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

by Henry Hitchings

  Sam is a moralist, but not of this kind. His idea of what it means to lead a good life involves actions, not just feelings – and effort rather than dogma, beneficence as well as benevolence. Although we are used to the term benevolent being applied to acts of kindness, for Sam it was a ‘disposition to do good’ – a mere state of mind. Better benevolence than malevolence, of course, but it was in performing good works that one could be fulfilled, realizing one’s potential. This is why he disapproved of religious hermits, for private piety ‘like that flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven . . . but it bestows no assistance on earthly beings’. A recluse may have a stainless character, yet accomplishes nothing.

  Rather than pontificating about abstract notions of goodness, Sam proposes a scheme of practical virtue. For instance, we should recall the times our commitment to doing the right thing brought success. If we reflect on past lapses, we should do so with regret rather than with a sneaking pleasure. We ought not to spend our days contemplating all the shocks and cataclysms that could befall us; an obsession with preparing for disasters, or really with preparing to prepare for them, diverts us from our responsibilities to others and to ourselves, increasing the chances of a more immediate kind of emergency. We mustn’t allow ourselves to be paralysed by indecision under the pretence that we’re awaiting the perfect moment to unfurl our plans: ‘He that waits for an opportunity to do much at once, may breathe out his life in idle wishes’ and will ‘regret, in the last hour, his useless intentions and barren zeal’.

  Then there were his more concrete commitments. Sam believed he had a duty to house the needy. Hester Thrale wrote of how by providing a refuge for poor wretches he ‘shared his bounty, and increased his dirt’. In truth, his humanitarianism came at a stiffer price than this, for it meant that often, having gone out, he was reluctant to return. Hawkins depicts him wandering the streets giving ‘loose money’ to beggars and then heading home in a state of dread; in the biographer’s opinion, Sam’s waiting menagerie of ‘distressed friends’ consisted of ‘undeserving people’ who ‘exposed him to trouble’ and ‘occasioned him great disquiet’.

  In speaking of Sam’s moral outlook, one has to understand that he was a Christian, solidly Anglican in childhood and then a doubter in adolescence, who renewed his faith while at Oxford, inspired by a single, recent book – William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729). Law, a fellow Midlander, shaped Sam’s understanding of the need for self-examination and for keeping a record of his prayers. In the short term, the effect of reading Law seems to have been negative; he believed that the high standards counselled in the Serious Call were beyond him, and this made him anxious that in the end, when judged, he would not be saved. In the longer term, although fear persisted, the result was a faith of humility and patience, firm and meditative rather than elaborate or jubilant. The character of that faith is most evident in Sam’s sermons. He wrote around forty of these for other people to preach; only two were published in his lifetime, and a total of twenty-eight survive. Their tone is one of elegant persuasion; these are works of practical divinity, concerned with ordinary human experiences such as friendship, suffering and the quest for domestic happiness.

  Even in his sermons, Sam is mainly concerned with ethics and morality, rather than with unpicking knotty matters of theology. He discusses fraud (‘it is generally an abuse of confidence’) and defamation (‘a false report may spread, where a recantation never reaches’), notes on one occasion that some taverns have to double up as brothels in order to survive, and writes astutely about the proud man who, thanks to ‘an insatiable desire of propagating in others the favourable opinion he entertains of himself ’, ‘tortures his invention for means to make himself conspicuous’. Elsewhere, when he ponders a religious question he remains mindful of the complexion of everyday life, and his personal struggles are palpable. Thus, in a theologically charged comment on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he reflects that ‘we all sin like Adam, and like him must all bewail our offences’. The verb he chooses – bewail – may be intended to recall the Book of Common Prayer (the confession made at communion that ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness’). But it is vivid, and the total effect of the statement is immediate rather than abstract. It summons an image of Sam wringing himself out as he plumbs the depths of penitence. He treats the operations of sin and repentance as a drama to which anyone can relate.

