Sam wrote approvingly in the Rambler of Epictetus’s notion that one should try ‘often to think of what is most shocking and terrible’. When I put this to a friend, in the bleak winter of 2016, she responded, ‘Aleppo? I don’t want to think about Aleppo.’ After a little consideration, she added, ‘But perhaps I ought to.’ Sam, after Epictetus, holds that we should, not least because in being aware of what’s truly terrible we improve our sense of perspective. Thinking of something shocking stops us wallowing in the morass of what often get called ‘first-world problems’ – the local deli’s having run out of quince jelly, the squirrel droppings atop the barbecue, the momentary skipping of our Collector’s Edition DVD of Scarface. Sam was of course familiar with Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock (‘the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions’), in which the theft of a fashionable young woman’s lock of hair provokes an almighty tantrum, and with the serious point of Pope’s poem, which is that our perception of offence is determined by context. A cosseted Hollywood star may be no less upset by a grey hair on his chest than a starving child in Yemen is by the death of one of her siblings. The Hollywood star could do with being less self-obsessed, but this requires him to change his frame of reference.
Epictetus’s appeal for Sam, as for those readers who study him today, lies in both his subject matter – integrity, happiness, sociability, the nature of how we act and what we feel – and his style, which is conversational. Philosophy, according to Epictetus, is a cure for adversity. It teaches us to have authority over ourselves. One of his key beliefs is that our relationships and roles commit us to certain responsibilities. In particular, we have relationships we did not choose, such as with our parents, and a life of virtue involves attending to the duties those relationships entail, however mundane they may be. If we step aside from these duties in order to pursue what we claim are higher purposes, we are guilty of both negligence and self-importance. For Sam, fitful in his devotion as both son and brother, this was a chastening doctrine.
33
Upon Charity – whether it be cold, and how it is performed
In a letter of April 1776, Sam tells Hester Thrale about V. J. Peyton, who had been one of his amanuenses when he was at work on the Dictionary. ‘Poor Peyton expired this morning,’ he writes, and the adjective poor looks formulaic. But if we read on, we see that he uses it with some force. Peyton’s wife had long been sick, and he was ‘condemned by poverty to personal attendance’ – unable, that is, to get help with looking after her. Moreover, he was ‘by the necessity of such attendance chained down to poverty’. He was thus one of those trapped in the vicious cycle of hardship, which is unbreakable without some intervention from outside. Sam regards his ‘fortitude’ as heroic, yet is appalled to think that his quiet forbearance kept him from achieving anything of note. He paid for Peyton to be buried, but believed he ought to have done more for him.
The question of what we do for those in need was one that preyed on his mind. He argued that ‘the true test of civilization’ is ‘a decent provision for the poor’. Ideas of decent provision vary, but it is striking that he thought this. He believed that in England the poor were better served than in most other places, yet he lived in an age where it was common to treat them with contempt and to imagine that their alleged privations were a fiction concocted by sanctimonious busybodies. As he commented in Rambler 48, ‘those who do not feel pain, seldom think that it is felt’, and Hester Thrale was one of the people he upbraided for insensitivity on this count: when she referred derisively to Porridge Island, a nook of London where some of its most wretched inhabitants went to eat, he jabbed back – ‘Let’s have no sneering at what is serious to so many’ – and pointed out that many people who passed in that direction felt they must turn away, for even the modest offerings of Porridge Island were luxuries they could not afford.
In Rambler 166 he piercingly observed that ‘The eye of wealth . . . seldom descends to examine the actions of those who are placed below the level of its notice’. The good qualities of the underprivileged, not ‘brightened by elegance of manners’, are ‘cast aside like unpolished gems’, and most of the time we simply overlook the most forlorn members of society. Our gaze skates past them; we are wrapped up in our own anxieties or submerged in conversation. Hester Thrale reported his saying that ‘Every one in this world has as much as they can do in caring for themselves, and few have leisure really to think of their neighbours’ distresses, however they may delight their tongues with talking of them.’
