase, “foppish lamentations,” which people ought to be
ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying
because the Good-natured {408}Man had failed, inspired him with no
pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised
valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser
absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. People whose hearts had
been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but
all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not
much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken
heart for the loss of her lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury
reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with
nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental
grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others
in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how
a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. “My dear
doctor,” said he to Goldsmith, “what harm does it do to a man to call
him Holofernes?”
“Pooh, ma’am,” he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, “who is the worse for being
talked of uncharitably?” Politeness has been well defined as
benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted
benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him than to
people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence halfpenny a
day.
The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great
powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of
his mind, we should place him almost as high as he was placed by the
idolatry of Boswell; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should
place him even below Boswell himself. Where {409}he was not under the
influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which
prevented him from boldly investigating a subject, he was a
wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a
little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon
by fallacies in argument or by exaggerated statements of fact. But if,
while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some
childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well managed
nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His
mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish
littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and
its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and
feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie,
whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might
seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the
dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the
charm of Solomon.
Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity the evidence
for all stories which were merely odd. But when they were not only odd
but miraculous, his severity relaxed. He began to be credulous precisely
at the point where the most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It
is curious to observe, both in his writings and in his conversation,
the contrast between the disdainful manner in which he rejects
unauthenticated anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the
general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he mentions
the wildest stories relating to the invisible world. A man who told him
of a water-spout or a meteoric stone generally had the lie {410}direct
given him for his pains. A man who told him of a prediction or a dream
wonderfully accomplished was sure of a courteous hearing. “Johnson,”
observed Hogarth, “like King David, says in his haste that all men are
liars.”
“His incredulity,” says Mrs. Thrale, “amounted almost to disease.”
She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who gave him an account of a
hurricane in the West Indies, and a poor quaker who related some strange
circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gibraltar.
“It is not so. It cannot be true. Don’t tell that story again. You
cannot think how poor a figure you make in telling it.” He once said,
half jestingly we suppose, that for six months he refused to credit the
fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still believed the extent
of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated. Yet he related with a grave
face how old Mr. Cave of St. John’s Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost
was something of a shadowy being. He went himself on a ghost-hunt, to
Cock Lane, and was angry with John Wesley for not following up another
scent of the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance. He rejects
the Celtic genealogies and poems without the least hesitation; yet he
declares himself willing to believe the stories of the second sight. If
he had examined the claims of the Highland seers with half the severity
with which he sifted the evidence for the genuineness of Fingal, he
would, we suspect, have come away from Scotland with a mind fully made
up. In his Lives of the Poets, we find that he is unwilling to give
credit to the accounts of Lord Roscommon’s early proficiency in his
studies; but he tells with great solemnity an absurd romance about some
intelligence preternaturally impressed on the mind of that nobleman. He
avows {411}himself to be in great doubt about the truth of the story,
and ends by warning his readers not wholly to slight such impressions.
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy 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 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 off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and
tongues. Alas! sir, a 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 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 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 {412}man, a pious
man. I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many
years; but he never 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 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 of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless
buns.
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 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 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 {413}Western.
He was, as a politician, half ice and half fire. On the side of his
intellect he was a 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 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 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.
“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. 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 perceive you are a vile
Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The
crown has not power enough.’”
One of the old philosophers, Lord Bacon tells us, used to say that life
and death were just the same to {414}him. “Why then,” said an objector,
“do you not kill yourself?” The 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 he
viler than Toryism, or how the crown can have too little power. If the
happiness of individuals is not affected by 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.
The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, 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, he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have
enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him.
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 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. {415}Their legal
arguments are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest
analogies 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 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 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 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.
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, {416}was the best kind 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
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 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 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, 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, 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
common-place, but because it had a superficial air of originality.
He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions {417}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 criticized Pope’s Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on
Shakspeare’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.
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. Hiss
preference of Latin epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An
English epitaph, he 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 commemorating the deeds of the heroes of
Thermopylæ in Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine.
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. 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 the middle
ages who were suffocated by their own chain-mail and cloth of gold,
his maxims perish under that {418}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.
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 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 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 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 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 {419}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 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 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 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 in
themselves an education, an education eminently fitted, not, indeed,
to farm 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 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. {420}Johnson’s friends have allowed that he carried to
a 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 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 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 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
unjust. The French footguards 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.”
Johnson’s visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a state of society
completely new to him; and a salutary {421}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 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. 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 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.
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 blind in a particular house in Threadneedle
Street, or the fact {422}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 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
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 Samuel Johnson in reality.
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 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
simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he
did his sentences out of English into {423}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. “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 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.”
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, 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 offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
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
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 {424}of padding out a sentence with useless
epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his
antithetical forms of expression, 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 have been
imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public
has become sick of the subject.
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 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
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 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 Tranquica
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 {425}the gratulations of
applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great,
the sprightly, 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 a great peard: I spy a great peard under
her muffler.” (1)
We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and
we must close it. We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from
the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed
his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced
us to read Boswell’s book again. As we close it, the club-room is before
us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons
for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the
canvass of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin
form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of
Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in
his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the
gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the
scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see
the heavy
(1) It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very
close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20). The
resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious
plagiarism.
{426}form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the “Why, sir!”
and the “What then, sir?” and the “No, sir!” and the “You don’t see your
way through the question, sir!”
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be
regarded in his own time as a classic, and in ours as a companion. To
receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius
have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately
known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case,
the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably
expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities
of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably
thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the
English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.