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

by Henry Hitchings

  The sensitivity he brings to all of this, and indeed his enthusiasm for the journey in the first place, seem odd in light of his reputation for making pungently negative statements about Scotland. He was known for these before he went there, added plenty to the canon during his travels with Boswell, and continued in this vein for the rest of his life. The result is that one of the things he is most known for today is anti-Caledonian sentiment. Sometimes this was jocular, sometimes more combative; when the latter, it could feel like an exercise in demonstrating his candour. He told John Ogilvie, a Church of Scotland minister who went into rhapsodies over the majesty of the Scottish landscape, that ‘The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!’ When the soldier Sir Allan Maclean boasted of Scotland’s abundant rivers and lakes, he shot back that ‘Your country consists of two things, stone and water.’ The treelessness of Scotland was a recurrent theme, and when he lost his oak stick he rejected Boswell’s assurances that it had not been stolen, saying that ‘it is not to be expected that any man in Mull, who has got it, will part with it. Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of timber here!’ Discussing the achievements of Lord Mansfield, a legal reformer who had been born in Perth but received most of his education in England, he joked that ‘Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.’ Most famously, in the Dictionary he defined oats as ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’

  The disputed Dictionary definition was not inaccurate – after all, haggis, porridge and oatcakes are prominent features of Scottish cuisine. It also wasn’t original, deriving from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. But Sam’s continual needling of the Scots seems oafish; or rather, it seems like an oaf’s idea of what might pass for incisiveness. In common with many of his English contemporaries, he thought the Scots were an intrinsically savage race, remote from them in character and lifestyle, and yet believed that when they travelled south, as Boswell had, they were outrageously successful in fields such as law and medicine. In the 1750s, tensions increased as more and more Scots assumed positions of influence in England, and especially in London. Anxiety peaked when the Earl of Bute, a native of Edinburgh, held the office of prime minister in 1762 and 1763; his role in securing Johnson’s pension was, to his detractors, simply further evidence of his guile. This was a climate in which casual abuse could multiply. To many English people, if not most, the Scots were clannish, crafty, on-the-make, rude and prone to violence – the same charges levelled by twenty-first-century xenophobes at incomers of all nationalities.

  What differentiated Sam from most of his fellow Scot-bashers was the tendency for his statements to be recorded, and unsurprisingly it was Boswell who did most to note them down. He also harboured a specific grievance against the Scottish world of letters, which hardened his antipathy. In the early 1760s James Macpherson, a young teacher with handy connections in Edinburgh literary circles, presented what he billed as a translation of Gaelic ballads by the medieval bard Ossian. These poems attracted huge interest, at first mostly positive. Sam considered them a fraud. Among those he regarded as having being ingloriously duped was the Scottish scholar Hugh Blair, who had been moved by their ‘vehemence and fire’ to compare the poems favourably to both Homer and Virgil; when Blair wondered if it was truly possible for any man in the modern age to have written them, Sam allegedly replied, ‘Yes, sir, many men, many women, and many children.’

  Although his private comments about the Ossian poems got around, it was only in A Journey to the Western Islands that he went public with his views on the matter. Macpherson complained, belligerently, and Sam did not take this lightly. After all, Macpherson was physically imposing and nearly thirty years his junior. Sam tried to make peace through his friend William Strahan, who had recently printed a revised two-volume Poems of Ossian, but Strahan’s diplomacy failed, and when Macpherson continued to make threats, Sam wrote back sharply. ‘I received your foolish and impudent note,’ he began, and he carried on in that vein – ‘I will not desist from detecting what I think a cheat, from any fear of the menaces of a ruffian’, and ‘what I have heard of your morals disposes me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you can prove’. Sam was disgusted by what he took to be the circulation of counterfeit antiquities – a crime against history. Modern accounts of Ossian vary, but it appears that about three-quarters of the poems are Macpherson’s fabrication. When Sam’s debunking of Macpherson met with anger and contempt, he had reason to be angry himself, as it seemed clear that anyone who blithely accepted the poems’ authenticity would draw false conclusions about Scottish history and identity.2 Yet he was nervous enough about Macpherson’s desire for violent revenge that he kept by his bedside a new cudgel, the head of which was as big as an orange.

  On this occasion Sam, rather than intending insult, was trying to halt the spread of a fantasy. But posterity has treated his skirmish with Macpherson as a straightforward example of his hostility to Scots. He saw that this would happen: amid the Scottish excitement over the Ossian poems, criticism of any aspect of them, no matter what its grounds, was regarded as an attack on indigenous Gaelic culture. By the time he travelled to Scotland with Boswell, his anti-Scottish sentiment was proverbial, and A Journey to the Western Islands, read against this background, compounded the image of him as a smiter of all things Scottish, whether ancient or modern.

