But when he goes on as they did to Temple Bar, he will find that ancient monument retired into the country and certainly nothing whatever to remind him of the Jacobite heads still mouldering on it, which gave occasion to Goldsmith’s witty turning of his Tory friend’s quotation —
“Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur ISTIS.”
But on that holy ground the Johnsonian will hardly miss even Temple Bar. For most of Johnson’s haunts and homes, the Mitre and the Cock, the Churches of St. Clement and of the Temple, his houses in Johnson’s Court and Gough Square, are or were all hard by: and the memory will be far too busy to allow room for the disappointments and lamentations of the eye.
But of course the great characteristic of Johnson is neither love of London nor hatred of Presbyterians, nor any of the other things we have been talking about; it is the love and power of talk. We cannot estimate talk nearly as accurately as we estimate writing: so much that belongs to the word spoken is totally lost when it becomes a word recorded: the light in the eye, the brow raised in scorn or anger, the moving lips whose amusement or contempt is a picture before it is a sound, the infinitely varying weight and tone of the human voice: all that is gone or seen only very darkly through the glass of description. But since the talk itself as written down and the manner of it as described are all we have to judge by: and since as long as we are alive and awake we cannot avoid judging the things and people that interest us, we inevitably form opinions about talkers as well as about writers: and the best opinion of those who know English is undoubtedly that Johnson is the greatest of all recorded talkers. The best of all is very possibly some obscure genius who caret vate sacro: but Johnson with the invaluable help of Boswell has beaten him and all the others. What is the essence of his superiority? Not wisdom or profundity certainly. There, of course, he would be immeasurably surpassed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of talkers. Of course his talk comes to us chiefly through the medium of a man of transcendent genius; and Plato may have transcended his master as well as other things. But on the whole all the evidence goes to show that the talk of Socrates was the force which set ideas in motion, which modified the whole subsequent moral and intellectual life of Greece and Rome, and through them of the world; in fact, that the spoken word of Socrates has played a greater part in the world than any written word whatsoever, except the Gospels and the Koran, both themselves, it may be noted, the record of a spoken word greater than the written book. Beside anything of this kind Johnson sinks of course into entire insignificance. But as an artist in talk, that is a man who talked well for the pleasure of it, as an end in itself, and whose talk was heard gladly as a thing of triumph and delight, bringing with it its own justification, he probably far surpassed Socrates. If he, too, had got to his trial he probably would have been as scornful as Socrates of the judgment of popular opinion. But he never would have got there, not only because he was too conservative to deny the established divinities, but because he was so entertaining that everybody liked listening to him, whatever he denied or affirmed. Socrates, on the other hand, was evidently something of a bore, with a bore’s unrelieved earnestness and inopportune persistence. His saying about “letting the talk lead us where it will,” is an exact description of Johnson’s practice, but nothing could be less like his own. He is always relentlessly guiding it towards a particular goal, from the path to which he will not have it for a moment diverted. Johnson, on the other hand, takes no thought whatever for the argumentative morrow, never starts a subject, never sets out to prove anything. He talks as an artist paints, just for the joy of doing what he is conscious of doing well. The talk, like the picture, is its own sufficient reward.
The same sort of inferiority puts other famous talkers, Coleridge for instance, and Luther, below Johnson. They had too much purpose in their talk to be artists about it. The endless eloquence of the Highgate days, to say nothing about the greater days before Highgate, was a powerful element in that revival of a spiritual or metaphysical, as opposed to a merely sensational, philosophy which has been going on ever since. No such results can be attributed to Johnson’s talk. But talk is one thing and preaching another: and the final criticism on Coleridge as a talker was given once for all in Charles Lamb’s well-known answer to his friend’s question: “Did you ever hear me preach, Charles?” “Never heard you do anything else.” Luther again, though much more of a human being than Coleridge and apparently a livelier talker, was, after all, the leader of one of the greatest movements the world has ever seen, and like his disciple, Johnson’s friend John Wesley, no doubt had no time to fold his legs, and have his talk out. Besides leaders of movements are necessarily somewhat narrow men. For them there is only one thing of importance in the world, and their talk inevitably lacks variety. That, on the other hand, is one of the three great qualities in which Johnson’s talk is supreme. Without often aiming at being instructive it is not only nearly always interesting but with an amazing variety of interest. The theologian, the moral philosopher, the casuist, the scholar, the politician, the economist, the lawyer, the clergyman, the schoolmaster, the author, above all the amateur of life, all find in it abundance of food for their own particular tastes. Each of them — notably for instance, the political economist — may sometimes find Johnson mistaken; not one will ever find him dull. On every subject he has something to say which makes the reader’s mind move faster than before, if it be but in disagreement. Reynolds, who had heard plenty of good talkers, thought no one could ever have exceeded Johnson in the capacity of talking well on any subject that came uppermost. His mere knowledge and information were prodigious. If a stranger heard him talk about leather he would imagine him to have been bred a tanner, or if about the school philosophy, he would suppose he had spent his life in the study of Scotus and Aquinas. No doubt the variety was a long way from universality. Johnson was too human for the dulness of omniscience. He had his dislikes as well as predilections. The least affected of men, he particularly disliked the then common fashion of dragging Greek and Roman history into conversation. He said that he “never desired to hear of the Punic War while he lived,” and when Fox talked of Catiline he “thought of Tom Thumb.” So when Boswell used an illustration from Roman manners he put him down with, “Why we know very little about the Romans.”