Of course, he had some experience of what it felt like to be poor, as well as of the contempt with which the rich often treated both destitute people and the very idea of destitution. He knew the difference between true poverty – lacking life’s necessities – and what many perceive to be poverty – lacking its pleasant superfluities. He had seen, too, the way the most needy were peppered with insult by those only a little removed from penury. Consequently he was appalled by writers who romanticized poverty, producing not a true portrait of ‘meanness, distress, complaint, anxiety and dependence’, but instead a false image of the pauper’s life as one of ‘innocence and cheerfulness’ or ‘tranquillity and freedom’.
Altogether more real was the urge to maintain an impression of cheer and tranquillity when in fact one was gnawed by want. In Adventurer 120 he observed that ‘great numbers are pressed by real necessities which it is their chief ambition to conceal, and are forced to purchase the appearance of competence and cheerfulness at the expense of many comforts and conveniences of life’. He understood the particular dread of poverty that afflicts the old, and was alive to the distinction between poor debtors and rich ones – witness his observation that ‘Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but of little danger.’ I’m reminded here of the old joke ‘If you owe the bank £100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank £100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.’ Used to having mean little debts that nagged at him constantly, he knew all about their capacity to injure pride, friendships, work and well-being. When Boswell was slipping into financial difficulties, Sam pointed out to him that debt is a calamity rather than simply an inconvenience, because it ‘produces so much inability to resist evil’ and ‘takes away so many means of doing good’.
His experiences led him to think a lot about charity. He reflected that ‘no sooner is a new species of misery brought to view, and a design of relieving it professed, than every hand is open to contribute’, and that when this happens ‘every art . . . is employed for a time in the interest of virtue’ (the emphasis is mine). People can and do come together for the purpose of philanthropy – but fashion plays a part, for today’s dominant issue is tomorrow’s forgotten cause. True charity requires a sustained commitment, not a temporary focus on a particular problem.
Say the word ‘charity’ today and there’s a good chance that it will call to mind chuggers in brightly coloured tabards, eager to commit you to a monthly direct debit, or mailshots staring up from the doormat, highlighting the plight of others and the apparently modest sums that could improve their lives. A word that once signified God’s gift of love to humankind and was one of the three Christian graces described by St Paul has become a term for a type of institution and its benign but often sterile endeavours. What’s more, although such institutions exist to benefit the disadvantaged, they’re mostly encumbered with expensive bureaucracy, and actions meant to give succour can instead seem like attempts to injure pride. In Rambler 162, a discussion of the afflictions of old age, Sam wrote that ‘There is no state more contrary to the dignity of wisdom than perpetual and unlimited dependence’. The phrase ‘cold as charity’, more than 300 years old, is a revealing one; it speaks of how dismal it can feel to rely on others’ largesse, and of the class-bound condescension that can cause a helping hand to seem instead like a gesture of reproof.
For Sam, every day offered
opportunities for charity. He did not necessarily have gifts of money in mind; as he says in one of his sermons, ‘He that cannot relieve the poor may instruct the ignorant; and he that cannot attend the sick may reclaim the vicious.’ Contemporary ideas of spiritual charity were shaped by the teachings of the seventeenth-century theologian Edward Stillingfleet, who identified seven forms it could take, which included comforting those lost in sorrow and advising those mired in doubt. But in the end it was practical support that mattered most. Strikingly, in the first edition of the Dictionary, Sam’s opening definition of relief was ‘the prominence of a figure in stone or metal; the seeming prominence of a picture’, but when he revised the entry in the 1770s this sense was relegated and he gave as its primary definition ‘alleviation of calamity; mitigation of pain or sorrow’. The means of relieving suffering were uppermost in his mind.1
The practical bent of Sam’s thoughts about poverty is apparent in his attitude to the death penalty. He considered it a disproportionate punishment for theft, and in Rambler 114 wondered, ‘who can congratulate himself upon a life passed without some act more mischievous to the peace or prosperity of others, than the theft of a piece of money?’ Hanging thieves was ineffective as a deterrent. Severe public punishment failed to produce the awe it was supposed to. Worse, it caused criminals to think not that theft was as serious as murder, but that murder was no more grave an offence than theft – and that killing the people they robbed would bring no harsher penalty than merely robbing them. His radical solution, with a nod to More’s Utopia, was ‘invigorating the laws by relaxation’. This, he knew, was something his readers would find strange.
