+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in |
| this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of |
| this document. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
VOL. II.
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
BY
LESLIE STEPHEN
_NEW EDITION, WITH ADDITIONS_
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1892
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME
PAGE
DR. JOHNSON'S WRITINGS 1
CRABBE 33
WILLIAM HAZLITT 67
DISRAELI'S NOVELS 106
MASSINGER 141
FIELDING'S NOVELS 177
COWPER AND ROUSSEAU 208
THE FIRST EDINBURGH REVIEWERS 241
WORDSWORTH'S ETHICS 270
LANDOR'S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 308
MACAULAY 343
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
_DR. JOHNSON'S WRITINGS_
A book appeared not long ago of which it was the professed object to
give to the modern generation of lazy readers the pith of Boswell's
immortal biography. I shall, for sufficient reasons, refrain from
discussing the merits of the performance. One remark, indeed, may be
made in passing. The circle of readers to whom such a book is welcome
must, of necessity, be limited. To the true lovers of Boswell it is, to
say the least, superfluous; the gentlest omissions will always mangle
some people's favourite passages, and additions, whatever skill they may
display, necessarily injure that dramatic vivacity which is one of the
great charms of the original. The most discreet of cicerones is an
intruder when we open our old favourite, and, without further magic,
retire into that delicious nook of eighteenth-century society. Upon
those, again, who cannot appreciate the infinite humour of the original,
the mere excision of the less lively pages will be thrown away. There
remains only that narrow margin of readers whose appetites, languid but
not extinct, can be titillated by the promise that they shall not have
the trouble of making their own selection. Let us wish them good
digestions, and, in spite of modern changes of fashion, more robust
taste for the future. I would still hope that to many readers Boswell
has been what he has certainly been to some, the first writer who gave
them a love of English literature, and the most charming of all
companions long after the bloom of novelty has departed. I subscribe
most cheerfully to Mr. Lewes's statement that he estimates his
acquaintances according to their estimate of Boswell. A man, indeed, may
be a good Christian, and an excellent father of a family, without loving
Johnson or Boswell, for a sense of humour is not one of the primary
virtues. But Boswell's is one of the very few books which, after many
years of familiarity, will still provoke a hearty laugh even in the
solitude of a study; and the laughter is of that kind which does one
good.
I do not wish, however, to pronounce one more eulogy upon an old friend,
but to say a few words on a question which he sometimes suggests.
Macaulay's well-known but provoking essay is more than usually lavish in
overstrained paradoxes. He has explicitly declared that Boswell wrote
one of the most charming of books because he was one of the greatest of
fools. And his remarks suggest, if they do not implicitly assert, that
Johnson wrote some of the most unreadable of books, although, if not
because, he possessed one of the most vigorous intellects of the time.
Carlyle has given a sufficient explanation of the first paradox; but the
second may justify a little further inquiry. As a general rule, the talk
of a great man is the reflection of his books. Nothing is so false as
the common saying that the presence of a distinguished writer is
generally disappointing. It exemplifies a very common delusion. People
are so impressed by the disparity which sometimes occurs, that they
take the exception for the rule. It is, of course, true that a man's
verbal utterances may differ materially from his written utterances. He
may, like Addison, be shy in company; he may, like many retired
students, be slow in collecting his thoughts; or he may, like Goldsmith,
be over-anxious to shine at all hazards. But a patient observer will
even then detect the essential identity under superficial differences;
and in the majority of cases, as in that of Macaulay himself, the
talking and the writing are palpably and almost absurdly similar. The
whole art of criticism consists in learning to know the human being who
is partially revealed to us in his spoken or his written words. Whatever
the means of communication, the problem is the same. The two methods of
inquiry may supplement each other; but their substantial agreement is
the test of their accuracy. If Johnson, as a writer, appears to us to be
a mere windbag and manufacturer of sesquipedalian verbiage, whilst, as a
talker, he appears to be one of the most genuine and deeply feeling of
men, we may be sure that our analysis has been somewhere defective. The
discrepancy is, of course, partly explained by the faults of Johnson's
style; but the explanation only removes the difficulty a degree further.