Wide as the country he could cover was, he is always coming back to his favourite topic, which can only be described as life; how it is lived and how it ought to be; life as a spectacle and life as a moral and social problem. That by itself makes a sufficiently varied field for talk. But real as his variety was, it is still not the most remarkable thing about his talk. Where he surpassed all men was in the readiness with which he could put what he possessed to use. Speaking of the extraordinary quickness with which he “flew upon” any argument, Boswell once said to Sir Joshua, “he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with the sword; he is through your body in an instant.” Sometimes he condescended to achieve this by mere rudeness, as once when, being hard pressed in an argument about the passions, he said, “Sir, there is one passion I advise you to be careful of. When you have drunk that glass don’t drink another.” But the notion, which one hears occasionally expressed, that his principal argumentative weapon was rudeness is an entire mistake. Every impartial reader of Boswell will admit that the rudeness of his retorts where it exists is entirely swallowed up and forgotten in their aptness, ingenuity and wit. He was rude sometimes, no doubt; as, for instance, to the unfortunate young man who went to him for advice as to whether he should marry, and got for an answer, “Sir, I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.” But, human nature being what it is, sympathy for the victim is in such cases commonly extinguished in delighted admiration of the punishment. That will be still more whole-hearted when the victim is obviously a bore, like the gentleman who annoyed Johnson by persisting in spite of discouragement in an argument about the fut
ure life of brutes, till at last he gave the fatal opportunity by asking, “with a serious metaphysical pensive face,” “But, really, sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don’t know what to think of him;” to which Johnson, “rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye,” replied, “True, sir, and when we see a very foolish fellow, we don’t know what to think of him.” Conversation would be a weariness of the flesh if one might never answer a fool according to his folly: and such answers are not to be called rude when the rudeness, if such there be, is only one ingredient in a compound of which the principal parts are humour and felicity. And, of course, even this measure of rudeness is only present occasionally, while the amazing exactness of felicity seldom fails. Who does not envy the readiness of mind which instantly provided him with the exact analogy which he used to crush Boswell’s plea for the Methodist undergraduates expelled from Oxford in 1768? “But was it not hard, sir, to expel them, for I am told they were good beings?” “I believe they might be good beings: but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.” Note that, as usual with Johnson, — and that is the astonishing thing — the illustration, however far-fetched, is not merely humorous but exactly to the point. Plenty of men can compose such retorts at leisure: the unique Johnsonian gift was that he had them at his instant command. Or take one other illustration; a compliment this time, and one of the swiftest as well as happiest on record. Mrs. Siddons came to see him the year before he died, and when she entered his room there was no chair for her. Another man would have been embarrassed by such a circumstance combined with such a visitor. Not so Johnson, who turned the difficulty into a triumph by simply saying with a smile, “Madam, you who so often occasion a want of seats to other people, will the more readily excuse the want of one yourself.”
The third great quality of Johnson’s talk is its style. His command of language was such as that he seems never to have been at a loss; never to have fumbled, or hesitated, or fallen back upon the second best word; he saw instantly the point he wanted to make, and was instantly ready with the best words in which to make it. It was said of him that all his talk could be written down and printed without a correction. That would, indeed, be double-edged praise to give to most men: but with Johnson it is absolutely true without being in the least damaging. For his talk is always talk, not writing or preaching; and it is always his own. That dictum of Horace which he and Wilkes discussed at the famous dinner at Dilly’s, Difficile est proprie communia dicere, gives the exact praise of Johnson as a talker. There are few things more difficult than to put the truths of common sense in such a way as to make them your own. To do so is one of the privileges of the masters of style. Few people have had more of it than Johnson. His prose, spoken or written, is altogether wanting in some of the greatest elements of style: it has no music, no mystery, no gift of suggestion, very little of the higher sort of imagination, nothing at all of what we have been taught to call the Celtic side of the English mind. But in this particular power of making the old new, and the commonplace individual, Johnson is among the great masters. And he shows it in his talk even more than in his writings. All that he says has that supreme mark of style; it cannot be translated without loss. The only indisputable proof of an author possessing style is his being unquotable except in his own words. If a paraphrase will do he may have learning, wisdom, profundity, what you will, but style he has not. Style is the expression of an individual, appearing once and only once in the world; it is Keats or Carlyle or Swinburne: it never has been and never will be anybody else.
