If we go further and extend the inquiry to those who can scarcely be called intimate friends, but with whom he was brought into more or less frequent social contact, the list becomes, of course, too long to give. But it may be worth while to mention that it would again include a very large number of men who had something in them above the ordinary. For instance, so great a name as that of Hogarth would be found in it, making with Allan Ramsay whom he also knew well and Reynolds who was perhaps the most intimate of all his friends, a remarkable trio to gather round a man who cared nothing for painting. He managed without that to impress them so much that Reynolds gave the credit of whatever was best in his Discourses to the “education” he had had under Johnson: and Hogarth declared that his conversation was to the talk of other men “like Titian’s painting compared to Hudson’s.” This outer circle includes also distinguished architects like Sir William Chambers who built Somerset House, and Gwynn who built Magdalen Bridge at Oxford and the English bridge at Shrewsbury: bishops like Barnard of Killaloe, and Shipley the liberal and reforming bishop of St. Asaph: poets like Collins and Young: historians and divines like Robertson and Hugh Blair: philosophers and men of science like Adam Smith and Sir Joseph Banks: with a certain number of intelligent peers like Lord Orrery the friend of Swift, Lord Marchmont the friend of Pope, and Lord Elibank whom Smollett praised for his “universal intelligence” and who said, when he was already seventy, that he would go five hundred miles to enjoy a day in Johnson’s company; besides public men like Lord Charlemont the Irish statesman and traveller who once went to visit Montesquieu, and Lord Macartney who had gone as ambassador to Russia and was soon to go in the same position to Pekin.
It is unnecessary to extend the list. All these men knew Johnson to a greater or less extent, and added to the interest of his life, as they add to the interest of Boswell’s record of it. Many or most of them are known to have recognized the greatness of Johnson. The words of some have been quoted and others might easily be added. Johnson often appears great in the books he wrote, and often too in the books which others have written about him: but it seems certain that unlike most authors he was far greater in bodily presence than he can be in his own or any one else’s books. Even Boswell’s magic pen cannot quite equal the living voice. To the overpowering impression made by that voice upon those who heard it, sometimes of almost bodily fear, oftener of a delight that could not have enough, always of amazed astonishment, the testimonies are not only innumerable, but so strongly worded and so evidently sincere as to suggest the conclusion that the fortunate listeners are attempting to relate an experience unique in the world’s history. Even those who had suffered from his rudeness like Wraxall, the author of the well-known Memoirs, give the impression of being unable to find words strong enough to describe the power of his presence, so that they use expressions like the “compass of his gigantic faculties” and “the sublime attainments of his mind” in speaking of the gap felt by the company when he left a room. The latter expression at any rate hardly seems to us exactly to fit Johnson; but no doubt Wraxall uses the word “sublime” because he wants to imply that there was something in Johnson’s talk utterly out of the reach of ordinary men of ability. In fact it does seem probable that no recorded man has ever talked with Johnson’s amazing freedom and power. Such an assertion cannot be proved, of course; but it would be difficult to exaggerate the weight of the evidence pointing in that direction. We have seen the kind of society in which he lived. In that society, rich in so many kinds of distinction, he was always accorded, as his right, a kind of informal but quite undisputed precedence. And it seems to have been the same among strangers as soon as he had opened his mouth. Whenever and wherever tongues were moving his primacy was immediate and unquestioned. The actual ears that could hear him were necessarily few; no man’s acquaintances can be more than an insignificant fraction of the public. But in his case they were sufficiently numerous, distinguished and enthusiastic to send the fame of his talk all over the country. Is he the only man whose “Bon Mots,” as they were called, have been published in his lifetime? “A mighty impudent thing,” as he said of it, but also an irrefragable proof of his celebrity.
