He had all an Englishman’s pride in England, as was prettily seen in his reply to Mrs. Thrale in the theatre at Versailles; “Now we are here what shall we act, Dr. Johnson? The Englishman at Paris?” “No, no; we will try to act Harry the Fifth”; and at bottom he thought that a free Englishman was too great a man to be patronized by any one on earth.
But there was something better than pride at the root of his whole attitude towards the rich and the poor; and that was his humanity. Again and again, as one studies him, one comes back to that, his humanity, his love of men as men. It was that which made him one of the earliest and fiercest enemies of the slave trade. So early as 1740 he maintained the natural right of the negroes to liberty; and he once startled “some very grave men at Oxford” by giving as his toast “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” This was his invariable attitude from first to last, and it was no mere scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in Taxation No Tyranny, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” No Tory prejudices and no sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American rebels, describing Jamaica as “a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves,” and speaking indignantly of the thousands of black men “who are now repining under English cruelty.” He denounced, as not only wicked but also absurd and foolish, the opinion common among the “English barbarians that cultivate the southern islands of America,” that savages are to be regarded as scarcely distinct from animals; and he dreaded discoveries of new lands because he was always afraid they would result in conquest and cruelty.
And this was not the public and vicarious humanity with which we are too familiar. What he preached to others he practised himself. He loved all life and all the men and women whom he saw living it. It takes one’s breath away at first to find the grave moralist of The Rambler coolly saying to Mrs. Thrale and Fanny Burney, “Oh, I loved Bet Flint!” just after he had frankly explained to them that that lady was “habitually a slut and a drunkard and occasionally a thief and a harlot.” But the creature was what we call a “character,” had had many curious adventures, and had written her life in verse and brought it to Johnson to correct, an offer which he had declined, giving her half a crown instead which she “liked as well.” He had, in fact, got below the perhaps superficial slut and harlot to the aboriginal human being, and that once arrived at he never forgot it. Nor did he need the kindly humours of old acquaintance to enable him to discover it. No moral priggishness dried up the tenderness with which he regarded the most forlorn specimens of humanity. Boswell tells this story. “Coming home late one night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk: he took her upon his back and carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of those wretched females who had fallen into the lowest state of vice, poverty and disease. Instead of harshly upbraiding her he had her taken care of with all tenderness for a long time at considerable expense till she was restored to health, and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living.” Like Mr. Gladstone, he exposed his own character to suspicion by his kindness to such poor creatures as this. His heart was always open to the miserable, so that Goldsmith said that the fact of being miserable was enough to “ensure the protection of Johnson.” Sir John Hawkins says that, when some one asked him how he could bear to have his house full of “necessitous and undeserving people,” his reply was, “If I did not assist them no one else would, and they must be lost for want.” He always declared that the true test of a nation’s civilization was the state of its poor, and specially directed Boswell to report to him how the poor were maintained in Holland. When his mother’s old servant lay dying he went to say good-bye to her and prayed with her, while she, as he says, “held up her poor hands as she lay in bed with great fervour.” Then, after the prayer, “I kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain that she had ever felt and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes and great emotion of tenderness, the same hope. We kissed and parted. I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more.”
Let all pictures of Johnson as a harsh and arrogant bully fade away before this touching little scene. The truth is that at the root of the man there was an unfailing spring of human love. One who knew him very well said that peace and goodwill were the natural emanations of his heart. All sorts of weakness found a friend in him. He was markedly kind to children, especially little girls, to servants, to animals. When he was himself in great poverty he would put pennies in the hands of the children sleeping on doorsteps in the Strand, as he walked home in the small hours of the morning. He left most of his property to his negro servant Frank: and so united a delicate consideration for Frank’s feelings with an affection for his cat Hodge that he always went out himself to buy oysters for Hodge lest Frank should think himself insulted by being employed to wait upon a cat.
