A serious conviction held by a human being is generally found to be an inner citadel surrounded by a network of prejudices. It was only Johnson’s intimate friends who were admitted into the central fortress of his faith: the rest of the world saw it plainly indeed, but did not get nearer than the girdle of defensive prejudices outside, and to them they often got nearer than they liked. Whether people discovered that Johnson was a Christian or not, they were quite certain to discover that he was a Churchman. His High Church and Tory guns were always ready for action, and Lord Auchinleck is perhaps the only recorded assailant who succeeded in silencing them. The praise he gave to the dearest of his friends, “He hated a fool, he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig: he was a very good hater,” was exactly applicable to himself. For us the word Whig has come to mean a dignified aristocrat who, by the pressure of family tradition, maintains a painful association with vulgar Radicals: for Johnson it meant a rebel against the principle of authority. From that point of view he was accustomed to say with perfect justice that the first Whig was the Devil. His sallies at the general expense of the enemies of “Church and King” must not be confused with those on many other subjects, as, for instance, on the Scotch, which were partly humorous in intention as well as in expression. He trounced the Scotch to annoy Boswell and amuse himself. He trounced Whigs, Quakers and Presbyterians because he loved authority both in Church and State. These latter outbursts represented definite opinions which were held, as usually happens, with all the more passion because reason had not been allowed to play her full part in their maturing. Johnson could hold no views to which he had not been able to supply a rational foundation: but in these matters passion had been given a free hand in the superstructure.
In this way his Tory outbursts have a smack of life about them not always to be found in the utterances of sages. High Tories were not often seen in the intellectual London world of these days: they were to be found rather in country parsonages and college common-rooms. In London Whiggery sat enthroned and complacent. It is, therefore, with a pleasant sense of the fluttering of Whig dovecotes that we watch Johnson, always, as Miss Burney said, the first man in any company in which he appeared, startling superior persons by taking the high Tory tone. He once astonished an old gentleman to whose niece he was talking by saying to her, “My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite”; and answered the uncle’s protest by saying, “Why, sir, I meant no offence to your niece, I meant her a great compliment. A Jacobite, sir, believes in the divine right of kings. He that believes in the divine right of kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig: for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.” But it was not often that his Toryism expressed itself in anything so like a chain of reasoning as this. As a rule, it appears rather in those conversational sallies, so pleasantly compounded of wrath, humour, and contempt, which are the most remembered thing about him. It provides some of the most characteristic; as the dry answer to Boswell who expressed his surprise at having met a Staffordshire Whig, a being whom he had not supposed to exist, “Sir, there are rascals in all countries”; or the answer Garrick got when he asked him “Why did not you make me a Tory, when we lived so much together?” “Why,” said Johnson, pulling a heap of half-pence from his pocket, “did not the King make these guineas?” Or the true story he liked to tell of Boswell who, he said, “in the year 1745 was a fine boy, wore a white cockade, and prayed for King James, till one of his uncles gave him a shilling on condition that he should pray for King George, which he accordingly did. So you see that Whigs of all ages are made the same way.” In the same vein is his pleasant good-bye to Burke at Beaconsfield before the election of 1774. “Farewell, my dear sir, I wish you all the success which can possibly be wished you — by an honest man.” Even the fiercer outburst about Patriotism (that is according to the meaning of the word in those days, the pretence of preferring the interests of the people to those of the Crown), “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” gains an added piquancy from the fact that it was uttered at “The Club” under the nominal though absentee chairmanship of Charles Fox, soon to be the greatest of “patriots,” and in the actual presence of Burke.