  The heart of Sam’s moral writing lies in a work I have already mentioned, a journalistic venture that transcended its immediate circumstances and became art. The Rambler appeared in 208 instalments – two a week for two years, beginning in March 1750. Each Tuesday and Saturday he addressed a grave subject, avoiding topical matters in favour of eternal ones. The first five Ramblers are all to do with the difficulty of making a start on any large undertaking – reflecting the problems he had been having with the Dictionary. Later he wrote about marriage, the abuse of power, our competitive nature, self-control, the necessity of contemplating death, the dangers of flattery and dependency, the tyrannical behaviour of landlords, the barren career of someone who lurches from one job to the next. Many of the essays were concerned with writing, and his approach was bookish, yet he constantly tried to turn his reading and learning to quotidian purposes. Keen not to alienate a secular audience, he avoided theological issues and cited the Bible a mere seven times (by contrast, the poet Horace cropped up 103 times).1 At the end of the final Rambler he spoke of hoping to be ‘numbered among the writers who have given ardour to virtue, and confidence to truth’. It’s a stirring statement about what he wanted to achieve – and a resonant one today, when so much journalism seems calculated to have the opposite effect.

  Rather than working to a commission, he wrote about whatever he wanted and was able to put all of himself into the essays. The form is one we now take for granted; I have already referred to essays by several writers other than Sam, and haven’t felt the need to explain what I mean. But it was only in the late sixteenth century that the essay became a recognizable genre. Michel de Montaigne, who published his Essais in 1580, is the father of the essay as we know it. The story of the word’s etymology takes in the French verb essayer, ‘to try’, and further back the Latin exigere, ‘to weigh’: in its original conception the essay was a trial, a test, an act of weighing or sampling, an attempt to get a grip on a subject, a starting point for a conversation. In England, the form’s outstanding exponent was Francis Bacon, whom Sam first read, with delight, while compiling the Dictionary; the first edition of his Essays appeared in 1597, and there were two enlarged editions in his lifetime. Bacon’s style is more compact than Montaigne’s, and his essays are less exploratory and personally revealing, but both make persuasive inquiries into the self.

  Sam, writing for a periodical, had little room to be truly exploratory, let alone garrulous in the way Montaigne often was. Because he was required to knock out two pieces a week, deadlines were forever looming, and instead of losing himself in the maze of planning, he had to focus on getting his copy written. The result was immediacy: an idea, rather than being left to season on some high shelf in the mind’s pantry, had to be served up quickly. A deadline is a challenge, and while not the prettiest kind of inspiration, it ensures that a writer doesn’t get lost in the rigmarole of preparation – which is often no more than squirrelly fidgeting. Under pressure to produce essays swiftly, Sam often sent them to the printer without carefully revising what he had written; he felt the thrill of rapid production, and of its being followed by rapid circulation.

  His sense of the form’s possibilities is clear in his Dictionary definition of essay as a ‘trial’ or ‘experiment’, and as ‘a loose sally of the mind, an irregular, undigested piece, not a regular and orderly composition’. It’s too easy, I think, to get hung up on the word loose, and the word that interests me here is the next one: by sally he means a sortie or excursion, an audacious departure from convention.
For Sam, the essay must put a belief to the test. It must be curious about the world, not least about the very processes of its own curiosity, and it must draw on deep reserves of experience. He values the essay’s tolerance and the potential it affords to wander around a theme. Yet he brings to this ‘irregular’ form and its brisk execution a style that is memorably precise and rigorous.

