All Johnson’s criticism has one great merit; it is thoroughly independent. It is also marked, almost everywhere, by strong good sense; and though good sense does not necessarily mean good taste, at any rate there can be no good taste without it.
His character was a noble one — generous, brave, unswervingly honest, and, above all, wonderfully kind. He had no patience for people grumbling about petty or sentimental troubles; but where there was real trouble, his bounty and his self-sacrifice were signal. Two thirds of his income went in charity. His dependents were numerous. In his later years his own house was full of permanent inmates who were either partly or wholly supported by him. Johnson describes, in a letter to Mrs Thrale, how his guests got on with each other; “Williams,” he says, “hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them.” Then Frank Barber resented the authority of Miss Williams, and she complained of Barber’s insubordination. And in this circle Johnson voluntarily made his home for years. His acts of goodness to the outcasts of society, to the most forlorn waifs and strays of humanity, were past counting, “A decent provision for the poor,” he said, “is the true test of civility”; and he regarded it as the chief distinction of his own age that it had given new examples of charity. Among such examples, others may have been more conspicuous in men’s eyes, and more often on their lips; but assuredly few can have been nobler. The eighteenth century had not come to see what the more prosperous classes can and ought to do towards making the lives of the poor brighter; but the feeling which moved Johnson when he met with misery in the London streets was as keen as stirs any worker at the East End to-day, and his benevolence, if less systematic and less refined, was as practical in spirit. Johnson’s large sympathies are seen again in his warm appreciation of his friends. Men of the most diverse characters and abilities have received from him a tribute of praise which sets forth some shining quality in each of them. Thus he pronounced David Garrick “the first man in the world for sprightly conversation”; and, in referring to the great actor’s death, wrote that it had “eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasures.” His estimate of the novelist Richardson, whom he somewhat unduly preferred to Fielding, appears in his saying that “Fielding can tell the hour by looking at the clock, whilst Richardson knows how the clock was made.” It was through Johnson’s good offices that the Vicar of Wakefield passed from manuscript into print; and intimately though he knew the foibles of Goldsmith’s character, he did the amplest justice to his peculiar literary genius. “Goldsmith,” he said, “was a man who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any other man could do” — a judgment which stands in the Latin of his famous epitaph on Goldsmith as nihil tetigit quod non ornavit, “he touched nothing which he did not adorn.” Horace Walpole described Johnson as “the representative in epitome of all the contradictions in human nature.” This gives a rather superficial view of him. No doubt there was sometimes an odd disproportion in his likings and dislikes; it might seem strange, for instance, that he could not tolerate the mention of a man so estimable as Joseph Priestley, and yet be ready to dine at the table of the sedition-monger Jack Wilkes. Macaulay dwells on the contrast between Johnson’s reluctance to credit the account of the Lisbon earthquake, and his readiness to believe in the Cock-Lane ghost. But Macaulay puts the case here in a somewhat misleading perspective. Johnson was slow to credit reports of extraordinary incidents in the ordinary course of nature, when he had no means of verifying such reports, because he was keenly alive to the various sources of falsehood in human life. In regard to alleged supernatural occurrences, he was not weakly credulous; it was he, for example, who demolished this very Cock-Lane ghost in the Gentleman s Magazine; but he wished to keep his mind open. Believing firmly in the existence of the soul after death, he was not prepared to deny the possibility of such communications from the unseen world. Once more, there was sometimes, no doubt, an odd contrast between his pursuits and his associates; it might seem incongruous that the great lexicographer should spend the small hours of the morning in brewing a bowl of bishop at a tavern with such young men as the elegant Mr Bennet Langton and the gay Mr Topham Beauclerc, and in helping them to surprise the early fruiterers in Covent Garden; but we may remember that all history attests the magnetic attraction of bright mind for bright mind — however different their bodily dwellings — from the days when Socrates fascinated Alcibiades, and at cock-crow, after the night-long banquet, was still trying to convince the drowsy Aristophanes that Comedy is of the same essence as Tragedy. Johnson was a great man to his contemporaries, and, if we judge soundly, he must appear a great man to us; although we estimate in a somewhat different proportion the elements which constitute his greatness. To us he is no longer the literary oracle or the profound sage; he is rather a man of singularly robust intellect; a most keen and sane observer of character; a man wise in the wisdom of life, who knew the evil and the misery that must be always in the world, but never wasted in idle repining the strength that should be reserved for combating and, so far as possible, alleviating them; a man to be honoured for his intellectual gifts, but who deserves at least equal honour for his moral qualities and his goodness. We in England have him all to ourselves. The best biography in all English literature has never been translated into any foreign language. An eminent French writer, who has shown a power, unusual in his countrymen, of comprehending England, — Monsieur Taine, — is obliged to confess that he cannot understand the English love of Johnson. And yet we shall continue to love him.