But as a rule the fiercest assaults were reserved for Presbyterians and Dissenters in whom political and ecclesiastical iniquity were united. When he was walking in the ruins of St. Andrews and some one asked where John Knox was buried, he broke out “I hope in the highway. I have been looking at his reformations.” And he wished a dangerous steeple not to be taken down, “for,” said he, “it may fall on some of the posterity of John Knox: and no great matter!” So when he and Boswell went to the Episcopal church at Montrose he gave “a shilling extraordinary” to the Clerk, saying, “He belongs to an honest church,” and when Boswell rashly reminded him that Episcopalians were only dissenters, that is, only tolerated, in Scotland, he brought down upon himself the crushing retort, “Sir, we are here as Christians in Turkey.” These ingeniously exact analogies were always a favourite weapon with him; and perhaps the most brilliant of them all is one he used on this same subject in reply to Robertson, who said to him in London, “Dr. Johnson, allow me to say that in one respect I have the advantage of you; when you were in Scotland you would not come to hear any of our preachers, whereas, when I am here, I attend your public worship without scruple, and, indeed, with great satisfaction.” “Why, sir,” said Johnson, “that is not so extraordinary: the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis the Fourteenth: but Louis the Fourteenth sent none to the King of Siam.” This topic also enjoys another distinction. It is one of many proofs of the superlative excellence of Johnson’s talk that it cannot be imitated. Hundreds of clever men have made the attempt, but, with the exception of a single sentence, not one of these manufactured utterances could impose for an instant upon a real Johnsonian. That single exception deals with this same anti-Presbyterian prejudice. It is variously inscribed to Thorold Rogers and to Birkbeck Hill, the most Johnsonian of all men. It supposes that Boswell and Johnson are walking in Oxford, and Boswell, endowed with the gift of prophecy, asks Johnson what he would say if he were told that a hundred years after his death the Oxford University Press would allow his Dictionary to be re-edited by a Scotch Presbyterian. “Sir,” replies Johnson, “to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent.” Here and here alone is something which might deceive the very elect.
In several of these last utterances the bias is as much anti-Scotch as anti-Presbyterian. Of course Johnson, as his Journey to the Western Islands amply proves, had no serious feeling against Scotchmen as Scotchmen like the settled convictions which made him dislike Presbyterians. But then, as always, the Scot had a specially “gude conceit” of himself and a clannish habit of pushing the interest of his brother Scots wherever he went, so that it was commonly thought that to let a Scot into your house or business was not only to let in one conceited fellow, but to be certain of half a dozen more to follow. The English were then still so far from their present admiring acceptance of Scotsmen as their ordinary rulers in Church and State that they had not even begun to think of them as their equals. Scotland was at that time a very poor country, and the poor relation has never been a popular character anywhere. Consequently Englishmen — and who was ever more English than Johnson? — commonly saw in the newly arrived Scot a pauper and an upstart come to live upon his betters: and they revenged themselves in the manner natural to rich relations. To Johnson’s tongue, too, the Scots offered the important additional temptations of being often Whigs, oftener still Presbyterians, and always the countrymen of Boswell. This last was probably the one which he found it most impossible to resist. Happily Boswell had the almost unique good sense to enjoy a good thing even at the expense of his country or himself. It is to him, or perhaps at him, that the majority of these Scotch witticisms wer
e uttered: it is by him that nearly all of them are recorded, from the original sally which was the first sentence he heard from Johnson’s lips, in reply to his “Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” “That, sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help” — to the famous reply at the Wilkes dinner, when some one said “Poor old England is lost,”— “Sir, it is not so much to be lamented that old England is lost as that the Scotch have found it.”
On this topic Johnson would always let himself go. Again and again the generous connoisseurship of Boswell describes not only the witticism but the joyous gusto with which it was uttered. On no subject is the great talker’s amazing ingeniousness of retort more conspicuous. When Boswell most justly criticized the absurd extravagance of his famous sentence about the death of Garrick eclipsing the gaiety of nations, Johnson replied, “I could not have said more nor less. It is the truth; eclipsed, not extinguished; and his death did eclipse; it was like a storm.” Boswell. “But why nations? Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?” Johnson. “Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed. Besides nations may be said — if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety — which they have not.” So when Johnson said the Scotch had none of the luxuries or conveniences of life before the Union, and added, “laughing,” says Boswell, “with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present,” “We have taught you and we’ll do the same in time to all barbarous nations — to the Cherokees — and at last to the Ourang-outangs,” Boswell tried to meet him by saying “We had wine before the Union.” But this only got him into worse trouble. “No, sir, you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk.” Boswell. “I assure you, sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness.” Johnson. “No, sir; there were people who died of dropsies which they contracted in trying to get drunk.” This was said as they sailed along the shores of Skye; and of course the whole tour in Scotland afforded many opportunities for such jests. There was the wall at Edinburgh which by tradition was to fall upon some very learned man, but had been taken down some time before Johnson’s visit: “They have been afraid it never would fall,” said he. There was St. Giles’s at Edinburgh, which provoked the chaffing aside to Robertson, “Come, let me see what was once a church.” There were the beauties of Glasgow of which Adam Smith boasted, and provoked the famous question “Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?” There was the supposed treelessness of Scotland, on which he dwells in the Journey, and which once led him to question whether there was a tree between Edinburgh and the English border older than himself; and to reply to Boswell’s suggestion that he ought to be whipped at every tree over 100 years old in that space, “I believe I might submit to it for a baubee!” It led also to the pleasantry in which he emphasized his conviction that the oak stick he had brought from London was stolen and not merely lost when it disappeared in Mull; “Consider, sir, the value of such a piece of timber here.”