  The reading necessary for the Dictionary meant he was immersed in the ocean of English vocabulary, and he introduced into the Rambler some of the recondite terms he hit upon. For instance, he writes that certain feelings, rather than arising directly from our animal appetites, are adscititious, i.e. a supplement to them; a river serves as a source of water for a large region through its ‘innumerable circumvolutions’ (its winding course); butterflies are ‘the papili-onaceous tribe’; orators’ best arguments should be at the end of their speeches ‘lest they should be effaced or perplexed by supervenient images’.2 The emphases here are mine, and the purpose of using these words wasn’t to make himself look clever. Instead, he was intent on developing a style appropriate to painstaking moral thought. Working on the Dictionary made him alert to the differences between words that were commonly treated as synonyms. At the same time, he saw the degree to which familiar words were mired in ambiguity because they possessed so many shades of meaning. Abstract terms of Latin derivation, typically of a kind found in books on scientific subjects, were the building blocks of this experiment in analytical prose. Besides adopting words such as adscititious (from Bacon) and supervenient (from Sir Thomas Browne), he appears at this time to have coined words of his own, among them colloquial, unimportance, symmetrical, evanescence, irascibility and disentanglement.3

  Phrasing of this kind has led to his writing being stereotyped as pompous. Macaulay claimed that it was sometimes monotonous and turgid, and an Edwardian critic, Walter Raleigh, spoke of its ‘sonorous and ponderous rotundity’.4 In fact, across his whole body of work his style varies a lot, to suit different purposes, and while some of his prose is grandly rhetorical, plenty is conversational or plain. It’s when he is in deliberative mode, as in the Rambler, that it feels rigid. He loves setting up a contrast: it is typical that, instead of writing ‘You may stop me accompanying, but not following you’, he chooses a more ceremonious parallelism and writes ‘You may deny me to accompany you, but cannot hinder me from following’.5 This is something he does again and again. When he wants to construct a strong argument or dismantle a popular misconception, his vocabulary and sentence structure become more formal.

  Boswell referred to the ‘dignified march’ of Sam’s sentences and made a neat case for why they had to move in the way they did: ‘Had his conceptions been narrower, his expression would have been easier.’ The sheer lexical range of his writing reflects the diversity, incongruity and abundance of his reading and his experience. Yet at the same time he is keen to maintain a sense of proportion; in discussing matters where he thinks popular opinion is mistaken, he is performing a kind of adjustment, correcting distortions and errors of emphasis. As pros and cons are weighed up, his style, with its antitheses and parallels, feels like a meticulous putting-in-order of experience. This weightiness and vigilant balance are not exactly user-friendly. He is abrupt where we might prefer him to be fluid – a hammerer rather than a dulcet seducer. His fellow author Oliver Goldsmith aptly remarked, in his presence, that if he were to write a fable about little fishes for a young audience, the little fishes would probably talk like whales. But Sam was careful not to be abstruse. He remembered the conclusion of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub: ‘As to the business of being profound . . . it is with writers as with wells’, for ‘often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half underground it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark’.

  The best of the Rambler essays provided what Boswell called ‘bark and steel for the mind’. Although bark and steel sound usefully sturdy, it’s not immediately clear what Boswell is getting at. It seems that by ‘steel’ he meant iron in its medicinal use (as in the iron-rich waters found in spa towns), and by ‘bark’ the outer covering of the cinchona tree (which was at the time known to be effective against fever, and from which in the next century scientists would derive quinine). He may have been recalling a poem by a favourite writer of Sam’s, Isaac Watts, who praised the substances’ powers: ‘when bark and steel play well their game / To save our sinking breath’. The bark and steel of Samuel Johnson’s prose is not just fortification, then, but medicine. I can remember being persuaded as a child that the only medicines that work are ones that taste unpleasant, and while Boswell isn’t saying that, he makes Sam’s essays sound healthful or hefty, but not sprightly.

  Sam saw them in a different light. Issues of the Rambler sold modestly (500 copies at most), and the printer lost money on the venture, but the essays were soon reproduced, and they drew argumentative responses that acknowledged their gravity and purposeful intelligence. When Sam viewed his achievement from a distance, he reflected that ‘My other works are wine and water, but my Rambler is pure wine.’ A red wine, I think we can safely say, full-bodied, rich and concentrated, spicy rather than jammy, chewy and well balanced, with plenty of grip. A Châteauneuf-du-Pape, perhaps. But it may be more useful to think of the Rambler as a whole cellar of wines with different bouquets: the essays show his range, and they also show us our range, our capacity to relinquish the comforts of cliché and to entertain, as he does, the contradictions and complexities of a life not merely examined, but re-examined.