  Sir John Hawkins pointed out that ‘If he stigmatized Scotland as a country, and the Scots as a people, his compliments to individuals in some measure atone for it . . . and express the sense of gratitude proportioned to the favours he experienced.’ But stigmatizing the Scots could seem like one of his cherished pastimes, and his more generous observations – such as that Scotland would be any epicure’s choice as the best country in which to have breakfast – didn’t compensate for the ungracious ones. Boswell’s account of the 101 days that he and Sam spent together on their Scottish tour does little to dispel this impression of churlishness. He depicts himself educating Sam out of his prejudices, reforming the great man’s insularity with his own sophistication. In reality, he had another agenda: to show Sam off, as if to say ‘Look at this strange beast I have almost tamed.’ ‘To see Dr Johnson in any new situation is always an interesting object to me,’ he writes, sounding a bit like someone who parades a pet (or a child, or a gadget) with a view to testing what it can do. Johnson scholar Pat Rogers suggests that Boswell was looking for ‘interesting confrontations rather than scenes of harmony’ – good material for his account of the trip.3

  Although the younger man undoubtedly enjoyed Johnsonian wit for its own sake, he also saw that there was a potentially lucrative public appetite for it. The first volume to be billed as Johnsoniana appeared in 1776, selling well and drawing Sam’s condemnation, in part because it attributed to him some lewd jests that certainly weren’t his. Boswell received further evidence of that appetite, as if he needed any, in 1781, when a volume called The Beauties of Johnson appeared, and then in 1785, when Stephen Jones published a volume with the title Dr Johnson’s Table Talk. Although the genre was an old one, Jones’s compendium had a particular seventeenth-century model, the polymath John Selden’s Table Talk (1689). The relish for this kind of book – for portable entertainment, like highlights from a dream dinner party – would continue for a couple of centuries after Selden, and one of its leading Victorian exponents, the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt, would in 1851 summarize its spirit and appeal: ‘Table-talk, to be perfect, should be sincere without bigotry, differing without discord, sometimes grave, always agreeable, touching on deep points, dwelling most on seasonable ones, and letting everybody speak and be heard.’4 While this doesn’t perfectly describe what either Stephen Jones or Boswell collected, or what Sam served up, it captures some of the appeal of Johnsonian utterance.

  It was to Boswell’s advantage that each day they spent together was like a hatchery of aphorism, and during their Scottis
h travels Sam reflected on the way this appetite for the nuggety and the sententious was becoming a trend among writers and their audience: ‘I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.’ In the age of social media, his prediction is at last borne out. On Twitter, for instance, bumper-sticker wisdom abounds, to the extent that aphorisms are now regarded as ‘the Twitter of philosophy’ (the phrase occurs in The Philosopher’s Toolkit, a book by Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl). The pace of life – or the perception that life’s pace is constantly increasing – makes us susceptible to the allure of witticisms and pat answers.

  The remark about writers of the future stringing together anecdotes and aphorisms can be taken as another little dig at Boswell, who, after all, was eager to construct a big book about Johnson along just such lines. But while that ambition, together with pride in his roots, explains Boswell’s desire to go on this lengthy trip, one of Sam’s particular motives for it is easily overlooked. The most detailed analyst of the two men’s journey, Pat Rogers, has the theory that it was ‘a sort of fugue, an act of wilful self-withdrawal’, which allowed Sam to reflect on large questions, and ‘the sparseness and remoteness of the landscape forced him to confront his own physical . . . inadequacies, as London seldom did’.5 When he set out for Scotland he was sixty-three – he reached his sixty-fourth birthday on Skye, and was keen to play the occasion down. We don’t now attach significance to that specific age, preferring to celebrate round numbers, but it was then common to think of sixty-three as the ‘grand climacteric’, an ominous waypoint in the journey of life. Herman Boerhaave had written about it, and Sir Thomas Browne had commented on the irrational suspicion of its ‘considerable fatality’. The notion persisted that it was a dangerous moment, and Sam, conscious of popular beliefs even if also dubious about them, thought of this as a time for taking stock. Among his journey’s purposes, one with which all travellers can identify was the wish to transport himself to a place where he could view with some detachment the usual patterns of his life.

  31

  On the fleeting nature of Pleasure and the state of Felicity

  Not long after Sam’s return, Boswell decided that he would like to make an extended visit to London. He particularly fancied celebrating Easter at St Paul’s cathedral, which struck him as ‘like going up to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover’. But he was having money troubles, and his wife Margaret, always uneasy at the idea of being separated from him, was pregnant. Sam wrote to him, arguing that he should not come, since his reasons were not good enough to answer the obvious objections. After all, he and Boswell had just spent more than three months rambling around Scotland; Margaret had permitted this, and now she should be permitted to keep her husband at home. While he was sympathetic to Boswell’s desire to ‘come once a year to the fountain of intelligence and pleasure’, he reflected that ‘both information and pleasure must be regulated by propriety’. That propriety was partly a question of marital responsibility. It was also a matter of financial prudence. If pleasure is achieved only at unaffordable expense, it ‘must always end in pain’, and if ‘enjoyed at the expense of another’s pain, can never be such as a worthy mind can fully delight in’.

