At the heart of social activity Sam saw ‘the general desire of happiness’ – and happiness was, he believed, ‘the only thing of real value in existence’. The means by which he cultivated it are worth examining. Any credible account of his life, no matter how much it insists on his pains and dreads, will be full of meals and visits, conversations and storytelling, evidence of friendship and camaraderie. In his later years, having no family of his own besides his stepdaughter Lucy Porter, he acquired alternative families (at the Thrales’, and in his own domestic space), and the time he spent among them, for all its melancholy moments, was rich with laughter.
The sociable Samuel Johnson was fond of clubs. The first in which he played an active part was the Ivy Lane Club, which, beginning in the winter of 1748, met each Tuesday evening at the King’s Head, a steakhouse near St Paul’s cathedral. Its more famous successor, now often simply called Johnson’s Club, first met in 1764 at the Turk’s Head, a pub in Soho on a site where today there is an Asian supermarket. The founder members included Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith, the last of whom proved a nuisance, always trying to ride the surf of discussion and prompting Sam to comment that ‘he goes on without knowing how he is to get off’. Among those who joined later were Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics; Edward Gibbon, author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Charles James Fox, who was three times Foreign Secretary; and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, best known for his comedies The School for Scandal and The Rivals. When Sam died, membership stood at thirty-five. There were no women, and Reynolds succeeded in keeping out any other painters; as in most institutions of its kind, noble talk of equality and accord didn’t put a stop to internal politicking.
At the time Johnson’s Club began, there were around 2,000 societies in London that met his Dictionary definition – ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’. That sounds vague, and Henry John Todd, who updated the Dictionary in the early nineteenth century, noted that ‘a club is not always “an assembly of good fellows” in Dr Johnson’s meaning; but an association of persons subjected to particular rules’. Todd’s point was twofold: membership was restricted, and some clubs were a home from home for those hung up on gambling, political agitation or unorthodox sexual practices. Certainly they came in different shapes and sizes, and some clubs’ preoccupations were weird – a tendency satirized as early as 1709 by the poet Ned Ward. In The Secret History of Clubs, Ward wrote about groups that didn’t exist but very well could have done; these included the Farting Club, whose members met to ‘poison the neighbouring air with their unsavoury crepitations’.1
In reality, while there were mixed clubs and all-female ones, the vast majority were exclusively male, and they indulged a male enthusiasm for odd little ceremonies, customs, fines and toasts. It is easy to dismiss such coteries as realms of fantasy, as breeding grounds for pettiness and snobbery, as mechanisms for reinforcing elitism or sexism. They can be cradles of criminality, and often they’re places of debauchery. Behind closed doors, members indulge in gossip or grease the wheels of nepotism. But clubs offer a refuge from the workplace and an alternative to the familiar tone of family life. They play a role in nurturing local identity or other kinds of solidarity (intellectual, political, artistic, and so on). For Sam and his contemporaries, they were a sphere in which to discuss new ideas – scenes of communion, not conspiracy.
The growth of these institutions, most of which were voluntary and secular, began in the seventeenth century and rocketed in Sam’s lifetime, reflecting the increasingly urban nature of Britain. Much of their activity happened at night. Street lighting had arrived in London in the 1680s; in the decades that followed, the night, instead of being a time for inertia or fear, became a social space, a scene of what the philosopher Lord Shaftesbury called ‘amicable collision’.2 Often fuelled by invigorating and newly fashionable coffee and tea, rather than by soporific wine, club life was, above all, dense with talk.
It is not hard to imagine what Sam’s fellow clubmen got from him. By the 1760s he had become the sort of elder statesman who routinely dispenses wise advice. In the press he was ‘voluminous Mr Johnson’, Chief Justice of the Court of Criticism, a ‘walking library’; to one of his critics he was Old Atlas, who imagined that he was carrying the world on his shoulders, and to one of his admirers, aware of such snarks, he was a lion surrounded by chattering monkeys.3 For those who had direct access to his powers of counsel and judgement, rather than merely hearing about them, he was a modern Solomon.