SAMUEL JOHNSON by Leslie Stephen
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE.
CHAPTER II. LITERARY CAREER.
CHAPTER III. JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS.
CHAPTER IV. JOHNSON AS A LITERARY DICTATOR.
CHAPTER V. THE CLOSING YEARS OF JOHNSON’S LIFE.
CHAPTER VI. JOHNSON’S WRITINGS.
CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE.
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709. His father, Michael Johnson, was a bookseller, highly respected by the cathedral clergy, and for a time sufficiently prosperous to be a magistrate of the town, and, in the year of his son’s birth, sheriff of the county. He opened a bookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns, including Birmingham, which was as yet unable to maintain a separate bookseller. The tradesman often exaggerates the prejudices of the class whose wants he supplies, and Michael Johnson was probably a more devoted High Churchman and Tory than many of the cathedral clergy themselves. He reconciled himself with difficulty to taking the oaths against the exiled dynasty. He was a man of considerable mental and physical power, but tormented by hypochondriacal tendencies. His son inherited a share both of his constitution and of his principles. Long afterwards Samuel associated with his childish days a faint but solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and long black hood. The lady was Queen Anne, to whom, in compliance with a superstition just dying a natural death, he had been taken by his mother to be touched for the king’s evil. The touch was ineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he ought to have been presented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts in Rome. Disease and superstition had thus stood by his cradle, and they never quitted him during life. The demon of hypochondria was always lying in wait for him, and could be exorcised for a time only by hard work or social excitement. Of this we shall hear enough; but it may be as well to sum up at once some of the physical characteristics which marked him through life and greatly influenced his career.
The disease had scarred and disfigured features otherwise regular and always impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, entirely destroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is said, distinguish a friend’s face half a yard off, and pictures were to him meaningless patches, in which he could never see the resemblance to their objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for he could see enough to condemn a portrait of himself. He expressed some annoyance wh
en Reynolds had painted him with a pen held close to his eye; and protested that he would not be handed down to posterity as “blinking Sam.” It seems that habits of minute attention atoned in some degree for this natural defect. Boswell tells us how Johnson once corrected him as to the precise shape of a mountain; and Mrs. Thrale says that he was a close and exacting critic of ladies’ dress, even to the accidental position of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons upon such matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to a “little creature.” “What,” he asked, “have not all insects gay colours?” His insensibility to music was even more pronounced than his dulness of sight. On hearing it said, in praise of a musical performance, that it was in any case difficult, his feeling comment was, “I wish it had been impossible!”
The queer convulsions by which he amazed all beholders were probably connected with his disease, though he and Reynolds ascribed them simply to habit. When entering a doorway with his blind companion, Miss Williams, he would suddenly desert her on the step in order to “whirl and twist about” in strange gesticulations. The performance partook of the nature of a superstitious ceremonial. He would stop in a street or the middle of a room to go through it correctly. Once he collected a laughing mob in Twickenham meadows by his antics; his hands imitating the motions of a jockey riding at full speed and his feet twisting in and out to make heels and toes touch alternately. He presently sat down and took out a Grotius De Veritate, over which he “seesawed” so violently that the mob ran back to see what was the matter. Once in such a fit he suddenly twisted off the shoe of a lady who sat by him. Sometimes he seemed to be obeying some hidden impulse, which commanded him to touch every post in a street or tread on the centre of every paving-stone, and would return if his task had not been accurately performed.
In spite of such oddities, he was not only possessed of physical power corresponding to his great height and massive stature, but was something of a proficient at athletic exercises. He was conversant with the theory, at least, of boxing; a knowledge probably acquired from an uncle who kept the ring at Smithfield for a year, and was never beaten in boxing or wrestling. His constitutional fearlessness would have made him a formidable antagonist. Hawkins describes the oak staff, six feet in length and increasing from one to three inches in diameter, which lay ready to his hand when he expected an attack from Macpherson of Ossian celebrity. Once he is said to have taken up a chair at the theatre upon which a man had seated himself during his temporary absence, and to have tossed it and its occupant bodily into the pit. He would swim into pools said to be dangerous, beat huge dogs into peace, climb trees, and even run races and jump gates. Once at least he went out foxhunting, and though he despised the amusement, was deeply touched by the complimentary assertion that he rode as well as the most illiterate fellow in England. Perhaps the most whimsical of his performances was when, in his fifty-fifth year, he went to the top of a high hill with his friend Langton. “I have not had a roll for a long time,” said the great lexicographer suddenly, and, after deliberately emptying his pockets, he laid himself parallel to the edge of the hill, and descended, turning over and over till he came to the bottom. We may believe, as Mrs. Thrale remarks upon his jumping over a stool to show that he was not tired by his hunting, that his performances in this kind were so strange and uncouth that a fear for the safety of his bones quenched the spectator’s tendency to laugh.