'The style is the man' is a very excellent aphorism, though some eminent
writers have lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark was_ le
style c'est de l'homme_. That only proves that, like many other good
sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process
of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by
a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be
correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration
which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. According to
Buffon, the style might belong to a man as an acquisition rather than to
natural growth. There are parasitical writers who, in the old phrase,
have 'formed their style,' by the imitation of accepted models, and who
have, therefore, possessed it only by right of appropriation. Boswell
has a discussion as to the writers who may have served Johnson in this
capacity. But, in fact, Johnson, like all other men of strong
idiosyncrasy, formed his style as he formed his legs. The peculiarities
of his limbs were in some degree the result of conscious efforts in
walking, swimming, and 'buffeting with his books.' This development was
doubtless more fully determined by the constitution which he brought
into the world, and the circumstances under which he was brought up. And
even that queer Johnsonese, which Macaulay supposes him to have adopted
in accordance with a more definite literary theory, will probably appear
to be the natural expression of certain innate tendencies, and of the
mental atmosphere which he breathed from youth. To appreciate fairly the
strangely cumbrous form of his written speech, we must penetrate more
deeply than may at first sight seem necessary beneath the outer rind of
this literary Behemoth. The difficulty of such spiritual dissection is,
indeed, very great; but some little light may be thrown upon the subject
by following out such indications as we possess.
The talking Johnson is sufficiently familiar to us. So far as Boswell
needs an interpreter, Carlyle has done all that can be done. He has
concentrated and explained what is diffused, and often unconsciously
indicated in Boswell's pages. When reading Boswell, we are half ashamed
of his power over our sympathies. It is like turning over a portfolio
of sketches, caricatured, inadequate, and each giving only some
imperfect aspect of the original. Macaulay's smart paradoxes only
increase our perplexity by throwing the superficial contrasts into
stronger relief. Carlyle, with true imaginative insight, gives us at
once the essence of Johnson; he brings before our eyes the luminous body
of which we had previously been conscious only by a series of imperfect
images refracted through a number of distorting media. To render such a
service effectually is the highest triumph of criticism; and it would be
impertinent to say again in feebler language what Carlyle has expressed
so forcibly. We may, however, recall certain general conclusions by way
of preface to the problem which he has not expressly considered, how far
Johnson succeeded in expressing himself through his writings.
The world, as Carlyle sees it, is composed, we all know, of two classes:
there are 'the dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and
thither, whithersoever they are led,' and there are a few superior
natures who can see and can will. There are, in other words, the heroes,
and those whose highest wisdom is to be hero-worshippers. Johnson's
glory is that he belonged to the sacred band, though he could not claim
within it the highest, or even a very high, rank. In the current
dialect, therefore, he was 'nowise a clothes-horse or patent digester,
but a genuine man.' Whatever the accuracy of the general doctrine, or of
certain corollaries which are drawn from it, the application to Johnson
explains one main condition of his power. Persons of colourless
imagination may hold--nor will we dispute their verdict--that Carlyle
overcharges his lights and shades, and brings his heroes into too
startling a contrast with the vulgar herd. Yet it is undeniable that
the great bulk of mankind are transmitters rather than originators of
spiritual force. Most of us are necessarily condemned to express our
thoughts in formulas which we have learnt from others and can but
slightly tinge with our feeble personality. Nor, as a rule, are we even
consistent disciples of any one school of thought. What we call our
opinions are mere bundles of incoherent formulæ, arbitrarily stitched
together because our reasoning faculties are too dull to make
inconsistency painful. Of the vast piles of books which load our
libraries, ninety-nine hundredths and more are but printed echoes: and
it is the rarest of pleasures to say, Here is a distinct record of
impressions at first hand. We commonplace beings are hurried along in
the crowd, living from hand to mouth on such slices of material and
spiritual food as happen to drift in our direction, with little more
power of taking an independent course, or of forming any general theory,
than the polyps which are carried along by an oceanic current. Ask any
man what he thinks of the world in which he is placed: whether, for
example, it is on the whole a scene of happiness or misery, and he will
either answer by some cut-and-dried fragments of what was once wisdom,
or he will confine himself to a few incoherent details. He had a good
dinner to-day and a bad toothache yesterday, and a family affliction or
blessing the day before. But he is as incapable of summing up his
impressions as an infant of performing an operation in the differential
calculus. It is as rare as it is refreshing to find a man who can stand
on his own legs and be conscious of his own feelings, who is sturdy
enough to react as well as to transmit action, and lofty enough to raise
himself above the hurrying crowd and have some distinct belief as to
whence it is coming and whither it is going. Now Johnson, as one of the
sturdiest of mankind, had the power due to a very distinct sentiment, if
not to a very clear theory, about the world in which he lived. It had
buffeted him severely enough, and he had formed a decisive estimate of
its value. He was no man to be put off with mere phrases in place of
opinions, or to accept doctrines which were not capable of expressing
genuine emotion. To this it must be added that his emotions were as deep
and tender as they were genuine. How sacred was his love for his old and
ugly wife; how warm his sympathy wherever it could be effective; how
manly the self-respect with which he guarded his dignity through all the
temptations of Grub Street, need not be once more pointed out. Perhaps,
however, it is worth while to notice the extreme rarity of such
qualities. Many people, we think, love their fathers. Fortunately, that
is true; but in how many people is filial affection strong enough to
overpower the dread of eccentricity? How many men would have been
capable of doing penance in Uttoxeter market years after their father's
death for a long-passed act of disobedience? Most of us, again, would
have a temporary emotion of pity for an outcast lying helplessly in the
street. We should call the police, or send her in a cab to the
workhouse, or, at least, write to the _Times_ to denounce the defective
arrangements of public charity. But it is perhaps better not to ask how
many good Samaritans would take her on their shoulders to their own
homes, care for her wants, and put her into a better way of life.
