The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  When today’s crapulent hacks recycle Sam’s remark, it lacks this particular resonance, and I’m tempted to argue that it is untrue: when one is tired of London, one is simply tired of London, and most people who have lived or worked there will know that feeling, even if they have also savoured the city’s charms. But the line has become so well-known that it obliterates pretty much everything else Sam said – or, more importantly, wrote – on the subject. ‘More importantly’, that is, because we can be confident that what he wrote was what he thought at that moment, whereas his sayings are inevitably a little warped by the people who recorded them. It’s not that we should reject the quotations attributed to him; many are too richly attested for that to be necessary, as well as too good to be given up. Yet what he wrote should take precedence. There we can find plenty more evidence of his delight in London’s social and cultural inexhaustibility, but there are hints in his letters that an occasional retreat from the city was essential to his continuing appreciation of it.

  Another possible objection to Sam’s celebrated aphorism is that it appears to confine itself to male experience. But while it’s true that at the time Sam was writing (and speaking), man could certainly mean ‘the male human being’, often it was used simply to denote ‘a person’, without any implications of gender. Even if it was no longer natural to write of Adam and Eve, as the preacher John King had in the sixteenth century, that ‘The Lord had but one pair of men in paradise’, an author generalizing about humankind would refer to the behaviours and attitudes of men. It was the norm to use he where an author might now prefer he or she, s/he or a less cumbersome singular they – the last of which is of course guaranteed to incense those guardians of the galaxy who otherwise go by the name of grammar pedants. (While this is not the place to present a sustained case for singular they, I make no apology for having used it in these pages.) More to the point, although Sam’s aphorisms often look gender-specific, they rarely need to be interpreted that way: ‘If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it’, ‘Men are seldom satisfied with praise introduced or followed by any mention of defect’, ‘There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given him something peculiar to himself.’

  This is also the place to observe that, if some of Sam’s most celebrated remarks are far from being his best, some of his best are commonly misunderstood. A perennial favourite is ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, which is trotted out by cynics eager to make the case that any flicker of patriotic sentiment is contemptible. Sam had something more specific in mind: the feigned love of country so often used to cloak the self-interest of tycoons and cheapjack politicians. It’s not that all attachment to one’s homeland is corrupt and boneheaded; rather, the most noxious individuals will claim, in moments of extremity, that the destructive things they’re doing must be performed for their country’s good, and that those who want to stand in their way are traitors. Exploited thus, the notion of patriotism has nothing to do with affection or a commitment to certain principles one thinks are embedded in one’s community. Instead, it’s a psychopath’s excuse for violence – and here it seems apt to add the judgement of Isaac Asimov’s character Salvor Hardin, a diplomat and master of the morally charged epigram, that ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’

  10

  Of Genius, with sundry other scenes from the farce of life

  By the 1740s, the territory known to modern literary tourists as ‘Dr Johnson’s London’ had been staked out. Over the course of the forty-seven years Sam spent in the city, he would reside at more than twenty addresses. But ‘his’ London was, as the historian Jerry White explains, ‘a tightly circumscribed district about three-quarters of a mile long – from Durham Yard, Strand, to Shoe Lane, Fleet Street – and only half a mile wide’. When he worshipped it was at St Clement Danes, a High Church establishment on the Strand, and the parish was mixed, a mosaic of fine streets and poor ones that included not one but two Pissing Alleys.1 This was the part of town where printing and publishing happened. It was a scene of pleasure, too: here were inns and shops and shows, as well as many potentially fatal attractions.

  Three decades later, Sam would survey this domain and say that ‘Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross’. These were the words of a man who felt a sense of ownership and believed he had an overview of London’s commerce and vitality. Yet during his early years in the city he was part of its surge and flow, a mere Grub Street peon. Feeling financially and morally responsible for Tetty, whose health was in decline, he took on a string of thankless projects. It was these that cemented the unillusioned attitude that would later find expression in statements such as ‘A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it’. By this reckoning, a real writer wasn’t one who coyly waited for inspiration and ideal conditions: ‘Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution.’

  Even when one of Sam’s Grub Street gigs held promise, in the very moment of savouring that promise he saw, as writers do, how small his chances were. In the Rambler, he would define the ‘writer’s malady’ as the dream of success. ‘Perhaps no class of the human species requires more to be cautioned against . . . anticipation of happiness, than those that aspire to the name of authors.’ A few years later he began his preface to Richard Rolt’s Dictionary of Trade and Commerce by returning to this theme: ‘No expectation is more fallacious than that which authors form of the reception which their labours will find among mankind.’ Sam had not met Rolt or even read his work, but, inadvertently anticipating the poor reception of this volume, noted that scarcely anyone publishes a book ‘without believing that he has caught the moment when . . . the world is disposed . . . to learn the art which he undertakes to teach’. From the very start of his own literary career he understood the delusions of authorship: the conviction that one’s current idea is brilliant and opportune, destined to express the spirit of the moment or of the moment that’s just about to be, and the necessarily sanguine belief, when that idea shows signs of being no more than a slushy brainfart, that the real magic lies in the next one, already taking shape.