In such a strange case was imprisoned one of the most vigorous intellects of the time. Vast strength hampered by clumsiness and associated with grievous disease, deep and massive powers of feeling limited by narrow though acute perceptions, were characteristic both of soul and body. These peculiarities were manifested from his early infancy. Miss Seward, a typical specimen of the provincial précieuse, attempted to trace them in an epitaph which he was said to have written at the age of three.
Here lies good master duck
Whom Samuel Johnson trod on;
If it had lived, it had been good luck,
For then we had had an odd one.
The verses, however, were really made by his father, who passed them off as the child’s, and illustrate nothing but the paternal vanity. In fact the boy was regarded as something of an infant prodigy. His great powers of memory, characteristic of a mind singularly retentive of all impressions, were early developed. He seemed to learn by intuition. Indolence, as in his after life, alternated with brief efforts of strenuous exertion. His want of sight prevented him from sharing in the ordinary childish sports; and one of his great pleasures was in reading old romances — a taste which he retained through life. Boys of this temperament are generally despised by their fellows; but Johnson seems to have had the power of enforcing the respect of his companions. Three of the lads used to come for him in the morning and carry him in triumph to school, seated upon the shoulders of one and supported on each side by his companions.
After learning to read at a dame-school, and from a certain Tom Brown, of whom it is only recorded that he published a spelling-book and dedicated it to the Universe, young Samuel was sent to the Lichfield Grammar School, and was afterwards, for a short time, apparently in the character of pupil-teacher, at the school of Stourbridge, in Worcestershire. A good deal of Latin was “whipped into him,” and though he complained of the excessive severity of two of his teachers, he was always a believer in the virtues of the rod. A child, he said, who is flogged, “gets his task, and there’s an end on’t; whereas by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundations of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.” In practice, indeed, this stern disciplinarian seems to have been specially indulgent to children. The memory of his own sorrows made him value their happiness, and he rejoiced greatly when he at last persuaded a schoolmaster to remit the old-fashioned holiday-task.
Johnson left school at sixteen and spent two years at home, probably in learning his father’s business. This seems to have been the chief period of his studies. Long afterwards he said that he knew almost as much at eighteen as he did at the age of fifty-three — the date of the remark. His father’s shop would give him many opportunities, and he devoured what came in his way with the undiscriminating eagerness of a young student. His intellectual resembled his physical appetite. He gorged books. He tore the hearts out of them, but did not study systematically. Do you read books through? he asked indignantly of some one who expected from him such supererogatory labour. His memory enabled him to accumulate great stores of a desultory and unsystematic knowledge. Somehow he became a fine Latin scholar, though never first-rate as a Grecian. The direction of his studies was partly determined by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch, lying on a shelf where he was looking for apples; and one of his earliest literary plans, never carried out, was an edition of Politian, with a history of Latin poetry from the time of Petrarch. When he went to the University at the end of this period, he was in possession of a very unusual amount of reading.
Meanwhile he was beginning to feel the pressure of poverty. His father’s affairs were probably getting into disorder. One anecdote — it is one which it is difficult to read without emotion — refers to this period. Many years afterwards, Johnson, worn by disease and the hard struggle of life, was staying at Lichfield, where a few old friends still survived, but in which every street must have revived the memories of the many who had long since gone over to the majority. He was missed one morning at breakfast, and did not return till supper-time. Then he told how his time had been passed. On that day fifty years before, his father, confined by illness, had begged him to take his place to sell books at a stall at Uttoxeter. Pride made him refuse. “To do away with the sin of this disobedience, I this day went in a post-chaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather; a penance by which I trust I have propitiated
Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy to my father.” If the anecdote illustrates the touch of superstition in Johnson’s mind, it reveals too that sacred depth of tenderness which ennobled his character. No repentance can ever wipe out the past or make it be as though it had not been; but the remorse of a fine character may be transmuted into a permanent source of nobler views of life and the world.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 632