In the lives of most eminent men we find much good feeling and
honourable conduct; but it is an exception, even in the case of good
men, when we find that a life has been shaped by other than the ordinary
conventions, or that emotions have dared to overflow the well-worn
channels of respectability. The love which we feel for Johnson is due
to the fact that the pivots upon which his life turned are invariably
noble motives, and not mere obedience to custom. More than one modern
writer has expressed a fraternal affection for Addison, and it is
justified by the kindly humour which breathes through his 'Essays.' But
what anecdote of that most decorous and successful person touches our
hearts or has the heroic ring of Johnson's wrestlings with adverse
fortune? Addison showed how a Christian could die--when his life has run
smoothly through pleasant places, secretaryships of state, and marriages
with countesses, and when nothing--except a few overdoses of port
wine--has shaken his nerves or ruffled his temper. A far deeper emotion
rises at the deathbed of the rugged old pilgrim, who has fought his way
to peace in spite of troubles within and without, who has been jeered in
Vanity Fair and has descended into the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
and escaped with pain and difficulty from the clutches of Giant Despair.
When the last feelings of such a man are tender, solemn, and simple, we
feel ourselves in a higher presence than that of an amiable gentleman
who simply died, as he lived, with consummate decorum.
On turning, however, from Johnson's life to his writings, from Boswell
to the 'Rambler,' it must be admitted that the shock is trying to our
nerves. The 'Rambler' has, indeed, high merits. The impression which it
made upon his own generation proves the fact; for the reputation,
however temporary, was not won by a concession to the fashions of the
day, but to the influence of a strong judgment uttering itself through
uncouth forms. The melancholy which colours its pages is the melancholy
of a noble nature. The tone of thought reminds us of Bishop Butler,
whose writings, defaced by a style even more tiresome, though less
pompous than Johnson's, have owed their enduring reputation to a
philosophical acuteness in which Johnson was certainly very deficient.
Both of these great men, however, impress us by their deep sense of the
evils under which humanity suffers, and their rejection of the
superficial optimism of the day. Butler's sadness, undoubtedly, is that
of a recluse, and Johnson's that of a man of the world; but the
sentiment is fundamentally the same. It may be added, too, that here, as
elsewhere, Johnson speaks with the sincerity of a man drawing upon his
own experience. He announces himself as a scholar thrust out upon the
world rather by necessity than choice; and a large proportion of the
papers dwell upon the various sufferings of the literary class. Nobody
could speak more feelingly of those sufferings, as no one had a closer
personal acquaintance with them. But allowing to Johnson whatever credit
is due to the man who performs one more variation on the old theme,
_Vanitas vanitatum_, we must in candour admit that the 'Rambler' has the
one unpardonable fault: it is unreadable.
What an amazing turn it shows for commonplaces! That life is short, that
marriages from mercenary motives produce unhappiness, that different men
are virtuous in different degrees, that advice is generally ineffectual,
that adversity has its uses, that fame is liable to suffer from
detraction;--these and a host of other such maxims are of the kind upon
which no genius and no depth of feeling can confer a momentary interest.
Here and there, indeed, the pompous utterance invests them with an
unlucky air of absurdity. 'Let no man from this time,' is the comment in
one of his stories, 'suffer his felicity to depend on the death of his
aunt.' Every actor, of course, uses the same dialect. A gay young
gentleman tells us that he used to amuse his companions by giving them
notice of his friends' oddities. 'Every man,' he says, 'has some
habitual contortion of body, or established mode of expression, which
never fails to excite mirth if it be pointed out to notice. By
premonition of these particularities, I secured our pleasantry.' The
feminine characters, Flirtillas, and Cleoras, and Euphelias, and
Penthesileas, are, if possible, still more grotesque. Macaulay remarks
that he wears the petticoat with as ill a grace as Falstaff himself. The
reader, he thinks, will cry out with Sir Hugh, 'I like not when a 'oman
has a great peard! I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Oddly enough
Johnson gives the very same quotation; and goes on to warn his supposed
correspondents that Phyllis must send no more letters from the Horse
Guards; and that Belinda must 'resign her pretensions to female elegance
till she has lived three weeks without hearing the politics of Button's
Coffee House.' The Doctor was probably sensible enough of his own
defects. And yet there is a still more wearisome set of articles. In
emulation of the precedent set by Addison, Johnson indulges in the
dreariest of allegories. Criticism, we are told, was the eldest daughter
of Labour and Truth, but at last resigned in favour of Time, and left
Prejudice and False Taste to reign in company with Fraud and Mischief.