And on the whole his popularity, then and since, has equalled his fame. Much is said of his rudeness and violence, but the fact remains that in all his life it does not appear to have cost him a single friend except the elder Sheridan. Those who knew him best bear the strongest testimony to the fundamental goodness of his heart. Reynolds said that he was always the first to seek a reconciliation, Goldsmith declared that he had nothing of the bear but his skin, and Boswell records many instances of his placability after a quarrel. The love his friends felt for him is written large all over Boswell’s pages. And of that feeling the public outside came more and more to share as much as strangers could. Even in his lifetime he began to receive that popular canonization which has been developing ever since. Perhaps the most curious of all the proofs of this is the fact mentioned by Boswell in a note, “that there were copper pieces struck at Birmingham with his head impressed on them, which pass current as halfpence there, and in the neighbouring parts of the country.” Has that ever happened to any other English writer? Well may Boswell cite it in evidence of Johnson’s extraordinary popularity. It is that and it is more. There is in it not merely a tribute of affection to the living and speaking man, there is also an anticipation of the most remarkable thing about his subsequent fame. That has had all along, as we saw at first, a popular element in it. It has never been, like that of most scholars and critics, an exclusively literary thing, confined solely to people of literary instincts. Rather it has been, more and more, what the newspapers and the Johnsoniana and these coins or medals already suggested, something altogether wider. Samuel Johnson was in his lifetime a well-known figure in the streets, a popular name in the press. He is now a national institution, with the merits, the defects, and the popularity which belong to national institutions. His popularity is certainly not diminished by the fact that he was the complacent victim of many of our insular prejudices and exhibited a good deal of the national tendency to a crude and self-confident Philistinism. These things come so humanly from him that his wisest admirers have scarcely the heart to complain or disapprove. They laugh at him, and with him, and love him still. But they could not love him as they do if he embodied only the weaknesses of his race. The position he holds in their affection, and the affection of the whole nation, is due to other and greater qualities. It is these that have given him his rare and indeed unique distinction as the accepted and traditional spokesman of the integrity, the humour, and the obstinate common sense, of the English people.
SAMUEL JOHNSON by Richard Claverhouse Jebb
From Essays and Addresses. A Lecture given at Newnham College, Cambridge, March 3, 1894.
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield on September i8, 1709, and died in London on December 13, 1784, in his 76th year. The time of his eminence begins shortly after the middle of the century, and covers about thirty years. Behind him lies the age of Pope and Swift, of Addison and Berkeley. After him comes the age of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Walter Scott and Byron. In the interval he stands out, if not as the greatest writer, at least as the greatest literary personality.
Nothing about Johnson is more singular than the relation of his writings to his permanent fame. In 1755 he published his Dictionary, after seven years of labour; and was thenceforth regarded as the foremost literary man of his day. He was then only forty-six years of age. Before that time, he had written much, but always under stress of the direst poverty, and much of what he then did was mere hack-work. Among the best productions of this earlier period were his two poems in imitation of Juvenal, — viz. “London,” written when he was twenty-nine, and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” when he was thirty-five. The Rambler, a series of more than two hundred essays, belongs to the years 1750–2. But after the appearance of the Dictionary, he wrote little. He had no longer the stimulus of necessity. In 1760
, on George the Third’s accession, Johnson was offered, and accepted, a pension of £300 a year. When Johnson called on Lord Bute to express his acknowledgments for this mark of royal favour, the Minister said, “It is not given to you for what you are to do, but for what you have done”; — a sly glance, possibly, at Johnson’s own definition of a pension in his Dictionary as “generally understood to mean pay given to a State hireling for treason to his country.” The pension placed Johnson in easy circumstances. Then he was constitutionally indolent. It was only because he happened to need a small sum for an urgent purpose, that he wrote, in 1759, the most successful of his minor works, the story of Rasselas, that young prince who, with his sister, and the sage Imlac, sets forth from the happy valley in Abyssinia to survey the world, and returns to his valley, convinced that, outside of it, all is vanity. The evenings of a single week sufficed for the composition of Rasselas, which has been translated, as Mr Birkbeck Hill tells us, into ten languages. After Rasselas, his chief productions were the edition of Shakespeare in 1765 (which does not seem to have cost severe labour); the Tour in the Hebrides, published ten years later; and the Lives of the Poets, in 1779–81. The last-named work is far the most considerable achieved by him after 1755. The series of poets