In the Lives, his frankness about his subjects’ works can be disarming. For instance, he remarks that Paradise Lost, despite its author’s ‘peculiar power to astonish’, suffers from a ‘want of human interest’ and ‘None ever wished it longer than it is’. Dryden ‘delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning’, and of a less distinguished poet, James Hammond, Sam avers, ‘It would be hard to find in all his productions three stanzas that deserve to be remembered.’ When he turns his attention to the plays of William Congreve, he admits he ‘cannot speak distinctly, for since I inspected them many years have passed’, but this doesn’t stop him declaring that Congreve’s characters are ‘artificial, with very little of nature, and not much of life’, and that ‘He formed a peculiar idea of comic excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers’ – with the result that ‘His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion’. Congreve’s briefer poems get short shrift: they are ‘seldom worth the cost of criticism’. Yet even Congreve has his moments. Sam singles out a passage in his play The Mourning Bride, in which a young woman enters a mausoleum, where ‘the tombs / And monumental caves of death look cold, / And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart’. Here, he believes, the reader discovers a new way of looking at something familiar – ‘he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility’.
The most famous moment in the Lives is Sam’s almost breezy declaration ‘I rejoice to concur with the common reader’. This comes in his assessment of Thomas Gray’s extraordinarily popular ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, and the statement is all the more significant because he generally thought Gray’s poems lacked either grace or intelligence. He condemned a weak bit of his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ as ‘useless and puerile’, and felt that when Gray’s poetry reached its greatest heights, it was mostly ‘by walking on tiptoe’. But in the case of Gray’s ‘Elegy’, he could agree with the prevailing taste, and that pleased him, as he believed that ‘by the common sense of readers . . . must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours’.
Sam’s ‘common reader’ is a member of the reading public, a person who buys books and has opinions that are, in his phrase, ‘uncorrupted by literary prejudices’. One might counter this by saying that everyone has prejudices, but he was thinking of those that are held by critics and scholars – the sort of readers who don’t sit by a fire caught up in a story, but instead cultivate rarefied theories. For Sam, the duty of the creative writer isn’t to beget literary criticism or sustain radical arguments, but consists of ‘engaging attention and alluring curiosity’; anyone who fails to do these things is wasting readers’ time. This isn’t a case of being crassly entertaining or juicily provocative. Readers ‘uncorrupted by literary prejudices’ may prefer Dan Brown to Dante, or Virginia Andrews to Virginia Woolf, yet won’t necessarily do so; the point is not that they have simple tastes, or what the literati might regard as low ones, but rather that they have their own tastes, undisturbed by the intellectual fashion of the day.
In his life of Swift, Sam speaks of England as a ‘nation of readers’. One of the triumphs of his age, it seemed, was that learning could at last be ‘universally diffused’, rather than remaining the preserve of a small, self-perpetuating elite. Besides being a champion of the reading public, a growing sphere, he was alive to the ideas and interests of the booksellers who catered for its needs and desires – and whom he called ‘the patrons of literature’. In cartoons of the period, such as Thomas Rowlandson’s Bookseller & Author, the bookseller was well-nourished and prosperous, while the author appeared cringing, scrawny and desperate. Sam knew better. After all, in his own words, ‘I was bred a bookseller, and have not forgotten my trade.’ The truth was that many of those in the business were patient and charitable, and their decisions about what to publish were driven by political inclination or cultural interest rather than simply by the desire to make a fat profit. Sam saw them as collaborators.
Sure in his grasp of the economics of their trade, he recognized its precariousness. A ‘nation of readers’ was one consisting of people who possessed the skill rather than those determined to exercise it. The proliferation of reading matter, in his age and even more so in ours, is no guarantee that reading itself will thrive. ‘It is strange,’ he reflected, with a certain wryness, ‘that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing.’ He said this near the end of his life, on an evening when he was visited by Boswell and by Edmund Burke’s son Richard, and he added, even more dispiritingly, that ‘People in general do not willingly read, if they can have anything else to amuse them.’ It would be an oddball publisher who printed these remarks and pinned them up in the office, but Sam’s insight is typical in being realistic – about the place of reading in the world, and about the challenges people in the book business must face.
It is ironic that the Lives of the Poets, which have lasted so well, began as a kind of garnish for what was in essence a defensive commercial venture. But it’s also instructive. It tells us something about Sam: his curiosity and intellectual vigour meant that he did far more than the commission required, seeing in it an opportunity to celebrate literature, its practitioners’ ‘sudden elevations of mind’ and readers’ experience of those sudden elevations. It tells us something bigger, too: that in embracing a project initiated by others, who perhaps have no higher purpose than earning money or staking out a patch of ground, one is not obliged to be servile, and that the business of literature – making money out of it – doesn’t have to involve cheapening culture and ideas.