Then we have the genealogy of Wit and Learning, and of Satire, the Son
of Wit and Malice, and an account of their various quarrels, and the
decision of Jupiter. Neither are the histories of such semi-allegorical
personages as Almamoulin, the son of Nouradin, or of Anningait and Ayut,
the Greenland lovers, much more refreshing to modern readers. That
Johnson possessed humour of no mean order, we know from Boswell; but no
critic could have divined his power from the clumsy gambols in which he
occasionally recreates himself. Perhaps his happiest effort is a
dissertation upon the advantage of living in garrets; but the humour
struggles and gasps dreadfully under the weight of words. 'There are,'
he says, 'some who would continue blockheads' (the Alpine Club was not
yet founded), 'even on the summit of the Andes or the Peak of Teneriffe.
But let not any man be considered as unimprovable till this potent
remedy has been tried; for perhaps he was found to be great only in a
garret, as the joiner of Aretæus was rational in no other place but his
own shop.'
How could a man of real power write such unendurable stuff? Or how,
indeed, could any man come to embody his thoughts in the style of which
one other sentence will be a sufficient example? As it is afterwards
nearly repeated, it may be supposed to have struck his fancy. The
remarks of the philosophers who denounce temerity are, he says, 'too
just to be disputed and too salutary to be rejected; but there is
likewise some danger lest timorous prudence should be inculcated till
courage and enterprise are wholly repressed and the mind congested in
perpetual inactivity by the fatal influence of frigorifick wisdom.' Is
there not some danger, we ask, that the mind will be benumbed into
perpetual torpidity by the influence of this soporific sapience? It is
still true, however, that this Johnsonese, so often burlesqued and
ridiculed, was, as far as we can judge, a genuine product. Macaulay says
that it is more offensive than the mannerism of Milton or Burke, because
it is a mannerism adopted on principle and sustained by constant effort.
Facts do not confirm the theory. Milton's prose style seems to be the
result of a conscious effort to run English into classical moulds.
Burke's mannerism does not appear in his early writings, and we can
trace its development from the imitation of Bolingbroke to the last
declamation against the Revolution. But Johnson seems to have written
Johnsonese from his cradle. In his first original composition, the
preface to Father Lobo's 'Abyssinia,' the style is as distinctive as in
the 'Rambler.' The Parliamentary reports in the 'Gentleman's Magazine'
make Pitt and Fox[1] express sentiments which are probably their own in
language which is as unmistakably Johnson's. It is clear that his style,
good or bad, was the same from his earliest efforts. It is only in his
last book, the 'Lives of the Poets,' that the mannerism, though equally
marked, is so far subdued as to be tolerable. What he himself called his
habit of using 'too big words and too many of them' was no affectation,
but as much the result of his special idiosyncrasy as his queer
gruntings and twitchings. Sir Joshua Reynolds indeed maintained, and we
may believe so attentive an observer, that his strange physical
contortions were the result of bad habit, not of actual disease.
Johnson, he said, could sit as still as other people when his attention
was called to it. And possibly, if he had tried, he might have avoided
the fault of making 'little fishes talk like whales.' But how did the
bad habits arise? According to Boswell, Johnson professed to have
'formed his style' partly upon Sir W. Temple, and on 'Chambers's
Proposal for his Dictionary.' The statement was obviously
misinterpreted: but there is a glimmering of truth in the theory that
the 'style was formed'--so far as those words have any meaning--on the
'giants of the seventeenth century,' and especially upon Sir Thomas
Browne. Johnson's taste, in fact, had led him to the study of writers
in many ways congenial to him. His favourite book, as we know, was
Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' The pedantry of the older school did
not repel him; the weighty thought rightly attracted him; and the more
complex structure of sentence was perhaps a pleasant contrast to an ear
saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison and Pope. Unluckily,
the secret of the old majestic cadence was hopelessly lost. Johnson,
though spiritually akin to the giants, was the firmest ally and subject
of the dwarfish dynasty which supplanted them. The very faculty of
hearing seems to change in obedience to some mysterious law at different
stages of intellectual development; and that which to one generation is
delicious music is to another a mere droning of bagpipes or the grinding
of monotonous barrel-organs.