treated in it begins with Cowley, who died in 1667, and ends with George, Lord Lyttelton, who died in 1773. Notwithstanding some eccentricities in poetical criticism, it is, of all Johnson’s writings, the work which can still be read with most sustained interest. The short biographies are full of the keenest insight into character and human nature. If any one of them were to be singled out, we might mention the sketch of that erratic and unhappy genius, Richard Savage, which Macaulay — long after his essay on Croker’s Boswell in the Edinburgh Review — justly recognised as a masterpiece. As Boswell records, “a friend once observed to Dr Johnson that, in his opinion, the Doctor’s literary strength lay in writing biography, in which he infinitely exceeded all his contemporaries. ‘Sir,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘I believe that is true. The dogs don’t know how to write trifles with dignity.’” Judged by the standards of our own day, Johnson is more successful as a biographer than as an essayist or a critic; partly because biography gives just the right scope for his powers of observation; and partly because the tendency of his style to be heavy and pompous, especially in abstract discussion, is held in check by the story itself; he may “write trifles with dignity,” but at any rate he has to write them. Next to the Lives of the Poets, the writings of Johnson which are least neglected at the present day are probably the Tour in the Hebrides, and the two satires, “London,” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes”; after these, perhaps, but at an interval, Rasselas. We know and estimate Johnson much less by his writings than by his talk; when we turn to his writings, it is rather to supplement our knowledge of the mind seen in his talk; to win further light, if possible, on the sources of that extraordinary influence which he undoubtedly wielded over the best of his contemporaries.
And then we are met by that curious phenomenon in English prose, Johnson’s literary style. The first thing which strikes one about it is that it is so inferior, as a rule, to his best utterances in conversation; it frequently lacks their terseness, their point and vigour; it is generally ponderous, often involved, artificial, tedious — though, like his talk, it is invariably clear. The most obvious and frequent fault is the see-saw of long words, in balanced clauses; thus, where it would be enough to say, “from childhood to old age,” Johnson says (in Rasselas), “from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondency of decrepitude”; or he speaks of “that levity and cheerfulness which disencumber all minds from awe and solicitude, invite the modest to freedom, and exalt the timorous to confidence.” This style is of course least happy when it is too grand for the subject; as when, after criticising the windows in some Scotch houses, he apologises for noticing such trifles:— “These diminutive observations seem to take away something from the dignity of writing, and are never communicated but with hesitation, and a little fear of abasement and contempt.” It is at its best when he is strongly moved: “That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.” Or take the first paragraph of his letter to Mr Macpherson, the author of Ossian, who had threatened him with summary vengeance:— “Mr James Macpherson, I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian.” It is a great mistake, however, to suppose that Johnson always wrote what is known as Johnsonese, or that the faults which we associate with Johnsonese do much to spoil the best things that he has written. It is not difficult to see that the worse side of his style answers to a physical infirmity of his nature, just as its better side answers to his mental strength. He had a powerful and clear mind, richly stored with knowledge; a high spirit; extraordinary depth and tenderness of feeling; and a sense, which his early miseries had only strengthened by touching his pride, that the vocation of literature is a high and noble one. Such a nature craved stately and ample utterance; he must be allowed to enforce each thought as it arises, to expand it, and to clothe it in language both exact and decorous. But then that powerful mind was subject to a lethargy against which he could not always strive successfully; it was part of his constitution. He was often sunk in reveries, when the expression of his face, we are told, was almost imbecile. The commonest faults of his style are largely to be explained by this lethargy; they indicate that, for the moment, the working of his mind is not really brisk, but painful, and half-mechanical. He himself gives us a glimpse of the labour which composition often cost him. “It is one of the common distresses of a writer,” he says (in the Adventurer), “to be within a word of a happy period, to want only a single epithet to give amplification its full force, to require only a correspondent term in order to finish a paragraph with elegance, and make one of its members answer to the other: but these deficiencies cannot always be supplied; and after a long study and vexation, the passage is turned anew, and the web unwoven that was so nearly finished.” There we see the grinding out of a cumbrous sentence. But when any one challenged Johnson to talk, especially by saying something with which he did not agree, the lethargy vanished; his mind was at once alert; the thoughts rolled forth without check, vigorous, incisive, set off with abundance of apt illustration; and in this respect his best talk had a great advantage over his average writing.