To-day we think of Scotland as one of the most beautiful countries in the world and go there in thousands for that reason. But that was not why Johnson went. He had little pleasure in any landscape scenery, and none in that of moors and mountains. Indeed nobody had in those days except Gray. And Gray was the last man in whose company Johnson was likely to be found differing from his contemporaries. So that though he saw much of what is finest in the noble scenery of Scotland, it hardly drew from him a single word of wonder or delight: and his only remembered allusion to it is the well-known sally hurled ten years earlier at the Scotsman in London who thought to get on safe ground for the defence of his country by speaking of her “noble wild prospects,” but only drew upon himself the answer, “I believe, sir, you have a great many. Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to London!”
So dangerous it always was to put a phrase into Johnson’s mouth! So dangerous above all to try to make him prefer anything to his beloved London. Perhaps no nation in the world has cared so little about its capital city as the English. When one thinks of the passionate affection lavished on Athens, Rome, Paris, even, strange as it seems to us, on Madrid, one is tempted to accuse the English of dull disloyalty to their own noble capital city. London played, at any rate till the French Revolution, a far more important part in English life than any other capital in the life of any other country. In the reign of Charles II, according to Macaulay, it was seventeen times as large as Bristol, then the second city in the Kingdom; a relative position unique in Europe. And all through our history it had led the nation in politics as well as in commerce. Yet of the best of all tributes to greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little. There is Milton’s noble burst of eloquence in the Areopagitica, but that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and politics of London at a particular moment. Spenser’s beautiful allusion in the Prothalamion to “mery London my most kyndly nurse” and to the “sweet Thames” whom he invites to “run softely till I end my song” is among the few tributes of personal affection paid by our poets to the great city. And it is still true to-day that the tutelary genius of London is none of the great poets: it is Samuel Johnson. At this moment, as these pages are being written, the railway stations of London are filled with picture advertisements of the attractions of the great city. And who is the central figure in the picture that deals with central London! Not Shakespeare or Milton, but Johnson. The worn, rather sad face, more familiar to Englishmen than that of any other man of letters, with the wig and brown coat to make recognition certain, is chosen as the most useful for their purpose by advertisers probably innocent of any literature, but astute enough in knowing what will attract the people.
Johnson’s love of London, however, was of his own sort, quite unlike that of Charles Lamb for instance, or that of such a man as Sir Walter Besant. He cared nothing for architecture, and little for history. Still less had his feeling anything to do with the commercial greatness of London. He had a scholar’s contempt for traders as people without ideas fit for rational conversation. The man who scoffed at the “boobies of Birmingham” as unworthy of notice in comparison with the gownsmen of Oxford or even the cathedral citizens of Lichfield, whose experience of commercial men made him declare that “trade could not be managed by those who manage it if it had much difficulty,” was not likely to have his imagination fired by talk about London as the centre of the world’s commerce. What he cared about was a very different thing. He thought of London as the place in all the world where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument: but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes, and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual pleasures which to him were the only real pleasures, and which made London for him a heaven upon earth. “He who is tired of London is tired of life,” he said on one occasion; and on another, when some one remarked that many people were content to live in the country, he replied, “Sir, it is in the intellectual as in the physical world; we are told by natural philosophers that a body is at rest in the place that is fit for it: they who are content to live in the country are fit for the country.” He was not one of them: he wanted Charing Cross and its “full tide of human existence,” and thought that any one who had once experienced “the full flow of London talk” must, if he retired to the country, “either be contented to turn baby again and play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a little pond, and die for want of his usual food.” He was more than once offered good country livings if he would take orders, but he knew that he would fi
nd the “insipidity and uniformity” of country life intolerable: and he stayed on to become the greatest of Londoners. There is probably to this day no book, not a professed piece of topography, which mentions the names of so many London streets, squares and churches, as Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Many sights that Johnson saw we can still see exactly as he saw them; many, of course, have disappeared; and many are so utterly changed as to be unrecognizable. The young poet may still stand where he and Goldsmith stood in Poets’ Corner and say in his heart with Johnson —
“Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.”
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 623