This spirit of reform was also apparent in his discussion of debtors’ prisons. In these squalid, rotting mansions of misery one person in three hundred was confined – ‘a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor’. Sam was impressed by arguments about the need for better ventilation in prisons and for a general improvement in conditions. But he saw the jailing of debtors as a symptom of a wider social problem, the abundance of easy credit. Could it be that a person who lends money is a participant in the crimes of the debtor and ‘shares the guilt of improper trust’? The problem that needed resolving was the recklessness and greed of lenders who disregarded the circumstances of those to whom they lent. ‘We have now imprisoned one generation of debtors after another,’ he wrote in Idler 22, ‘but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We have now learned, that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit; let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it.’
Such an overhaul of attitudes to debt and credit required an unlikely moral and economic jubilee. At least in its absence one could always give alms. When Sam heard a complaint that handing money to beggars was irresponsible, since they would use it to buy gin or tobacco, he countered that it was cruel to deny them ‘such sweeteners of their existence’. ‘Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding,’ he argued, ‘yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.’ That ‘none of us’ is worth pausing over. The vices we condemn are ones we practise too, except in more socially acceptable ways; a chic diner’s good bottle of wine performs many of the same functions as a kerbside drinker’s can of cheap cider.
In a sermon on the subject of charity, he questioned the tendency to draw a distinction between the deserving poor and undeserving. It was common to suppose that some paupers were too steeped in vice to be worth helping; there was a risk that assisting them would simply make it easier for them to drag others down to their level. Sam was unconvinced, though, and argued that ‘we do not always encourage vice when we relieve the vicious. It is sufficient that our brother is in want; by which way he brought his want upon him, let us not too curiously enquire.’ Besides, ‘if a bad man be suffered to perish, how shall he repent?’
Struck by the specious piety of people keen to trumpet their virtue, he saw how often charity was hollow. When told of a woman of large fortune who did good for others and blushed with delight at the fame of her kindness, Sam argued that this was the norm: ‘Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.’ There was, he believed, no such thing as pure benevolence. What he did not foresee was a world in which the large-scale relief of poverty and hunger could be an instrument of governments’ foreign policy, and in which the benevolence of charitable giving would sometimes be transmuted into humanitarian projects whose main purpose is not to provide aid, but to legitimize their own expansion.
He did notice, though, that spurious patriotism could impinge on charity. During the Seven Years’ War, public funds were used to clothe French soldiers taken prisoner. The argument against this was – in his paraphrase – ‘that charity may be improperly and unseasonably exerted; that while we are relieving Frenchmen, there remain many Englishmen unrelieved’. But, he countered, ‘the relief of enemies has a tendency to unite mankind in fraternal affection’ and ‘takes away something from the miseries of war’. Conflict already did enough to fill the world with horror: ‘let it not then be unnecessarily extended . . . and no man be longer deemed an enemy than while his sword is drawn against us’.
34
A chapter about Boredom, which may serve to remind us that there are no truly uninteresting things
Sam’s acts of charity compensated for what he thought were oversights and omissions. He chastised himself for neglecting religion, study and work. ‘I have done nothing,’ he wrote in a prayer he composed on the eve of his fifty-fifth birthday (which he called his fifty-sixth, as he included the day on which he was born). ‘I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving, having from the earliest time almost that I can remember been forming schemes of a better life.’ Now ‘the need of doing is . . . pressing, since the time of doing is short’.