Johnson’s literary style must also be considered in its relation to the English predecessors by whom he had been influenced. In his invariable clearness, and in the strict propriety which marks his use of words, we see the influence of the literary generation which came next before his own, the writers who were the standards of style in the reigns of Anne and George I. — such as Addison and Pope. That period had been characterised by a revolt from the pedantries of scholasticism, and the revolt had run to the other extreme; common sense was the new divinity; and everything that common sense could not explain, everything that savoured of a mystic profundity, was suspected of imposture, or at least of mental confusion. In style the great virtue was elegant correctness — the appropriate garb for penetrating and polished common sense. If we wished to illustrate this ideal by the opposite extreme, we might turn to Carlyle, hurling his amorphous language into space, and tormenting human speech in a struggle to body forth the Immensities. Johnson’s age was remote enough from Carlyle’s ways of thinking, but at least it was in process of outgrowing the deification of common sense and correctness; it was beginning to feel that there were more things in heaven and earth than had been comprehended by the literary law-givers of the age before it. This perception necessarily re-acted upon style; in Johnson’s own ponderous sentences we can occasionally see that, like Thucydides, he labours under the difficulty that the things which he wishes to express are rather too complex for his instru
ment, in the form which recent usage had given to it, and that he must strive to draw some new tones out of that instrument in his own way. Compare Johnson with Addison, for instance. Addison had lived from earliest manhood in a polite world; the tone of the drawing-room and the coffee-house came naturally to him; it suited his gifts, and they, in their turn, raised and adorned it. Everything that Addison wished to say, grave or lively, could be said in this tone. As Johnson finely says of him, Addison “taught a succession of writers to bring elegance and gaiety to the aid of goodness.” But Johnson had grown up to middle-life, a poor and recluse student struggling with adversity; “toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol” — he had known all of them except the last; and during the long years before the dweller in Grub Street became the oracle of society, his brooding mind had communed deeply with a scholar’s natural friends, the great prose-writers of the preceding century. He used to say that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was the only book which ever got him out of bed two hours earlier than usual; another of his favourites was Sir Thomas Browne. These studies could not but affect his style; they furnished to it an element which tempers the tradition of Addison and Pope; we see it in the lofty diction, the ampler periods, and, generally, in that tone which suggests the study rather than the drawing-room. To make this clearer, let us place side by side a short passage from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and a like specimen of Addison. Here is Burton:— “Every man knows his own but not others’ defects and miseries; and ’tis the nature of all men still to reflect upon themselves and their own misfortunes, not to examine or consider other men’s, not to confer themselves with others: to recount their miseries, but not the good gifts, fortunes, benefits, which they have; to ruminate on their adversity, but not once to think on their prosperity, not what they have, but what they want; to look still on them that go before, but not on those infinite numbers that come after; whereas many a man would think himself in heaven, a petty prince, if he had but the least part of that fortune which thou so much repinest at, abhorrest, and accountest a most vile and wretched estate.” Here is Addison, dealing with a similar subject, in The Mountain of Miseries:— “It is a celebrated thought of Socrates, that if all the misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stock, in order to be equally distributed among the whole species, those who now think themselves the most unhappy would prefer the share they are already possessed of, before that which would fall to them by such a division. Horace has carried this thought a great deal further (Sat. i. 1, ver. 1), which implies that the hardships or misfortunes we lie under are more easy to us than those of any other person would be, in case we could change conditions with him.”
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