  In his thirties, one of the most exacting tasks he took on was writing up parliamentary debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine. This occupied him from July 1741 to March 1744, and was a job that called for some ingenuity. Since the House of Commons had resolved in 1738 that it was a ‘breach of privilege’ to report these debates, parliamentary coverage had to be dressed as something else – in the case of the Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘Debates in the Senates of Magna Lilliputia’. Sam, who seems to have entered the House of Commons only once, would write his account of a debate long after the event, with the help of notes provided by Edward Cave, who had some clout with the House’s doorkeepers. He was also able to refer to the London Magazine, which was quicker to report the speeches, and where he added drama to his account it was in order to make the Gentleman’s Magazine seem superior to its brisker rival. At best a reconstruction, his reporting was often more like an inspired fiction. Yet most readers, while aware of the limits on parliamentary reporting, accepted that these reports were as close to the truth as they would get. This preyed on Sam’s mind. Many years later, when a literary acquaintance, Philip Francis, pronounced a speech by William Pitt one of the masterpieces of modern oratory, Sam astonished his companions by explaining that the printed version, rather than being a faithful transcript of Pitt’s eloquence, was something he had cobbled together in a garret in Covent Garden. Near the end of his life he expressed regret over passing off these fictions as realities, which to Boswell was prime evidence of ‘the tenderness of his conscience’.

  A more bookish task that occupied him during this period was cataloguing the libr
ary of the Earl of Oxford, who had died in 1741. Acquired by the bookseller Thomas Osborne for £13,000, this was at the time Britain’s best collection in private hands – around 50,000 books and 350,000 pamphlets, together with 7,639 volumes of manuscripts, and 14,236 rolls, charters and deeds. Sam worked alongside William Oldys, who had been the Earl’s literary secretary but now had to earn his keep as a literary hack. ‘In this painful drudgery both editors were day-labourers for immediate subsistence,’ writes Oldys’s Victorian biographer James Yeowell.2 It says something about the nature of this drudgery that Osborne objected to Sam’s pausing to read a little of one of the books he was meant to be cataloguing, and that Sam responded by thumping him with a particularly large volume and then stood on his neck. Here, in a nutshell, is one of his life’s recurring problems: his appetite for literature could hamper his work on projects where time was of the essence and other people’s livelihood was at stake. And here, too, is the stout-hearted Samuel Johnson of legend, subduing a bully, though it is worth adding that the details of what happened are disputed, with Sam conceding only that ‘he was impertinent to me, and I beat him’.

  His life in Grub Street made him aware of how the literary world functioned. It exposed him to good writers who existed in a state of perpetual penury, their gifts unrecognized, and to writers whose success and reputation were vastly in excess of their talent. He saw at close quarters the mud-slinging and sharp practices of a culture in which plagiarists mixed on equal terms with poets and pornographers. In the Idler, another of his series of essays, he would reflect on the surfeit of violent propaganda and the ease with which it could be commissioned from desperate hacks: ‘I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.’ This was a milieu in which belligerence, jealousy and double-dealing were the norm. When he wrote that ‘the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life’ he was thinking of an incident in the literary career of Sir Thomas Browne, a seventeenth-century Londoner who removed himself to the comparative obscurity of Norwich. Browne’s first book, the anonymously published Religio Medici, gained publicity as a result of an inept commentary produced in the space of twenty-four hours by Sir Kenelm Digby, a writer at the time well-known, and the two men then exchanged polite letters in which Digby was at pains to emphasize his correspondent’s brilliance and his own comparatively modest gifts. For Sam, this ritual courtesy was an example of the embarrassing ease with which authors stoop to mutual puffery. Of course, there are countless instances of authors doing the very opposite and trashing each other. Yet literary squabbles are to be expected; it is the secret ecosystem of flattery and covert patronage that needs exposing.

  He noted with distaste how many of his contemporaries were content to bestow the word genius on people of modest ability. Where once it had signified a guardian spirit, presiding over a person, a place or an age, it had become a badge of individual excellence – of being, as Sam puts it in the Dictionary, ‘endowed with superior faculties’. Writing in the Spectator in 1711, Joseph Addison had complained that writers were forever being called geniuses; even some puny scribbler of unoriginal poems could receive the accolade. In Addison’s view, there were two types of ground (i.e. mind) in which genius could grow: one was ‘like a rich soil in a happy climate, that produces a whole wilderness of noble plants rising in a thousand beautiful landscapes without any certain order or regularity’, the other ‘the same rich soil under the same happy climate, that has been laid out in walks and parterres, and cut into shape and beauty by the skill of the gardener’. In other words, there were extravagant geniuses and there were restrained ones. Shakespeare was in the first class, along with Homer; Plato and Sir Francis Bacon were in the second. When Addison wrote this, the vulgarization of genius was in its infancy. By mid-century, it was an established problem. In Tom Jones (1749), Henry Fielding had fun at the expense of the fashion for finding genius inside thick skulls: ‘several gentlemen in these times, by the wonderful force of genius only, without the least assistance of learning, perhaps without being well able to read, have made a considerable figure in the republic of letters’. The result, joked Fielding, was that critics had begun to claim that any kind of learning is useless to a writer and acts like ‘fetters on the natural spriteliness and activity of the imagination’.