This is the sort of thing he says a lot. In his earliest surviving diary entry, from October 1729, there is a Latin phrase that Boswell translates as ‘I bid farewell to Sloth, being resolved henceforth not to listen to her siren strains’. But those siren strains were never blocked out, and the diaries abound with his complaints of having ‘trifled away’ days and weeks, of months drifting by as if in a dream. In September 1768 he writes, ‘How the last year has passed I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking.’ In April 1778 he reviews the previous twelve months and finds ‘a very melancholy and shameful blank’. In April 1779 he carries out the same review, which reveals ‘little but dismal vacuity’. He is continually making resolutions, and every New Year there are new promises of reform: he will get up early, conduct himself better, ‘redeem the time I have spent in sloth’, read the Bible in Greek, fast on Good Friday, worship at church more often and more regularly. He must manage his mind, combat doubts, conquer ‘useless scruples’ about his minor shortcomings as a Christian. When he reflects on this pattern of behaviour, after years of broken commitments, he concludes that despite all his defeats he must resolve himself again, ‘because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal’.
The dial of his watch, bought when he was fifty-nine, bore an inscription from St John’s gospel, in the original Greek. ‘For the night cometh,’ it read. Sir Walter Scott would choose the same phrase as a motto to be inscribed on the sundial in his garden. That’s gently amusing, but think of seeing it every time you looked at your watch. After three years, Sam decided to get a new dial-plate, and it’s not hard to imagine why. He told Boswell that he’d concluded it made him appear ostentatious. But who looks at a watch more – other people, or its owner? I’m inclined to believe that he felt oppressed by the darkness of the sentiment, which must have seemed an admonition – yet another self-reproach. We can be sure that Sam, with his close knowledge of the New Testament, was continually reminded by this Greek snippet of the phrase’s original context. In full, the quotation is ‘For the night cometh, when no man can work.’ The words are spoken by Jesus, who is healing a man born blind, and immediately before them is this: ‘I must
work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.’
The truth is that, despite periods of inertia, his career was fertile. Yet his statements about his lack of productivity were not a pose; they were formed in private, in the hope of goading himself into better working practices. Even when making headway with a task, he always thought that he could do more, and, like most people with a great capacity for work, dwelled on the blankness of his less fruitful days, believing himself a failure.
Writing to Boswell in the summer of 1775, he reports a recent trip to the Midlands and says that he was glad to get away for a while but then glad to return to London. This, surely, is the experience of anyone who takes a holiday: we exchange one set of anxieties for another, and, even though the second set may be trifling, leaving more space than usual for our minds and bodies to uncoil, we can soon become nostalgic for the first. Sam continues, ‘I was, I am afraid, weary of being at home, and weary of being abroad. Is not this the state of life?’ The pattern is familiar: we make up for the staleness or flatness of one experience by throwing ourselves into another, which promises some new flavour and may indeed deliver it – but soon comes to seem stale and flat.
Sam sees that boredom is natural. In the Rambler he refers to our need to ‘relieve the vacuities of our being’ and recognizes that they are an inevitable feature of life. The world is under no obligation to entertain us. To complain of boredom is to voice a misguided sense of entitlement. Yet he doesn’t refer to boredom or being bored. The verb to bore, in the sense ‘To weary by tedious conversation or simply by the failure to be interesting’ (OED), emerged around 1750 and does not appear in his Dictionary of 1755. The OED dates the appearance of boredom and boring to midway through the following century. What we would call ‘boring’, Sam would have labelled ‘irking’ or ‘wearisome’; what we call ‘boredom’ he would have known by half a dozen names, including ‘tedium’ and ‘languor’. He would have balked at the then-fashionable ‘ennui’, as he was suspicious of the vogue for importing words from French, believing it a form of social pretentiousness that threatened to weaken the language. But ennui was something he knew deeply.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 26