Assuming that a man can find perfect satisfaction in the versification
of the 'Essay on Man,' we can understand his saying of 'Lycidas,' that
'the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers
unpleasing.' In one of the 'Ramblers' we are informed that the accent in
blank verse ought properly to rest upon every second syllable throughout
the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid
satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of
alternate beats as regularly as the piston of a steam engine, are more
or less defective. This simple-minded system naturally makes wild work
with the poetry of the 'mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' Milton's
harsh cadences are indeed excused on the odd ground that he who was
'vindicating the ways of God to man' might have been condemned for
'lavishing much of his attention upon syllables and sounds.' Moreover,
the poor man did his best by introducing sounding proper names, even
when they 'added little music to his poem:' an example of this feeble,
though well-meant expedient, being the passage about the moon, which--
The Tuscan artist views,
At evening, from the top of Fiesole
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, &c.
This profanity passed at the time for orthodoxy. But the misfortune was,
that Johnson, unhesitatingly subscribing to the rules of Queen Anne's
critics, is always instinctively feeling after the grander effects of
the old school. Nature prompts him to the stateliness of Milton, whilst
Art orders him to deal out long and short syllables alternately, and to
make them up in parcels of ten, and then tie the parcels together in
pairs by the help of a rhyme. The natural utterance of a man of strong
perceptions, but of unwieldy intellect, of a melancholy temperament, and
capable of very deep, but not vivacious emotions, would be in stately
and elaborate phrases. His style was not more distinctly a work of art
than the style of Browne or Milton, but, unluckily, it was a work of bad
art. He had the misfortune, not so rare as it may sound, to be born in
the wrong century; and is, therefore, a giant in fetters; the amplitude
of stride is still there, but it is checked into mechanical regularity.
A similar phenomenon is observable in other writers of the time. The
blank verse of Young, for example, is generally set to Pope's tune with
the omission of the rhymes, whilst Thomson, revolting more or less
consciously against the canons of his time, too often falls into mere
pompous mouthing. Shaftesbury, in the previous generation, trying to
write poetical prose, becomes as pedantic as Johnson, though in a
different style; and Gibbon's mannerism is a familiar example of a
similar escape from a monotonous simplicity into awkward complexity.
Such writers are like men who have been chilled by what Johnson would
call the 'frigorifick' influence of the classicism of their fathers, and
whose numbed limbs move stiffly and awkwardly in a first attempt to
regain the old liberty. The form, too, of the 'Rambler' is unfortunate.
Johnson has always Addison before his eyes; to whom it was formerly the
fashion to compare him for the same excellent reason which has recently
suggested comparisons between Dickens and Thackeray--namely, that their
works were published in the same external shape. Unluckily, Johnson gave
too much excuse for the comparison by really imitating Addison. He has
to make allegories, and to give lively sketches of feminine
peculiarities, and to ridicule social foibles of which he was, at most,
a distant observer. The inevitable consequence is, that though here and
there we catch a glimpse of the genuine man, we are, generally, too much
provoked by the awkwardness of his costume to be capable of enjoying, or
even reading him.
In many of his writings, however, Johnson manages, almost entirely, to
throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and
reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a
poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive
intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For
poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was
understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the
intellectual vivacity implied in the marvellously neat workmanship of
Pope, and still less the delight in all natural and artistic beauty
which we generally take to be essential to poetic excellence. His
contempt for 'Lycidas' is sufficiently significant upon that head. Still
more characteristic is the incapacity to understand Spenser, which
comes out incidentally in his remarks upon some of those imitations,
which even in the middle of the eighteenth century showed that
sensibility to the purest form of poetry was not by any means extinct
amongst us. But there is a poetry, though we sometimes seem to forget
it, which is the natural expression of deep moral sentiment; and of this
Johnson has written enough to reveal very genuine power. The touching
verses upon the death of Levett are almost as pathetic as Cowper; and
fragments of the two imitations of Juvenal have struck deep enough to be
not quite forgotten. We still quote the lines about pointing a moral and
adorning a tale, which conclude a really noble passage. We are too often
reminded of his melancholy musings over the
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise,
and a few of the concluding lines of the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' in
which he answers the question whether man must of necessity
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate,
in helplessness and ignorance, may have something of a familiar ring. We
are to give thanks, he says,
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind nature's signal for retreat;
These goods for man, the laws of heaven ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain,
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.
These lines, and many others which might be quoted, are noble in
expression, as well as lofty and tender in feeling. Johnson, like
Wordsworth, or even more deeply than Wordsworth, had felt all the
'heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world;' and,
though he stumbles a little in the narrow limits of his versification,
he bears himself nobly, and manages to put his heart into his poetry.
Coleridge's paraphrase of the well-known lines, 'Let observation with
extensive observation, observe mankind from China to Peru,' would
prevent us from saying that he had thrown off his verbiage. He has not
the felicity of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' though he wrote one of the best
couplets in that admirable poem; but his ponderous lines show genuine
vigour, and can be excluded from poetry only by the help of an arbitrary
classification.