38
In which this account of the great Johnson is concluded, with a Farewell to the reader
After he completed the Lives of the Poets, the main events of Sam’s life were social and domestic. While Henry Thrale was alive he spent a great deal of time at Streatham Park, as well as the Thrales’ new property in Grosvenor Square, but often he was at home, among his books on the third storey of his house in Bolt Court. Then the highlight of his day was usually dinner; among his favourite companions were Reynolds, Baretti and the Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli. Poor health troubled him increasingly, and there were days when he could think of nothing else; Boswell feels able to say, of 1782, that ‘the history of his life this year is little more than a mournful recital of the variations of his illness’. He rose late, wrote letters, went to church, received visitors, was bled, and studied Dutch. He made a few trips, to Brighton and Salisbury and Rochester; he boated on the Medway and inspected Stonehenge. His mental powers remained, yet when friends saw him they were moved to comment on his sharp physical decline.
In the bitter winter of 1784 his health worsened, and as news spread that he was near death, there was keen public interest in what kind of end he might have. For a couple of decades he had seemed one of those rare figures whose posterity begins in their lifetime. What would his last words be? Would there be some final, decisive articulation of his wisdom? The fascination with last words was not new, but it had recently become a contentious subject, much discussed in print. Sam would have recalled John of Gaunt’s lines in Shakespeare’s Richard II: ‘They say the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony’. Among his contemporaries, it was usual to think that a person’s final utterance was likely to be particularly clear-sighted, an irrevocable expression of beliefs or values. When people said dull things at the end, their dullness was conveniently forgotten, but when they spoke movingly, the words’ finality seemed sacred. They served as a key to understanding an entire life; the exit line unlocked the mystery of everything that had preceded it. This cult of last words continues, though it’s not as pronounced as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It speaks of – and to – our desire for meaning, closure and completeness. We crave a definitive statement about the truth of a life. About, for that matter, the truth of life in general.
According to whose account you accept,
Sam’s dying utterance was a conventional ‘God bless you’, the Latin ‘Iam moriturus’ (‘I who am about to die’), or something about a cup of warm milk not being handed to him in the way he would have liked. We can be sure, though, that his life ended on the evening of 13 December 1784, a Monday, at Bolt Court. Several details stand out in the copious newspaper coverage: a preoccupation with his legacy to Francis Barber, a concern about where he should be buried – Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s are recommended – and disappointment that in his final days he destroyed manuscripts that included valuable notes on his own life. The Morning Chronicle pronounced him ‘a saint’ and urged a period of national mourning. Other publications certified that he had already attained mythic status. The Public Advertiser deplored the circulation of vast numbers of anecdotes about him (most of them, inevitably, rubbish), and on Christmas Eve the Edinburgh Advertiser reported that eleven writers were separately at work on biographies of him.1
‘How many maggots,’ remarked Edmund Burke, ‘have crawled out of that great body!’ The image conveyed his disgust, and Burke, who had previously used maggots as a symbol of falsehood, clearly had low expectations of most of the biographers. Perhaps he recalled Shakespeare’s reference to ‘maggot ostentation’ – in a speech from Love’s Labour’s Lost that Sam had quoted in his Dictionary entry for maggot. The character who utters these words, Berowne, speaks of the ‘taffeta phrases’ that bloat the language of praise, and, although he is thinking about the verbal games favoured by suitors, his words apply to the effusiveness and pedantry of literary parasites who’ve got something to sell.
From the moment Sam’s death was known, there emerged a pattern with which we are now well acquainted: everyone who had associated with him, no matter how fleetingly, had a story of sorts, and while many of those who had never met him expressed disappointment that they would now not get the chance to do so, dissenters insisted that he had been overrated. There were valuable glimpses of the authentic Johnson, but also a surfeit of far-fetched, self-promoting yarns. Writers aspiring to topical seriousness took him as their subject. Thomas Percy’s Verses on the Death of Dr Samuel Johnson (1785) praised his success in freeing the English language from ‘the mad grasp of fashion’s wild decree’ and issued the rather clunky instruction ‘Ye sons of Britain, venerate a name / That fix’d the channels of your country’s fame.’ In the same year, Thomas Hobhouse’s Elegy to the Memory of Dr Samuel Johnson included the apt couplet ‘His last dread precepts ever shall survive / And Johnson’s death shall teach the world to live’.2
Boswell would write in the Life that he could not express all that he felt upon the loss of his great guide and friend. Instead he quoted William Gerard Hamilton, an Irish politician Sam had admired: ‘No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson’, and his death ‘has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up’. Plenty of people have tried to occupy the space he vacated – self-anointed polymaths and linguistic savants, princes of apophthegm and titans of literary London – and plenty have done their bit to recreate his immensity – biographers and critics, idolaters and cock-eyed champions of misquotation. A sense of his distinctive powers and irreplaceable authority has endured.