  It was understandable, then, that Sam should argue in the early 1750s that ‘the present generation’ suffered gravely from feeling it could ‘rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity’ – on ‘sudden irradiations of intelligence’ and ‘immediate intuition’. Within a few years there was a new spokesman for that generation, the poet Edward Young, who claimed in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) that the difference between genius and competence was like that between a magician and an architect. For Young, uncovering one’s genius was a matter of examining oneself profoundly rather than of applying oneself to study; it was a native endowment rather than an acquired art. He also argued that genius was far from rare, and that there had been many geniuses whose gifts had gone undiscovered because they’d not been afforded the benefits of literacy.

  By the end of the century the distinction between genius and talent had widened. This was thanks in large measure to the influence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that genius was an attribute of artists, not scientists; whereas a scientist carried out careful investigation, an artist could fire off new ideas with fierce spontaneity. In the early years of the nineteenth century the Romantic poets, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, advanced the cult of artistic genius – a belief that the individual’s unique personality is the source of art, and that art is the sublime expression of the individual’s feelings.

  Sam’s understanding of genius was very different – grounded rather than airy. His attitude to Shakespeare illustrates this. Whereas the Romantics’ insistence on the category ‘genius’ was in large measure a means of coming to terms with the playwright’s originality and extraordinary capacities, for Sam he was an ‘exact surveyor’ of the world, whose insights arise from ‘contemplating things as they really exist’. As it happens, Exact Surveyor was the title of a book published in 1654, in which a certain John Eyre described the use of theodolites and protractors, as well as how to ‘prove the truth of your work by a decimal table’. I have no evidence that Sam knew this, but Eyre’s is the sort of book he found interesting, and its image of what it meant to be an ‘exact surveyor’ is a nice sidelight, a droll hint at how far his conception of genius was from Edward Young’s. Fanny Burney reported hearing him say that ‘Genius is nothing more than knowing the use of tools’, and elsewhere, as we have seen, he wrote that ‘Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.’

  Today this isn’t the usual perception of genius. We think, as the Romantics did, of geniuses as a breed apart, possessed from birth of special qualities: they may fritter away their gifts, and such gifts may thrive only in certain sorts of environment, but genius is a natural endowment, not an acquired trait. The genius, as commonly conceived, is wild and godlike. Alongside this, Sam’s position seems lacklustre. Tools? Large general powers? Some particular direction?

  But wait: the most important part of his hostility to the cult of genius is moral. The geniuses glorified by his contemporaries were allowed, even encouraged, to get away with not knowing the use of tools, not having large general powers, and not channelling their abilities in a particular direction. Worse, they were allowed to get away with behaving like jackasses. Sam’s apparently drab notion of genius is not an attempt to belittle inventiveness, but is instead a criticism of a culture that insists on anointing people as magicians and by doing so gives them licence to be pricks. He is attuned to a problem that’s with us today: a willingness to indulge the vileness of people who are believed to be gifted, and a willingness to indulge the mediocrity of people whose vilenes
s is understood as a symptom of their nascent, latent or dormant gifts.

  It’s too easy to dismiss Sam’s notion of genius as merely grey. In fact, he wants to establish two things: the first is that geniuses are still human, and the second is that genius is basically exploratory. He understands genius as ‘the power of combination’, and describes a genius for poetry as ‘that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates’. In this he’s much closer to the philosopher Alexander Gerard, who set out his claims about imagination and aesthetics in essays published in 1759 and 1774. Gerard thought of genius as having a mechanism; it involves the filtration and association of ideas. While the sudden blaze of imagination may seem marvellously inexplicable to the person who experiences it, it’s a feat of computation rather than a moment of magic.

  There’s another good reason to cherish Sam’s antipathy to the cult of the wild and effortless genius. It is a corrective to our present obsession with creativity (or ‘creativity’), which, rather than stimulating genuine inventiveness, prizes suppositious guff at the expense of rigorous execution. People who boast about their creativity – and who revel in job titles such as Creative Director – tend not to be fresh thinkers. They act as though it’s a special faculty that they possess and the rest of us don’t. At the same time, conversely, there’s a widespread fixation with insisting that each of us is already a creative hotshot: if I can’t tie my shoelaces and express myself intelligibly, the most likely explanation is that I’m about to invent video tattoos or air-conditioned underpants. But anyone who brags about their creativity (‘I’m a thought sherpa’, ‘Meet the Ideas Ninja!’) is no better than a snake oil merchant. Individuals who are especially creative don’t tend to make a noise about it; they just get on with producing things that are the best possible advertisement for their talents.