Nor did this human and social element in him show itself only in such grave shape as hatred of slavery and tenderness to the poor. His sense of kinship with other men was, indeed, a serious conviction held on serious grounds. But it was also the expression of his natural good nature, and overflowed into the obvious channels of kindly sociability which come to every man unsought, as well as into these deeper ones of sympathy which are only found by those who seek them. Those who know him only through Boswell are in danger of over-accentuating the graver side of his character. In Boswell’s eyes he was primarily the sage and saint, and though he exhibits him playing many other parts as well it is on these two that the stress is especially laid. Other people, notably Fanny Burney, who in his last years saw a great deal of him at the Thrales’, enable us to restore the balance. She loved and honoured him with an affection and reverence only short of Boswell’s: and her youth, cleverness and charm won Johnson’s heart as no one won it who came so late into his world. Like Boswell she had a touch of literary genius, and luckily for us she used it partly to write about Johnson. Hers is the most vivid picture we have of him after Boswell’s, and it is notable that she is for ever laying stress on his gaiety. The seriousness is there, and she thoroughly appreciated it; but the thing that strikes any one coming to her from Boswell is the perpetual recurrence of such phrases as “Dr. Johnson was gaily sociable,” “Dr. Johnson was in high spirits, full of mirth and sport,” “Dr. Johnson was in exceeding humour.” On one day in 1778 he appears in her journal as “so facetious that he challenged Mr. Thrale to get drunk”; and the next year, when he was seventy, she writes that he “has more fun and comical humour and love of nonsense about him than almost anybody I ever saw.” Even in 1783, after he had had the stroke which was the beginning of the end, she speaks of his “gaiety.” The explanation is no doubt partly that Miss Burney was a woman and saw him chiefly with women, Boswell a man who saw him chiefly with men. Even without her genius she would not be the first young woman whose admiring affection has seemed to an old man to give him back his youth. And she had not only her own sudden and surprising celebrity but all that happy ease of the Streatham life, and the cleverness and good humour of Mrs. Thrale, to help her. No wonder Johnson was at his brightest in such circumstances.
But his easy sociability there was no sudden revolution in his nature. Sir John Hawkins, who, though never a very congenial companion, had known him longer than almost any of his friends, says of him that he was “a great contributor to the mirth of conversation.” And constant glimpses of his lighter side are caught all through Boswell, such as that picture of him at Corrichatachin, in Skye, sitting with a young Highland lady on his knee and kissing her. We have already heard his peals of midnight laughter ringing through the silent Strand. The truth is that both by nature and by principle he was a very sociable man. That is another of the elements in his permanent popularity. The man who liked all sorts and conditions of men when he was alive has one of the surest passports to the friendliness of poster
ity. Johnson, like Walter Scott, could and did talk to everybody, or, rather, join in any talk that anybody started; for he seldom spoke first even among his friends. It was probably to this ease of intercourse that he owed the stores of information with which he often surprised his hearers on all sorts of unlikely subjects, such as on one occasion that of the various purposes to which bones picked up in the streets by the London poor are put, and the use of a particular paste in melting iron. But in these casual conversations he was not consciously seeking information as Scott partly was; he was just giving play to his natural sociability, or perhaps deliberately acting on the principle of humani nihil, which no one ever held more strongly than he.