Its presence in Johnson is painfully brought home to any one who tries to quote his good things without the assistance of a very accurate verbal memory. Even when he says such a thing as “This is wretched stuff, sir,” the words manage to have style because they express his convictions in a way which is his, and no one else’s. This is taking it at its lowest, of course; when we go a little further and take a sentence like the famous remark about Ossian, “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever if he would abandon his mind to it,” the sting in the word “abandon” is the sort of thing which other people devise at their desks, but which Johnson has ready on his lips for immediate use. So again, he seems to have been able not only to find the most telling word in a moment, but to put his thought in the most telling shape. Many people then and since disliked and disapproved of Bolingbroke. But has there ever, then or at any other time, been a man who could find such language for his disapproval as Johnson? “Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.” It is at once as devastating as a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a smaller way, is his criticism of a smaller man. Dr. Adams, talking of Newton, Bishop of Bristol, whom Johnson disliked, once said, “I believe his Dissertations on the Prophecies is his great work,” Johnson’s instant answer was, “Why, sir, it is Tom’s great work; but how far it is great, or how much of it is Tom’s, are other questions.” How mercilessly perfect! A thousand years of preparation could not have put it more shortly or more effectively. It both does the business in hand and gives expression to himself; nor is there in it a superfluous syllable; all of which is, again, another way of saying that it has style. And he did not need the stimulus of personal feeling to give him this energy of speech. The same gift is seen when he “communia dicit,” when he is uttering some general reflection, the common wisdom of mankind. Molière said, “Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve.” Johnson might have used the same words with a slightly different meaning. He excelled all men in recoining the gold of common sense in his own mind. All the world has said “humanum est errare”: but the saying is newborn when Johnson clinches an argument with, “No, sir; a fallible being will fail somewhere.” So on a hundred other commonplaces of discussion one may find him, all through Boswell’s pages, adding that unanalysable something of himself in word or thought which makes the ancient dry bones stir again to life. “It is better to live rich than to die rich”; “no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures”; “it is the business of a wise man to be happy”; “he that runs against time has an antagonist not subject to casualties”; “the great excellence of a writer is to put into his book as much as his book will hold”; “there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money”; “no woman is the worse for sense and knowledge”; but “supposing a wife to be of a studious or argumentative turn it would be very troublesome; for instance — if a woman should continually dwell upon the subject of the Arian heresy”; “a man should keep his friendship always in repair”; “to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life”; “every man is to take existence on the terms on which it is given to him”; “the man who talks to unburden his mind is the man to delight you”; “No, sir, let fanciful men do as they will, depend upon it it is difficult to disturb the system of life.”
The man who thinks, as Taine thought, that sayings of this sort are mere commonplaces, will never understand Johnson: he may give up the attempt at once. The true commonplace is like the money of a spendthrift heir: his guineas come and go without his ever thinking for a moment where they came from or whither they go. But Johnson’s commonplaces had been consciously earned and were deliberately spent; he had made them himself, and when he handed them on to others he handed himself on with them. Taine may perhaps be excused; for it may require some knowledge of English to be sure of detecting the personal flavour Johnson gave to his generalizations: but the Englishman who misses it shows that he has mistaken the ornaments of literature for its essence and exposes himself to the same criticism as a man who cannot recognize a genius unless he is eccentric. Johnson could break out in conversation as well as in his books into a noble eloquence all his own; such a phrase as “poisoning the sources of eternal truth,”
rises spontaneously to his lips when his indignation is aroused. His free language disdained to be confined within any park palings of pedantry. Some of his most characteristic utterances owe their flavour to combining the language of the schools with the language of the tavern: as when he said of that strange inmate of his house, Miss Carmichael, “Poll is a stupid slut. I had some hopes of her at first: but when I talked to her tightly and closely I could make nothing of her; she was wiggle waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical.” He was the very antipodes of a retailer of other men’s thoughts in other men’s words: every chapter of Boswell brings its evidence of Johnsonian eloquence, of Johnsonian quaintness, raciness, and abundance, of the surprising flights of his fancy, of the inexhaustible ingenuity of his arguments and illustrations. No talk the world has ever heard is less like the talk of a commonplace man. Yet the supreme quality of it is not the ingenuity or the oddness or the wit: it is the thing Taine missed, the sovereign sanity of the Johnsonian common sense. Bagehot once said that it was the business of the English Prime Minister to have more common sense than any man. Johnson is the Prime Minister of literature; or perhaps, rather, of life. Not indeed for a time of revolution. For that we should have to go to some one less unwilling to “disturb the system of life.” But for ordinary times, and in the vast majority of matters all times are ordinary, Johnson is the man. The Prime Minister is not the whole of the body politic, of course: and there are purposes for which we need people with more turn than Johnson for starting and pressing new ideas: but these will come best from below the gangway; and they will be none the worse in the end for having had to undergo the formidable criticism of a Prime Minister whose first article of faith is that the King’s government must be carried on. The slow-moving centrality of Johnson’s mind, not to be diverted by any far-looking whimsies from the daily problem of how life was to be lived, is not the least important of the qualities that have given him his unique position in the respect and affection of the English race.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 624