  With their fine sense of the layers of experience, the Rambler essays show that Sam the moralist has thought deeply, and one of their recurring subjects is the uses of literature. It is a commonplace that we read books for knowledge, enlightenment or escape, and apologists for literature may also point out that it teaches us the arts of concentration and absorption – or of vigilance, judgement, sympathy, awe. Yet Sam goes further, showing us that we turn to literature in order to engage in self-scrutiny and to intensify not only our powers of awareness, but also our contact with the textures of life itself. Sometimes this results in our recognizing who (and how) we are, sometimes it leads us to see ourselves in new ways, and occasionally we feel, as if for the first time, the density of existence, gaining access as we do so to the living palimpsest of human history.

  18

  Some further thoughts on the Rambler and the intricacies of ordinary life

  Rambler 68, published on 10 November 1750, is a good example of Sam’s peculiar range and his capacity for constructing a layered and surprising argument. There, after some initial comments about how much of what we do and feel passes unobserved, he writes that most of life is made up of ‘small incidents’ and ‘petty occurrences’. We spend our days wishing ‘for objects not remote’ and mourning ‘disappointments of no fatal consequence’; often we experience ‘insect vexations which sting us and fly away’ and ‘impertinencies which buzz a while about us, and are heard no more’. It is not just the irritants that are transitory, as even compliments ‘glide off the soul’, leaving no mark.

  His point is that at any given time we occupy ourselves with matters that will soon seem unimportant. On one occasion, when Boswell was embarrassed by being unable to offer hospitality to some guests, Sam remarked, ‘Consider, sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelvemonth hence.’ Boswell reflected on the usefulness of this precept: ‘Were this consideration to be applied to most of the little vexatious incidents of life, by which our quiet is too often disturbed, it would prevent many painful sensations.’ And yet, as Sam acknowledged, it’s not our first instinct to apply such a principle. In the moment when insect vexations occur, they consume all our attention and appear immense.

  The insect imagery feels apt: we tend to think of insects as pests, associating them with disease and destruction, and we often swat them away or kill them without a second thought, but we also marvel at
their aerodynamic abilities and sheer abundance. Among those to whom Sam’s image has since appealed, Thomas Jefferson stands out. In a long letter of August 1820 to Louis Hue Girardin, his neighbour in Virginia, he wrote of ‘The thousand and one insect vexations which have, of late especially, buzzed about my ears’. Jefferson’s choice of this Johnsonian language is piquant, because his letter is concerned with difficulties he had in his dealings with publishers, and also because he identifies procrastination as one of his habitual sins.1 An admirer of Johnson’s works, he claimed that his Dictionary was one of the books best able to ‘fix us in the principles and practices of virtue’, and he admitted that it was one of his favourite places to find quotable snippets from other writers. It is even possible that he owed his most enduring turn of phrase, the reference in the Declaration of Independence to ‘the pursuit of happiness’, to Johnson, who used it in print on several occasions.2

  For Jefferson, as for Sam, life is a swarm of distractions. The buzzing presence of annoying concerns is enough to engross three of our five senses: taste and smell are usually unaffected, but we can see and hear and touch the vexation – not just its causes, but the effect itself, which vibrates a few inches out of reach. We’re perhaps especially likely to think of vexation as having an acoustic signature, because we cannot close our ears and our appreciation of sound’s great potential to soothe us means that we regard jarring sounds as particularly obnoxious. The modern reader will think here not so much of insects as of smartphones clicking, chirping and rumbling. A feature of all such disturbance is that we understand that it will end but can’t be sure of when. I want it to go away, and in doing so I intensify its immediacy. Until it is over, my mind feels alien to me, as if a foreign object has taken up residence right in the middle of what was previously open, uncontaminated ground.