What, though, did Sam get from his clubs? He enjoyed their competitive buoyancy, and enjoyed eating good food. There was the pleasure of access to other people’s intimate thoughts, though when the scatterbrained Goldsmith argued that bringing in new members would spice up the debate, since all involved ‘had travelled over each other’s minds’, Sam was indignant – ‘You have not travelled over my mind, I promise you.’ For most people, regardless of the subjects discussed and the productive differences of opinion, the reward of membership is at root the simple pleasure of togetherness. Contact, and a sense of belonging, of being endorsed by others. But for Sam it was conversation that mattered most in the life of the club. He needed it. He needed to exercise his talent for it, which prompted Boswell to claim that ‘his language was so accurate, and his sentences so neatly constructed, that his conversation might have been all printed without any correction’. But, more than that, he needed its presence: to engage in dialogue was to escape introspection.
In Rambler 89, he observes that people who are in the business of serious thought are likely to spend a lot of time on their own. They must compensate for this, banishing self-scrutiny through ‘that interchange of thoughts which is practised in free and easy conversation’. Here he may be recalling Michel de Montaigne, who in his essay on the art of conversation described it as a kind of exercise, invigorating the mind after the ‘languid’ and ‘feeble’ study of books. For Montaigne, ‘This world is but a school of inquiry’, and it is through talking wisely and in an orderly fashion that one learns most.4 Sam’s facility for such conversation is apparent in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. As Fanny Burney noted when the Life came out, its record of his talk kept ‘filling all sorts of readers with amaze, except the small party to whom Dr Johnson was known’.
But of course, not all conversation is good. Sometimes it can be trite, hurtful or dishonest, and sometimes it can simply be awkward. Montaigne deplored conversation that was defensive or blandly compliant. He felt the same way about pushful cleverness – exhibitionism was a way of masking meagre content. Sam was similarly averse to meek agreement and pretentiousness, as well as to mere chitchat (‘we had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed’). In Rambler 14, he noted that many writers are poor conversationalists, and in the Life of Savage he applauded his old friend’s powers of listening (‘He mingled in cursory conversation with the same steadiness of attention as others apply to a lecture’), thereby hinting at a common social problem – the listener whose concentration wanders like smoke.
At the same time, he understands that in some conversations the fact of engagement is more important than its terms. ‘It is commonly observed,’ he wrote, ‘that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.’ The English are not alone in doing this, but it is a habit that amuses visitors to England, since English weather, while changeable, is less extreme than that of most other places. Yet the truth is that while talking about the weather may be an attempt to master its peculiarities, mostly it’s a means of overcoming inhibitions in unfamiliar company: the weather, for all its fluctuations, is a safe subject, unlikely to lead to confrontation, and a stranger’s attitude to it can be a good indication of their mood.
What Sam recognizes is that weather chat isn’t obsessively precise. When we embark on the subject, we are ‘in haste to tell each other, what each must already know’. That element of obviousness is key – a mean
s of establishing common ground. Compare with this the way people converse about their cars, minutely commenting on engine size, acceleration, torque and fuel economy. At the time of writing, I’ve within the last twenty-four hours had a conversation in which a friend mentioned that his car has a boot capacity of 1,851 litres with the rear seats down and torque of 273 pounds per foot. By contrast, in talking about the weather I’ve never known someone refer to anything more technical than temperatures and (occasionally) wind speed. Considering we’re fixated with the subject, we’re remarkably ill equipped to discuss it, and that’s because doing so is a performance of rapport, not meteorology.