The fullest expression, however, of Johnson's feeling is undoubtedly to
be found in 'Rasselas.' The inevitable comparison with Voltaire's
'Candide,' which, by an odd coincidence, appeared almost simultaneously,
suggests some curious reflections. The resemblance between the moral of
the two books is so strong that, as Johnson remarked, it would have been
difficult not to suppose that one had given a hint to the other but for
the chronological difficulty. The contrast, indeed, is as marked as the
likeness. 'Candide' is not adapted for family reading, whereas
'Rasselas' might be a textbook for young ladies studying English in a
convent. 'Candide' is a marvel of clearness and vivacity; whereas to
read 'Rasselas' is about as exhilarating as to wade knee-deep through a
sandy desert. Voltaire and Johnson, however, the great sceptic and the
last of the true old Tories, coincide pretty well in their view of the
world, and in the remedy which they suggest. The world is, they agree,
full of misery, and the optimism which would deny the reality of the
misery is childish. _Il faut cultiver notre jardin_ is the last word of
'Candide,' and Johnson's teaching, both here and elsewhere, may be
summed up in the words 'Work, and don't whine.' It need not be
considered here, nor, perhaps, is it quite plain, what speculative
conclusions Voltaire meant to be drawn from his teaching. The
peculiarity of Johnson is, that he is apparently indifferent to any such
conclusion. A dogmatic assertion, that the world is on the whole a scene
of misery, may be pressed into the service of different philosophies.
Johnson asserted the opinion resolutely, both in writing and in
conversation, but apparently never troubled himself with any inferences
but such as have a directly practical tendency. He was no
'speculatist'--a word which now strikes us as having an American twang,
but which was familiar to the lexicographer. His only excursion to the
borders of such regions was in the very forcible review of Soane Jenyns,
who had made a jaunty attempt to explain the origin of evil by the help
of a few of Pope's epigrams. Johnson's sledge-hammer smashes his flimsy
platitudes to pieces with an energy too good for such a foe. For
speculation, properly so called, there was no need. The review, like
'Rasselas,' is simply a vigorous protest against the popular attempt to
make things pleasant by a feeble dilution of the most watery kind of
popular teaching. He has no trouble in remarking that the evils of
poverty are not alleviated by calling it 'want of riches,' and that
there is a poverty which involves want of necessaries. The offered
consolation, indeed, came rather awkwardly from the elegant country
gentleman to the poor scholar who had just known by experience what it
was to live upon fourpence-halfpenny a day. Johnson resolutely looks
facts in the face, and calls ugly things by their right names. Men, he
tells us over and over again, are wretched, and there is no use in
denying it. This doctrine appears in his familiar talk, and even in the
papers which he meant to be light reading. He begins the prologue to a
comedy with the words--
Pressed with the load of life, the weary mind
Surveys the general toil of human kind.
In the 'Life of Savage' he makes the common remark that the lives of
many of the greatest teachers of mankind have been miserable. The
explanation to which he inclines is that they have not been more
miserable than their neighbours, but that their misery has been more
conspicuous. His melancholy view of life may have been caused simply by
his unfortunate constitution; for everybody sees in the disease of his
own liver a disorder of the universe; but it was also intensified by the
natural reaction of a powerful nature against the fluent optimism of the
time, which expressed itself in Pope's aphorism, Whatever is, is right.
The strongest men of the time revolted against that attempt to cure a
deep-seated disease by a few fine speeches. The form taken by Johnson's
revolt is characteristic. His nature was too tender and too manly to
incline to Swift's misanthropy. Men might be wretched, but he would not
therefore revile them as filthy Yahoos. He was too reverent and cared
too little for abstract thought to share the scepticism of Voltaire. In
this miserable world the one worthy object of ambition is to do one's
duty, and the one consolation deserving the name is to be found in
religion. That Johnson's religious opinions sometimes took the form of
rather grotesque superstition may be true; and it is easy enough to
ridicule some of its manifestations. He took the creed of his day
without much examination of the evidence upon which its dogmas rested;
but a writer must be thoughtless indeed who should be more inclined to
laugh at his superficial oddities, than to admire the reverent spirit
and the brave self-respect with which he struggled through a painful
life. The protest of 'Rasselas' against optimism is therefore widely
different from the protest of Voltaire. The deep and genuine feeling of
the Frenchman is concealed under smart assaults upon the dogmas of
popular theology; the Englishman desires to impress upon us the futility
of all human enjoyments, with a view to deepen the solemnity of our
habitual tone of thought. It is true, indeed, that the evil is dwelt
upon more forcibly than the remedy. The book is all the more impressive.