In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, the more than faintly Johnsonian teacher Hector tells his charges that ‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something . . . which you had thought special and particular to you.’ There it is: a thought, a phrase, an attitude, written down by someone you have never met – ‘And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’ Sam’s hand reaches down the ages in just this manner. He speaks of familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways, and it can seem as if he has a wise word for every occasion.
Isaiah Berlin drew a distinction between those writers and thinkers who are foxes and those who are hedgehogs. Or rather, he popularized a distinction originally drawn by the Greek poet Archilochus, nearly 2,700 years ago. Archilochus wasn’t thinking about writers, but his words seem peculiarly applicable to them: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. According to Berlin, among writers and thinkers there is a ‘great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision . . . and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory’.3 Sam, I’d argue, was a fox who could do a good impression of being a hedgehog.
It’s not entirely satisfactory to speak of him in such terms, because he was physically most unlike either creature. Still, it is the fox-like Samuel Johnson who can enter into a discussion of beekeeping or kelp-gathering as readily as he can write a biography or a political tract, and whose intellect inclines, in the words of the critic Jean Hagstrum, ‘towards reducing, revising, displacing, or altering mental structures too easily established’.4 It is the fox-like Johnson, too, who can write in Adventurer 126 of the perils of being someone who ‘never compares his notions with those of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom discovers the objections which may be raised against his opinions’. A person unappreciative of the ‘advantages of society’ and ‘general converse’ has failed to get to grips with the sheer ‘multiplicity of objects’ and ‘thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded’. Deep intelligence, according to this view, comes from being responsive to a breadth of stimuli.
But what of the one big thing, the hedgehog’s singular notion? It is a principle summed up in Rasselas, almost in passing, by Princess Nekayah. In conversation with her brother, Nekayah comments that ‘We differ from ourselves just as we differ from each other’. She is thinking of how, when we reflect on questions to do with politics and morality, we can never have a fully rounded understanding of what’s at stake – what one might today call a 360-degree view. Her words echo Montaigne’s assertion that ‘We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.’5
Nekayah’s statement has a broad significance. It affirms two principles that we’re on the whole not very willing to acknowledge. The first is simple and unsettling: we are inconsistent. This is an uncomfortable notion – we have been programmed to think that consistency is a great virtue – yet it has some salutary effects. When we notice our inconsistencies, we are discovering complexity, not inadequacy. The worst of ourselves is part of who we are and, rather than denying this, we should accept it, for suffering and error can be translated into wisdom. This is how we earn our truth, and we grow from truth to truth. Then there is the second principle, more familiar but easily neglected: differing from others is normal, and our disagreements, animosities and tensions don’t always need to be actively (and forcefully) resolved, because over time they may resolve themselves or prove bearable (even interesting or rewarding), like the discrepancies within ourselves. These two principles merge into a single principle: when our tolerance fails, it is not only for the obvious reason that we cannot stomach, let alone welcome, other people’s difference from us, but also because we have not managed to understand our own contradictions.
Sam points up the need for such perspective. Near the end of Rasselas, Imlac emphasizes that ‘You are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue or vice . . . that you should be singled out for supernatural favours or afflictions.’ Reading this, it feels natural to rush towards the end of the sentence, but the most important part is the first. We are significant to ourselves and to the people that love us, but each of us is only one atom of the mass of humanity. This isn’t simply a statement about the paltriness of the individual, or a reminder not to get big ideas about how consequential we are; it’s also a declaration about equality.
Acknowledgements
An acknowledgement, according to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, can be ‘confession of a benefit received’ and al
so ‘confession of a fault’.
By ‘benefit’ he meant ‘a kindness; a favour conferred; an act of love’. I am grateful for favours done me by James Basker, Robert Macfarlane and Michael Proffitt; for the larger kindnesses of Alexandra Harris, Gesche Ipsen and Leo Robson; and for the unstinting generosity of Jessica Edwards and Paul Hitchings.
Thanks are also due to my judicious editor, Georgina Morley, her colleague Chloe May, my copy-editor Fraser Crichton, my agent Peter Straus and his assistant Matthew Turner.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge two people who shaped my interest in Samuel Johnson: John Mullan and the late Tony Nuttall.
Such faults as this book contains are mine.
Bibliography
I have used the following editions of works by Johnson and his biographers:
The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 23 vols (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1959–)
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 30
