The world will be ready to admit that we have one such witness in Boswell. Now the life described by Miss Burney differs somewhat from the aspects familiar to the reader of Boswell. The latter naturally saw more of his hero on dress parade; Miss Burney saw more of him in what the world might then have called “the agreeable relations of domestic privacy.” But in the general characterization of Johnson there is an almost startling agreement with Boswell, which, in the minds of any but the most skeptical, will go far toward furnishing a sufficient proof of Miss Burney’s authenticity. Certainly this was the impression in the eighteenth century; “How well you know him,” writes Mrs. Thrale, “and me, and all of us.” Large matters like the general truthfulness of a portrait, I repeat, must be tested in large and general ways. In the present case, we find in Miss Burney’s Johnson the same formal courtesy of address, the sudden bursts of ferocity, the contradictions, the argumenta ad hominem, the humor, the pronouncements, the wealth of anecdote and reminiscence, and the appeal to first principles, that we find in Boswell’s record of Johnson’s conversation. The words may (conceivably) be the words of Miss Burney, but the voice is the voice of Johnson.
Now, the question of inaccuracy aside, is there any animus in Miss Burney’s work that is likely to distort her account of Johnson? She was not, like Mme. Piozzi in her Anecdotes, eager to vindicate her own conduct, and therefore not over anxious to do justice to Johnson’s. She was not, like Hannah More, determined to “mitigate” Johnson’s “asperities.” She might perhaps have been capable of the latter sin, had she been consciously preparing her record for the press; in fact she once actually deplores the publication of Johnson’s Meditations, “too artless to be suited to [the world],” and becomes disastrously artificial in her account of Johnson inserted in the Memoirs of Doctor Burney. But in the Diary her account is neither marred by mitigations, nor tainted by suggestions of malice. It is the account of one who saw sympathetically, and therefore saw clearly, of one who was concerned simply with telling the truth to two sisters who were themselves acquainted with Johnson, and who were certainly unlikely to be deceived by a policy of “mitigation.” It is undoubtedly true that Miss Burney is occasionally inaccurate in her dates; in her record of Johnson’s conversation it is extremely probable that her memory sometimes played her false, and that, like Boswell, she found herself obliged to draw upon her imagination for a Johnsonian phrase; but in the larger matter of general truthfulness, her record, when compared with other records of Johnson, will be found not only loving, but accurate, not only brilliant, but reliable.
And now with trembling quill and an adequate sense of my own unfitness, I come to the point where it is necessary to say something of the great protagonist of the following pages — if, indeed, anything more can safely be said! So much has been written of Samuel Johnson that it would now be unwise, if it were possible, to avoid the commonplaces of criticism. Johnson is, we have been frequently told, the most completely preserved of any figure in our history. It is unlikely that any one, even in this day of “personal interviews,” will be inclined to dispute it. I touch upon the matter now only by way of pointing out that this familiarity with Johnson in the end breeds no contempt. Posterity may follow Johnson into the gloom of his solitude, may intrude into his very confessional, and even scrutinize his final agony as he lay through long weeks waiting for death; but the completeness of the revelation (and who could be found to covet a similar one for himself?), though it has led many to patronize, has caused few to sneer. It is the slow death of his works — destined perhaps to include even the Lives of the Poets — simultaneously with the perfect preservation of his reputation that has puzzled the critics, and driven them to explain away Johnson’s greatness by the fame of the books which record him. It is Boswell, we are often told, that made Johnson great. Mr. Thomas Seccombe, for example, is at a loss to find other explanation for the greatness of the man than “the extent and accuracy of our information about him,” and intimates that the bird of immortality is capricious in its perching, and the critic leaves the reader of the Bookman to infer that there is, when all is said, something accidental about Johnson’s immortality. I should be sorry if the present volume contributed to spread this notion. I consider these reminiscences, for reasons that I have brought forward, a capital specimen of the personal record in literature; but I am far from thinking that this, or any book like it, accounts for the greatness of Samuel Johnson. We cannot dispose of the miracle of the Great Dictator by expatiating on the perfection of works about him; for, if we could, it would next be necessary to inquire whence came this invincible impulse to record the man, an impulse which men and women felt alike. Why, as Carlyle asked long ago, did Boswell, among all the great men whom he knew, fasten upon Johnson? In all this biographical activity, what was the causa cans arts?