We are almost appalled by the gloomy strength which sees so forcibly the
misery of the world and rejects so unequivocally all the palliatives of
sentiment and philosophy. The melancholy is intensified by the ponderous
style, which suggests a man weary of a heavy burden. The air seems to be
filled with what Johnson once called 'inspissated gloom.' 'Rasselas,'
one may say, has a narrow escape of being a great book, though it is ill
calculated for the hasty readers of to-day. Indeed, the defects are
serious enough. The class of writing to which it belongs demands a
certain dramatic picturesqueness to point the moral effectively. Not
only the long-winded sentences, but the slow evolution of thought and
the deliberation with which he works out his pictures of misery, make
the general effect dull beside such books as 'Candide' or 'Gulliver's
Travels.' A touch of epigrammatic exaggeration is very much needed; and
yet anybody who has the courage to read it through will admit that
Johnson is not an unworthy guide into those gloomy regions of
imagination which we all visit sometimes, and which it is as well to
visit in good company.
After his fashion, Johnson is a fair representative of Greatheart. His
melancholy is distinguished from that of feebler men by the strength of
the conviction that 'it will do no good to whine.' We know his view of
the great prophet of the Revolutionary school. 'Rousseau,' he said, to
Boswell's astonishment, 'is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a
sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from
the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in
the plantations.' That is a fine specimen of the good Johnsonese
prejudices of which we hear so much; and, of course, it is easy to infer
that Johnson was an ignorant bigot, who had not in any degree taken the
measure of the great moving forces of his time. Nothing, indeed, can be
truer than that Johnson cared very little for the new gospel of the
rights of man. His truly British contempt for all such fancies ('for
anything I see,' he once said, 'foreigners are fools') is one of his
strongest characteristics. Now, Rousseau and his like took a view of the
world as it was quite as melancholy as Johnson's. They inferred that it
ought to be turned upside down, assured that the millennium would begin
as soon as a few revolutionary dogmas were accepted. All their remedies
appeared to the excellent Doctor as so much of that cant of which it was
a man's first duty to clear his mind. The evils of life were far too
deeply seated to be caused or cured by kings or demagogues. One of the
most popular commonplaces of the day was the mischief of luxury. That we
were all on the high road to ruin on account of our wealth, our
corruption, and the growth of the national debt, was the text of any
number of political agitators. The whole of this talk was, to his mind,
so much whining and cant. Luxury did no harm, and the mass of the
people, as indeed was in one sense obvious enough, had only too little
of it. The pet 'state of nature' of theorists was a silly figment. The
genuine savage was little better than an animal; and a savage woman,
whose contempt for civilised life had prompted her to escape to the
forest, was simply a 'speaking cat.' The natural equality of mankind was
mere moonshine. So far is it from being true, he says, that no two
people can be together for half an hour without one acquiring an evident
superiority over the other. Subordination is an essential element of
human happiness. A Whig stinks in his nostrils because to his eye modern
Whiggism is 'a negation of all principles.' As he said of Priestley's
writings, it unsettles everything and settles nothing. 'He is a cursed
Whig, a _bottomless_ Whig as they all are now,' was his description
apparently of Burke. Order, in fact, is a vital necessity; what
particular form it may take matters comparatively little; and therefore
all revolutionary dogmas were chimerical as an attack upon the
inevitable conditions of life, and mischievous so far as productive of
useless discontent. We need not ask what mixture of truth and falsehood
there may be in these principles. Of course, a Radical, or even a
respectable Whig, like Macaulay, who believed in the magical efficacy of
the British Constitution, might shriek or laugh at such doctrine.
Johnson's political pamphlets, besides the defects natural to a writer
who was only a politician by accident, advocate the most retrograde
doctrines. Nobody at the present day thinks that the Stamp Act was an
admirable or justifiable measure; or would approve of telling the
Americans that they ought to have been grateful for their long exemption
instead of indignant at the imposition. 'We do not put a calf into the
plough; we wait till he is an ox'--was not a judicious taunt. He was
utterly wrong; and, if everybody who is utterly wrong in a political
controversy deserves unmixed contempt, there is no more to be said for
him. We might indeed argue that Johnson was in some ways entitled to the
sympathy of enlightened people. His hatred of the Americans was
complicated by his hatred of slave-owners. He anticipated Lincoln in
proposing the emancipation of the negroes as a military measure. His
uniform hatred for the slave trade scandalised poor Boswell, who held
that its abolition would be equivalent to 'shutting the gates of mercy
on mankind.' His language about the blundering tyranny of the English
rule in Ireland would satisfy Mr. Froude, though he would hardly have
loved a Home Ruler. He denounces the frequency of capital punishment and
the harshness of imprisonment for debt, and he invokes a compassionate
treatment of the outcasts of our streets as warmly as the more
sentimental Goldsmith. His conservatism may be at times obtuse, but it
is never of the cynical variety. He hates cruelty and injustice as
righteously as he hates anarchy. Indeed, Johnson's contempt for mouthing
agitators of the Wilkes and Junius variety is one which may be shared by
most thinkers who would not accept his principles. There is a vigorous
passage in the 'False Alarm' which is scarcely unjust to the patriots of
the day. He describes the mode in which petitions are generally got up.