When Sam defined rapport, signifying ‘relation; reference; proportion’, he commented that the word had failed to catch on. Since then it has gained ground, but when we use it today it’s with a nod to Freud: rapport is the sympathetic connection between a patient and therapist, though its sense has broadened – it’s now any kind of close mutual understanding. Even if Sam wasn’t keen to adopt the term (too French), he cherished the concept, and his model of how not to socialize was a writer whose failures of rapport were legendary. This was Jonathan Swift, sardonic and twisted, addicted to hoaxes yet unable to laugh, permanently disgusted by the world. ‘He seems to have wasted life in discontent,’ wrote Sam; his chief pleasure lay in ‘depravity of intellect’, an enjoyment of the sort of thoughts ‘from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust’. Crucially, and disastrously, Swift was fond of ‘singularity’, a vice analysed in the Adventurer. What Sam called singularity consisted of an arrogant contempt for the normal way of doing things. When Swift was sick, he insisted that his ailments, despite their familiar symptoms, were unique. And when visitors turned up expecting dinner, he would give each of them a shilling, so that they might provide themselves with food.
Sam abhorred singularity because ‘voluntary neglect of common forms’ – the conviction that one ‘is an odd fellow, and must be let alone’ – involves excessive pride. It suggests a disdain for the rest of society and an assumption that one’s merit is exceptional. In moral questions, he concedes, one must ‘hold no consultations with fashion’. Here, certainly, it is noble to stand alone:
To be pious among infidels, to be disinterested in a time of general venality, to lead a life of virtue and reason in the midst of sensualists, is a proof of a mind intent on nobler things than the praise or blame of men, of a soul fixed in the contemplation of the highest good, and superior to the tyranny of custom and example.
But in the usual course of life, compliance with the broad norms of behaviour is prudent. Many people make the mistake of thinking that such amenability is somehow inauthentic, a failure to be true to oneself. They misunderstand complaisance as insincerity and think of conventionality as mere performance – a kind of barrier rather than a form of emollient.5
Intriguingly, this is one of several points of connection between Sam’s ideas and those of Confucius. We might assume that he knew nothing of this Chinese sage, born more than two millennia before him, but in fact he wrote about him in the Gentleman’s Magazine, applauding his ‘philosophical dignity’. In the eighteenth century, accounts in English of Chinese thought were often garbled, but Sam’s was lucid even if necessarily limited. While Confucius’s manner was cryptic and far more didactic than his own, Sam shared his interest in thinking seriously about social matters, and was naturally struck by his statement that, if called on to govern a country, his first act would be to rectify the names of all things. Besides having a Confucian talent for giving memorable advice, he shared his understanding of the importance of ritual – the very kind of procedures practised in clubs, where ceremony and protocol existed to avert the risk of disorder. For Sam, ritual was most of the time an adjective, and where we would use it as a noun he tended to refer to rite, solemnity or observance, which he characterized in terms of respect, reverence, attentiveness and dignity. These qualities, present in his private devotions, were ones he hoped to carry over into his public life. We know that he didn’t always manage to achieve this, but he understood that in adapting himself to the rituals of sociability he had an opportunity for self-reform.
We are now inclined to see ritual as stifling, even to dismiss it as jejune nonsense. Yet ritual can liberate us from the constraints of the everyday and adjust our perception of the world around us. Worship is one way to achieve this, but the transformative effect of ritual need not be confined to religious practices, or even to quasi-religious ones such as yoga or a therapy session. Ritual removes us from the frictions of our familiar reality. In doing so it enables us to see the extent to which our lives are full of routines and compulsive behaviours that are hollow. It heightens our awareness of habit, the mechanisms of our ordinariness, and it inspires us to think about how we might change those mechanisms and change that ordinariness. By observing the frameworks of ritual, we pay new attention to all the other framing devices that shape our lives, many of which are pointless or counterproductive.