He always condemned the cold reserve so common among Englishmen. Two strangers of any other nation, he used to say, will find some topic of talk at once when they are thrown into an inn parlour together: two Englishmen will go each to a different window and remain in obstinate silence. “Sir, we as yet do not enough understand the common rights of humanity.” He boasted that he was never strange in a strange place, and would talk at his best in a coach with perfect strangers to their outspoken amazement and delight. At all times he hated and dreaded being alone, both on moral and medical grounds, having the fear of madness always before him. He said that he had only once refused to dine out for the sake of his studies, and then he had done nothing. He praised a tavern chair as the throne of human felicity, better indeed, because freer, than anything to be found at a private house; for only “a very impudent dog indeed can freely command what is in another man’s house.” He loved to assert that all great kings (among whom he curiously included Charles II, “the last King of England who was a man of parts”) had been social men; and he was the most convinced of Londoners because it was in London that life, which to him meant the exercise of the social and intellectual faculties, was to be found at its eagerest and fullest. If, as Mrs. Thrale said, all he asked for happiness was conversation it must be admitted that his standard was exacting both in quantity and quality. He never wanted to go to bed, and if any one would stay with him, would sit talking and drinking tea till four in the morning. Yet his instantaneous severity in reproving inaccuracies or refuting fallacies was so alarming that he sometimes reduced a whole company to the silence of fear. The last thing he wished, no doubt, but it is one of the tragedies of life that power will not be denied its exercise, even to its own misery. But these were the rare dark moments; as a rule, as we have seen, all who came into a room with him were entranced by the force, variety and brilliance of his talk.
His natural turn was to be the very opposite of a killjoy; he loved not merely to be kind to others but to be “merry” with them, Mrs. Thrale tells us: loved to join in children’s games, especially those of a “knot of little misses,” of whom he was fonder than of boys: and always encouraged cards, dancing and similar amusements. He was by temperament and conviction a conformer to the innocent ways of the world: and once, when some Quaker was denouncing the vanities of dress, he broke out, “Oh, let us not be found when our Master calls us, ripping 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.” Though he practised some severities, such as fasting, himself, he was altogether opposed to an austere view of life: was no friend, he said, to making religion appear too hard, by which he thought many good people had done harm. Though he walked with enthusiastic reverence on any ground trodden by saints or hermits, yet he was quite clear that retirement from the world was for ordinary men and women both a mistake and a crime; and he regarded with special distrust all “youthful passion for abstracted devotion.” The Carthusian silence was, of course, particularly obnoxious to the master and lover of talk. “We read in the Gospel,” he said, “of the apostles being sent to preach, but not to hold their tongues.” We all like to find reasons of religion or philosophy in justification of our own pleasures: and no doubt one hears the personal prejudices of the lover of society as well as the serious thought of the student of life in the warmth with which he denounces solitude as “dangerous to reason without being favourable to virtue,” and declares that “the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.”
But real as the social element in Johnson was, and important as the remembrance of it is for a corrective of the too solemn portrait of him for which Boswell gives some excuse, it never got the mastery of him. In the ordinary way the life of the pre-eminently social man or woman gradually disappears in a dancing sunshine of sociability. The butterfly finds crossing and recrossing other butterflies in the airy, flowery spaces of the world such a pleasant business that it asks no more: above all, it does not care to ask the meaning of a thing so easy and agreeable as day to day existence. The pleasures and the business that lie on life’s surface, the acquaintances and half friends that are encountered there, are enough for it: and the crowded empty days glide by as easily and as imperceptibly as a boatful of dreaming idlers drifting on unawares till the pace suddenly quickens for a moment, and almost before the speed wakens them they are struggling hopelessly in the whirlpool at the bottom of the fall. But, for Johnson, society had no sleeping potion strong enough to overcome his ever-wakeful sense of the issues of life. Underneath all the “gaiety” that Miss Burney liked to record, there was one of the gravest of men, a man whose religion had a strong “Day of Judgment” element in it, who believed as literally as Bunyan in heaven and hell as the alternative issues of life, except that he allowed himself some Catholic latitude of hope as to that third possibility which provides the most human of the three divisions of Dante’s great poem. Most people, even the most strictly orthodox, would now say that Johnson’s religion contained too much consciousness of the Divine Judgment and too little of the Divine Love. But at least the fear of God, which was to him a thing so real and awful, had nothing in it of the attitude, so common in all ages and all religions of the world, which attempts to delude or defeat or buy off the hostility of a capricious despot by means of money, or magical arts, or a well devised system of celestial alliances. In Johnson it came simply from the sense of sin and issued in the desire to live better. He was as ethically minded as any one in that moralizing century: only that he added to ethics the faith in God and conviction of sin which have a power on life unknown to mere moral philosophy. He lived among good men, mainly, but men, for the most part, whose intellectual attitude towards the Christian faith was one of detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not be his attitude. He was the last man in the world to be content with anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking was to him a pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He might have been either Hume or Butler, either Wesley or Gibbon, but he was certain not to be, what the average cultivated man in his day was, a respectable but unenthusiastic and unconvinced conformer. Conventional acquiescence is easy provided a man does not choose to think or inquire; but, as Carlyle said, that would not do for Johnson: he always zealously recommended and practised inquiry. The result was what is well known. His mind settled definitely on the opposite side to Hume and Gibbon: the Christian religion became intensely real to him, sometimes, it almost seems, the nightmare of his life, often its comfort and strength, present, at any rate, audibly and visibly, in every company where he was; for no man was ever so little ashamed of his religion as Johnson. It was the principle of his life in public as well as in private. Hence that spectacle which Carlyle found so memorable, of “Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire able to purify and fortify his soul, and hold real Communion with the Highest, in the Church of St. Clement Danes; a thing to be looked at with pity, admiration, awe.”