It is easy to say that Boswell’s choice of Johnson as a biographical subject was owing to the latter’s literary eminence, and this is partly true. But whence, we must ask again, came Johnson’s literary eminence? Why was he the acknowledged Dictator? There was certainly no sufficient explanation of this in his literary works. It is, indeed, sometimes supposed that readers in the eighteenth century hung over the pages of Rasselas and the Rambler with a breathless rapture; but this is far from true. Those books were of course more widely and enthusiastically read than they are to-day, but they were commonly recognized by Johnson’s friends, and by Johnson himself, for that matter, as no sufficient explanation of his fame. Fanny Burney herself had difficulty in reading Rasselas because of its “dreadful” subject, a subject which Miss Hannah More found “as cheerful as the Dead Sea.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was bored by the Rambler, “who follows the Spectator with the same pace that a pack-horse would a hunter.” Johnson himself found it, as modern readers do, “too wordy.” So that even in 1778 it was difficult to give a satisfactory explanation of Johnson’s acknowledged supremacy. The puzzle was already stated. It was hoped that the publication of the Lives of the Poets would establish his fame once for all; but, splendid as was that achievement, it was not sufficiently great to account for his reputation. Certain of the biographies were received with a storm of merited protest; some were completely negligible; others gave evidence of distorted critical standards; and yet others betrayed evidences of haste and of inadequate preparation. Johnson himself realized that the work was no satisfactory representation of the powers that were in him. But even had it been so, even had it satisfied the most eager demands of his admirers, it would still be not an explanation of his supreme position but an illustration of it. His fame had been long since established, and was now hardly susceptible of sudden change. Here was an author whose fame already transcended that of all his works combined, who filled those close to him with a desire to do justice to his personality in written records of it, a personality that stimulated hatred as well as love, but left nobody indifferent. There; is, it would therefore appear, no hope of falling back upon Johnson’s position in the literary world as an explanation of his fame; and yet the conviction persists that he is really a figure in English literature. Even Mr. Seccombe has written a book called the Age of Johnson. It is evident that Johnson represents more than Johnson achieved; that he stimulated more than he wrote.
There is a principle in the history of modern literature which I think will help us. It has not, so far as I am aware, been definitely formulated, though it is unconsciously employed by all discerning critics. Modern literary history, we are coming to see, consists of something more than the belles lettres which it contains. With the rise of what I may call the personal record in literature — biographies, diaries, and letters — there has entered literature a new interest which tends quite as often to centre in the individual who creates as in the book created. It is an interest which is stimulated not so much by felicities of style, or excitement of plot, or brilliant imagination, as by an acquaintance with the secret places of some great man’s mind. It is the desire of knowing the whole of a giant personal
ity, its weakness and its vagaries, its passion and its pride. It desires to ransack the very holy of holies and find out its secret. It was this interest that Johnson himself felt in literature. “Sir,” he would say, “the biographical part of literature is what I love most.” Now it is most important to notice that such an interest as this may exist quite independently of our appreciation of an author’s books. Johnson himself felt a profound interest in men like Savage, whose poetry he held in low esteem. And if such an interest be sufficiently diffused, it may result that a man attains a position in literature not by what he has himself contributed to it, but by a kind of transcendental force which he exerts upon it by virtue of what he was. The literature of the nineteenth century is fertile in examples of what I am trying to describe. Take the case of Byron. He is unlike enough to Johnson, in all conscience; yet there is the very problem in his case that we are considering in Johnson’s. Upon what is based the enduring fame of the man? Who now reads Byron? The dramas are forgotten, and the early Oriental tales are grown a little shabby. Even Don Juan seems too long. And the lyrics, fresh and fervid as they yet are, nevertheless fall below the best productions of Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. Yet there is the star of the man’s fame burning on; distance does not dim its radiance nor reduce its magnitude. Byron has lived; only Childe Harold is dead. He, like Johnson, has survived not so much because of a purely literary achievement as by virtue of a remarkable temper of mind, an ardor, an attitude toward life, a force and a fire. What is the secret of his influence? His works alone will never explain it, and fortunately or unfortunately, he had no Boswell. What was it that fired the imagination of Goethe? Was it Manfred that Goethe loved, or Cain? or was it that bright, perverse spirit who created these, his lesser selves? However we may try to escape the conclusion, are we not forced to assert at last that his reputation springs to-day, as it did a century ago, from his influence upon other men rather than from his books? That fire did not spring from books alone which kindled a new school of poets in Spain and in Italy.
The note which is heard to-day in the rending harmonies of Tschaikowski, that is the genuine voice of Byron, that and not the mocking cry which too often echoes that voice in Byron’s verse. The English poet speaks to-day with greater authority in Russian music than he ever spoke in English verse. His spirit is still at work among us, producing greater works than any that were actually done in his own name, and that miracle will continue until another supreme patron of the philosophy of revolt shall usurp his dominion, and rule his disciples in his stead.
Now this same high potential which Bryon had, was Johnson’s in large measure. Whenever this dynamic power makes its appearance, it operates in remarkable and unusual ways. It may divert the whole stream of literature into new channels, as did Byron, or confine it in old ones, as did Johnson. It may color the very language and style of authors, causing other men’s work to have the ring of a quotation. It makes small men large, breaks down fears and prejudices in timorous minds, suddenly exalting them to levels which they have never reached before, and which indeed they are by nature unable to reach. It impels them to accomplishments of which they had deemed themselves incapable. Above all, it sets in motion a whole current of feelings and ideas that swells as it moves away from its source. Presumably the greatest authors have always this ability, but there are other orders of genius who possess it in apparent independence of the highest literary skill. The main interest of these men is always in literature, but they are sometimes incapable of producing it without a medium, for their work is rather with men than with books. Thus such men become a type. They bear, as Oscar Wilde said of himself, “a symbolic relation to their age,” and those who fail to find in them an author may amuse themselves by the attempt to discover there an era. Of these men is Samuel Johnson, and this is the secret of his fame.