  Underpinning Sam’s arguments here was an awareness that pleasure is, as he writes in Idler 18, ‘seldom such as it appears to others, nor often such as we represent it to ourselves’. We exaggerate its possibilities, fixate on its power to transform us, pursue it selfishly, and yet are rarely more pleased with our own critical faculties than when explaining why the quest for it has failed. One of the things he admired about Confucius was his ability to resist pleasure, which seemed to guarantee that he would also be able to withstand pain. He was impressed, too, by Confucius’s judgement that no one is as ardent in the pursuit of virtue as pleasure-seekers are in the pursuit of thrills.

  Pleasure is fleeting. I cannot write those words without being reminded of an incident when I was in my early twenties: as I helped myself to a large serving at a buffet, while on holiday in Egypt, a stranger sidled up to me and said, ‘A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.’ At that moment I resented what seemed an unhelpful and intrusive remark. But since then the hips have broadened and the lips (or what lies behind them) have become no less voracious. Pleasure is fleeting, and our attempts to prolong it come at a price – one we keep paying.

  Today we have an idea of the neuroscience of pleasure. Sam of course knew nothing of the brain’s circuitry and hedonic hotspots, of dopamine and its release in the region of the basal forebrain called the nucleus accumbens, but he instinctively understood how pleasure works. His most sustained discussion of the subject was in Idler 58, which opens with the large claim that ‘Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought.’ He goes on: ‘Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.’ Pleasure, in this view, isn’t something that can be programmed, the way I might today devise an iTunes playlist, and ‘Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.’ For someone organizing a birthday party or a hen weekend, that’s a discouraging maxim. But it’s true that the deepest pleasures are spontaneous, and that minutely scheduled amusement soon starts to feel like a series of chores. In the same essay he argues that ‘Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression’ and ‘The jest which is expected is already destroyed.’

  Sam also grasps that our pursuit of pleasure is often so frantic that we miss the highlights as they occur; we hurtle past them, blind to everything except the vague penumbra of the big sensation we are chasing. This tunnel vision is a pipeline to disappointment, because whatever we go after so unswervingly becomes a fetish, and the reality of attaining it can’t match the glamour with which we have invested it. The pattern I’m describing is one that afflicts addicts to an unbearable degree. Addiction can be thought of as nostalgia for the first heady experience of what I’ll for convenience’s sake call a stimulant (alcohol, heroin, gambling), but it’s more useful, I think, to imagine that for the addict every time is the first time, and if it fails to be as vivid as they hope then there is the next first time, which will come along soon, and the total hunger for the next first time propels life, gives it shape, shrinks the universe into the prison of compulsion, the narrowness of one’s cell, one’s bed, the needle in the vein.

  In his short account of the life of Joseph Addison, Sam observes that ‘In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.’ Addison was a writer acclaimed for his rich comedy yet often guilty of cheap facetiousness, and he seems to have wrecked his already fragile health by knocking back too many supposedly restorative alcoholic cordials. For Sam, he was a cautionary illustration of drink’s twin tendencies to create a phoney self-certainty by reducing one’s field of vision and to amplify the pains it is supposed to dampen. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that alcohol did nothing to improve talk and made people blind to their own defects – a state he called ‘self-complacency’. Religious scruples, illness and the embarrassment that occasionally resulted from his friends’ drunken antics combined to make him feel that he was wise to forswear alcohol.

  Yet his attitude to drink demands more scrutiny. This, after all, is someone who could claim that ‘he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy’ (leaving wine and port to lesser mortals) and who said in the hearing of his biographer Hawkins that a tavern chair is ‘the throne of human felicity’. Perhaps what he enjoyed most in a tavern was the company and atmosphere – he revealed that on entering such establishments ‘I experience an oblivion of care’. But when he went into more detail about the freedoms of tavern life, he mentioned that ‘wine there exhilarates my spirits, and prompts me to free conversation . . . I dogmatize and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinion and sentiments I find delight’. The problem, he saw, was that this exhilaration was also disorganization; drinkers
know how much they can take, but by the time they’ve taken it they’ve forgotten. Eventually he concluded that he was one of those people for whom the price of overindulgence is too steep. On one occasion, asked by the poet and philanthropist Hannah More if he would have a little wine at dinner, he replied that ‘Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.’ Not everyone feels this way, but it’s far from unusual to do so. Temperance is an ability ‘to set the mind above the appetites’, and finding it difficult means that one lurches between extremes.