That church still remains; the least altered, perhaps, with the possible exception of the house in Gough Square, of all the buildings which once had the body of Johnson inside
them; a place of pilgrimage for many Johnsonians who, refusing to be driven away by the commonplace window which officially honours his memory, are grateful to find the seat he used to occupy marked out for their veneration: and not altogether ungrateful even for the amateur statue which stands in the churchyard, looking towards his beloved Fleet Street. There were performed the central acts of those half tragic Good Fridays, those self-condemning Easter Days, recorded in his private note-books: there, on the Good Friday of 1773, he took Boswell with him, and Boswell observed, what he said he should never forget, “the tremulous earnestness with which Johnson pronounced the awful petition in the Litany: ‘In the hour of death, and at the day of judgment, good Lord deliver us.’”
We now know more in some ways about his religious life than his friends did, because we have the private prayers he wrote for his own use, the sermons he composed for others, and a few notes, chiefly of a religious kind, describing his doings and feelings on certain days of his life. But all the evidence, private and public, points the same way. His prayers are among the best in English, pulsing and throbbing with earnest faith and fear, yet entirely free from the luscious sentimentality of so many modern religious compositions. He was in the habit of making special prayers for all important occasions: he made them, for instance, sometimes before he entered upon new literary undertakings, as in the case of The Rambler; and he took Boswell into the Church at Harwich and prayed with him before he saw him off for Utrecht. No one who was with him on such occasions failed to be impressed by his profound and awe-inspiring sincerity. Mrs. Thrale says that when he repeated the Dies Irae “he never could pass the stanza ending Tantus labor non sit cassus without bursting into a flood of tears”; and another witness records how one night at a dinner where some one quoted the nineteenth psalm his worn and harsh features were transformed, and “his face was almost as if it had been the face of an angel” as he recited Addison’s noble version of that psalm. Phrases that came unbidden to his voice or pen show the same constant sense of this life as a thing to be lived in the sight and presence of Eternity. When at Boswell’s request he sends him a letter of advice, one of his sentences is “I am now writing, and you, when you read this, are reading, under the Eye of Omnipresence.” So on one occasion he said, “The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity”; and he would quote Law’s remark that “every man knows something worse of himself than he is sure of in others.” Such sayings do not come to the lips of men to whom the life of the spirit and the conscience is not a daily and hourly reality. That it was to Johnson; and no one understands him who does not lay stress on it. It does not always appear in such grave guise as in these instances, but it is always there. We may take our leave of it as we see it in simpler and happier shape in Boswell’s account of himself and Johnson sharing a bedroom at Glen Morrison. “After we had offered up our private devotions and had chatted a little from our beds, Dr. Johnson said ‘God bless us both for Jesus Christ’s sake! Good-night.’ I pronounced ‘Amen.’ He fell asleep immediately.”
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 622