They are sent from town to town, and the people flock to see what is to
be sent to the king. 'One man signs because he hates the Papists;
another because he has vowed destruction to the turnpikes; one because
it will vex the parson; another because he owes his landlord nothing;
one because he is rich; another because he is poor; one to show that he
is not afraid, and another to show that he can write.' The people, he
thinks, are as well off as they are likely to be under any form of
government; and grievances about general warrants or the rights of
juries in libel cases are not really felt so long as they have enough to
eat and drink and wear. The error, we may probably say, was less in the
contempt for a very shallow agitation than in the want of perception
that deeper causes of discontent were accumulating in the background.
Wilkes in himself was a worthless demagogue; but Wilkes was the straw
carried by the rising tide of revolutionary sentiment, to which Johnson
was entirely blind. Yet whatever we may think of his political
philosophy, the value of these solid sturdy prejudices is undeniable. To
the fact that Johnson was the typical representative of a large class of
Englishmen, we owe it that the Society of Rights did not develop into a
Jacobin Club. The fine phrases on which Frenchmen became intoxicated
never turned the heads of men impervious to abstract theories and
incapable of dropping substances for shadows. There are evils in each
temperament; but it is as well that some men should carry into politics
that rooted contempt for whining which lay so deep in Johnson's nature.
He scorned the sickliness of the Rousseau school as, in spite of his
constitutional melancholy, he scorned valetudinarianism whether of the
bodily or the spiritual order. He saw evil enough in the world to be
heartily, at times too roughly, impatient of all fine ladies who made a
luxury of grief or of demagogues who shrieked about theoretical
grievances which did not sensibly affect the happiness of one man in a
thousand. The lady would not have time to nurse her sorrows if she had
been a washerwoman; the grievances with which the demagogues yelled
themselves hoarse could hardly be distinguished amidst the sorrows of
the vast majority condemned to keep starvation at bay by unceasing
labour. His incapacity for speculation makes his pamphlets worthless
beside Burke's philosophical discourses; but the treatment, if wrong and
defective on the theoretical side, is never contemptible. Here, as
elsewhere, he judges by his intuitive aversions. He rejects too hastily
whatever seems insipid or ill-flavoured to his spiritual appetite. Like
all the shrewd and sensible part of mankind he condemns as mere
moonshine what may be really the first faint dawn of a new daylight. But
then his intuitions are noble, and his fundamental belief is the vital
importance of order, of religion, and of morality, coupled with a
profound conviction, surely not erroneous, that the chief sources of
human suffering lie far deeper than any of the remedies proposed by
constitution-mongers and fluent theorists. The literary version of these
prejudices or principles is given most explicitly in the 'Lives of the
Poets'--the book which is now the most readable of Johnson's
performances, and which most frequently recalls his conversational
style. Indeed, it is a thoroughly admirable book, and but for one or two
defects might enjoy a much more decided popularity. It is full of shrewd
sense and righteous as well as keen estimates of men and things. The
'Life of Savage,' written in earlier times, is the best existing
portrait of that large class of authors who, in Johnson's phrase, 'hung
loose upon society' in the days of the Georges. The Lives of Pope,
Dryden, and others have scarcely been superseded, though much fuller
information has since come to light; and they are all well worth
reading. But the criticism, like the politics, is woefully out of date.
Johnson's division between the shams and the realities deserves all
respect in both cases, but in both cases he puts many things on the
wrong side of the dividing line. His hearty contempt for sham pastorals
and sham love-poetry will be probably shared by modern readers. 'Who
will hear of sheep and goats and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets
through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the dawn of
literature, and children in the dawn of life, but will be for the most
part thrown away as men grow wise and nations grow learned.' But
elsewhere he blunders into terrible misapprehensions. Where he errs by
simply repeating the accepted rules of the Pope school, he for once
talks mere second-hand nonsense. But his independent judgments are
interesting even when erroneous. His unlucky assault upon 'Lycidas,'
already noticed, is generally dismissed with a pitying shrug of the
shoulders. 'Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen
deities; Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Æolus, with a long train of
mythological imagery, such as a college easily supplies. Nothing can
less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a
shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone; how
one god asks another god what has become of Lycidas, and how neither god
can tell. He who thus grieves can excite no sympathy; he who thus
praises will confer no honour.'