26
A chapter upon Samuel Johnson’s lawyerly inclinations, in which we may wonder at the conduct of Signor Giuseppe Baretti and the philosophy of Dr George Berkeley – of whom, we can be sure, only the latter was fit to be a bishop
Of all the people with whom Sam socialized, none was more mercurial than the linguist and travel writer Giuseppe Baretti. Known for his strong prejudices and prickly manner, he was ten years Sam’s junior. He had grown up in Turin and since his twenties had made it his business to alienate people with heated outbursts and a litany of contemptuous opinions – about the playwright Carlo Goldoni, the study of archaeology, and many of his fellow linguists. One evening in October 1769, Baretti was walking along London’s Haymarket when, near the junction with Panton Street, he was accosted by a couple of prostitutes. Apparently one of them asked him to buy her a glass of wine. He took exception to her grasping at his crotch and struck her companion. Three pimps then lurched out of the darkness and tried to shove him into a puddle. In the ensuing scuffle, Baretti stabbed one of them, Evan Morgan, with a fruit knife that he habitually carried (a custom of his people in Italy, he would later explain). The wounds were fatal, and Baretti was accused of murder. When he stood trial at the Old Bailey, Sam’s character evidence was crucial to his acquittal, and the Italian’s own arguments were shaped by Sam’s understanding of the law surrounding provocation and self-defence, as well as showing signs of carefully measured Johnsonian phrasing.
This was far from being the first occasion when Sam displayed an interest in the law as a profession and intellectual discipline. As a young man he seriously considered a legal career, and his decision not to pursue one would later haunt him. Many who encountered the mature Samuel Johnson thought him perfectly suited to the law – by his acuity, fine understanding of subtle points of language, wide range of knowledge, moral seriousness and capacity for taking up cases that were not his own. His familiarity with important books about the law was impressive, and the eminent modern jurist Lord Bingham of Cornhill comments that his library was ‘a remarkable treasure-trove of legal knowledge for a literary man’ and that ‘he would have been a brilliant advocate and a wise, erudite, compassionate and constructive judge’.1 We get a flavour of Sam the judge-who-never-was in Rambler 79, when he writes that ‘Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society’. We also discern it in Hester Thrale’s report of his saying that ‘The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.’
Boswell, who practised as an advocate (barrister) in Scotland, often sought his opinion on questions of law. Sam was directly involved in several other cases, and his most significant contribution to the field came in the 1760s, when he collaborated with Robert Chambers, the newly appointed Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford. Chambers struggled to draft the lectures he was required to deliv
er; his sure grasp of jurisprudence was not matched by an ability to write clearly and briskly. The help that Sam provided, though mostly editorial rather than technical, included some trenchant thoughts on the triple benefits of punishment, which secured the public from criminals, made a form of reparation to the victim and held out the promise of rehabilitation for the offender. The collaboration was at the time unknown and potentially embarrassing, with only Hester Thrale having an inkling of what they were up to. It fortified Sam’s sense of the need for what in Chambers’ lectures is called ‘public wisdom’ – a governing power that, as he put it to Boswell a few years later, ‘gives every man a rule of action, and prescribes a mode of conduct which shall entitle him to the support and protection of society’. ‘That the law may be a rule of action,’ he explained, ‘it is necessary that it be known’, and ‘it is necessary that it be permanent and stable’. This enables ‘the deficiencies of private understanding . . . to be supplied’ and creates laws ‘not . . . for particular cases, but for men in general’.
Sam’s friends enjoyed calling upon his legislative powers, not just because they admired his legal knowledge and incisiveness, but also because doing so yielded anecdote. When delivered in person, rather than on the page, his pronouncements were likely to have a special degree of brio, and for reasons that will be obvious, no one was keener than Boswell on getting him to hand down zippy judgements. One of the most famous examples occurred in 1763, when Boswell was heading to Holland and said goodbye to Sam at Harwich. He was off to study law in Utrecht; though his time there would be unhappy, he would draw comfort from reading the Rambler (‘several papers seem to have been written just for me’) and from being able to have newsworthy encounters with eminent Europeans. After he quit Utrecht in the summer of 1764, he travelled to Germany, where he hoped to meet the Prussian king, Frederick the Great. This didn’t happen, but there were compensations; before the year was out he met two of the most famous people in Europe. When he ventured to the tiny Swiss village of Môtiers, he was granted an audience with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who disconcerted him with the information that ‘Only by doing good can you undo evil’. Not long after that he was in Ferney, close to Geneva, to visit Voltaire, with whom he argued about the immortality of the soul (something in which Boswell was keen to believe).2 Both encounters shaped his understanding of literary fame – the degree to which authors craved renown, and the ways in which they manipulated public curiosity.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 20