Let us now consider some of the ways in which Johnson infused his genius into his age. To begin with, he was generally recognized as an author whose influence transcended that usually exerted by authors. Here let me quote a contemporary eulogy of Johnson which puts into heroic couplets what I am trying to say:
By nature’s gifts, ordained mankind to rule,
He, like a Titian, formed his brilliant school....
Our boasted Goldsmith felt the sovereign sway;
From him derived the sweet yet nervous lay....
With Johnson’s fame melodious Burney glows,
While the grand strain in smoother cadence flows....
Amid these names can Boswell be forgot,
Scarce by North Britons now esteemed a Scot?
Who to the Sage devoted from his youth,
Imbibed from him the sacred love of truth,
The keen research and exercise of mind,
And that best art, the art to know mankind.
Poor verses, we may grant, but rather good criticism.
Consider, in particular, Johnson’s influence upon Goldsmith. Who can doubt that the style of Doctor Minor, superior as it is to that of Doctor Major, would yet have been a very different thing if Goldsmith had never read the Rambler? Both Boswell and Dr. Warton noted the influence of Johnson upon Goldsmith’s conversation, particularly in his attempt to employ difficult words, but they might have discovered even subtler evidences of it in his writings. The particular power of Johnson that Goldsmith longed for was the older man’s ability to sum up a whole department of things in one telling sentence. It was a power that Goldsmith never attained, but his attempts were numerous. Hear, for example, the voice of Johnson speaking through these words of Goldsmith at the opening of the latter’s Life of Nash: “History owes its excellence more to the writer’s manner than to the materials of which it is composed,” or this from the Life of Voltaire, “That life which has been wholly employed in the study is properly seen only in the author’s writings; there is no variety to entertain, nor adventure to interest us in the calm succession of such anecdotes.” It is only an echo, to be sure, but we know whence issued the original sound.
That the influence of Johnson’s style was the most potent brought to bear upon English style in the second half of the 18th century cannot, I think, be disputed. Boswell’s discussion of it, and his accompanying list of examples of direct imitation are too convincing to be neglected. There is something of its fine dignity in the best of Burke and of Gibbon; and it is probable that the serious student of style still finds his best examples of the more elaborate manner in the pages of Johnson. The very enemies of the man recognized the force of the authority he exerted, so that Churchill, in his caricature of him as Pomposo, dubs him the
Vain idol of a scribbling crowd,
Whose very name inspires an awe,
Whose every word is sense and law.
Influence of a very different kind, which nevertheless reveals the kinetic force which I have been describing, is shown by his relation with the art of his time. This is the more significant because Johnson was by nature unfitted to appreciate the delicate distinctions of color and form. It is doubtful if he ever saw the outlines of paintings clearly. And yet he is certainly to be thanked for having inspired some of the finest pictures in the history of English art. That Reynolds should have painted Johnson once is of course no sufficient ground for critical deduction of any kind; but that he should have returned to the subject again and again, painting him at least a dozen times, if we count copies — this is a fact of which we are not likely to exaggerate the significance. Most people know the famous portrait in the National Gallery, the one which Reynolds painted for Johnson’s gay young friend Beauclerk, and on the frame of which the owner wrote an inscription proclaiming that beneath this rude exterior there dwelt a giant mind. To me the most notice able thing about the portrait has always been that in it, almost alone among his portraits, Reynolds makes no attempt to conceal the crudeness of the exterior that he is representing. Here surely is the craglike quality of Johnson. If we had only this one portrait of Reynolds, it would naturally be assumed that he had the
virile realism of a Velasquez. But I know of no other in which he attains the utter clarity of the Spaniard, the power of naked fact. What was the force that woke the gentle Reynolds to this unaccustomed power? Was the influence different in kind from that which worked upon the style of Goldsmith and upon the mind of Boswell? This conclusion is not so slightly based as it may seem at first. It is certainly obvious that a painter bestows prolonged and affectionate attention only upon that which has fascinated his intellect and his sympathy. No artist of the abilities of a Reynolds will consent to paint an unsympathetic subject a dozen times. But Reynolds loved the task because he loved the inspiration which he drew from the mere presence of the man. And so he painted him as he appeared after the completion of the Dictionary, seated at his desk in an arm-chair in complacent meditation on the completed work. He painted him again for his step-daughter, Miss Lucy Porter, and this time in a form more or less idealized, in conventional Roman costume, without his wig. It is Reynolds’s most touching portrait of him, for in it he has allowed the suffering and the sympathy of Johnson which he had witnessed so often to predominate over the ruder strength of countenance. Yet again he painted him as he appeared when reading a book, “tearing the heart out” of it in his impatience to be at the core of the author’s meaning. He painted him as he must have appeared when a young man, resting his chin upon his hand, and holding a copy of Irene; and as if this were not enough, went farther, and painted a wholly imaginary and wholly delightful portrait of him in his infancy, representing a Herculean babe, with head sunk in precocious contemplation of the insoluble problem of human existence, a veritable Infant Samuel. Such is the nature of Johnson’s impress upon the painter.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 676
