The notion, then, that the man who wrote theLife of Johnsonwas a fool, is an absurdity. If the arguments in its favour prove anybody a fool it is not Boswell. Nor is it even true that Boswell, like some great artists, escaped apparently by some divine gift from his natural folly just during the time necessary for the production of his great work, but at all other times relapsed at once into imbecility. We know how scrupulously accurate he was in what he wrote, not only from his candour in relating his own defeats, but from the many cases in which he confesses that he was not quite sure of the exact facts, such as, to give one instance, whether Johnson, on a certain occasion, spoke of "a page" or "ten lines" of Pope as not containing so much sense as one line of Cowley. Therefore we may take the picture he gives of himself in his book as a fair one. And what is it? Does it bear out the notorious assertion that "there is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion or society which is not either commonplace or absurd"? One would sometimes imagine Macaulay had never read the book of which he speaks with such {66} confident decision. Certainly, except as a biographer, Boswell was not a man of any very remarkable abilities. But, in answer to such an insult as Macaulay's, Boswell's defenders may safely appeal to the book itself, and to everybody who has read it with any care. Will any one deny that not once or twice, but again and again, the plain sense of some subject which had been distorted or confused by the perverse ingenuity of Johnson "talking for victory" comes quietly, after the smoke has cleared away, from the despised imbecility of Boswell? Who gives the judgment which every one would now give about the contest with the American colonies? Not Johnson but Boswell; not the author ofTaxation No Tyranny, but the man who wrote so early as 1775 to his friend Temple: "I am growing more and more an American. I see the unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their Assemblies; I think our Ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate war." Who was right and who was wrong on the question of the Middlesex Election? Nobody now doubts that Boswell was right, and Johnson was wrong. Which has proved wiser, as we look back, Johnson who ridiculed Gray's poetry, or Boswell who sat up all night reading it? The fact is that Boswell was undoubtedly a {67} sensible and cultivated as well as a very agreeable man, and as such was warmly welcomed at the houses of the most intelligent men of his day.
The old estimate, then, of James Boswell must be definitely abandoned. The man who knew him best, his friend Temple, the friend of Gray, said of him that he was "the most thinking man he had ever known." We may not feel able to regard that as anything more than the judgment of friendship: but it is not fools who win such judgments even from their friends. We may wonder at the word "genius" being applied to him; and if genius be taken in the stricter modern sense of transcendent powers of mind, the sense in which it is applied to Milton or Michael Angelo, there is of course no doubt that it would be absurd to apply it to Boswell. But if the word be used in the old looser sense, or if it be given the definite meaning of a man who originates an important new departure in a serious sphere of human action, who creates something of a new order in art or literature or politics or war, then Boswell's claim to genius cannot be questioned. Just as another member of "Johnson's Club" was in those years writing history as it had never been written before, so, and to a far more remarkable degree, Boswell was writing {68} biography as it had never been written before. Gibbon'sDecline and Fallwas in fact a far less original performance, far less of a new departure, than Boswell'sLife of Johnson. Boswell's book is in truth what he himself called it, "more of a life than any work that has ever yet appeared." After it the art of biography could never be merely what it had been before. And in that sense, the sense of a man whose work is an advance upon that of his predecessors, not merely in degree, but in kind, Boswell was undoubtedly and even more than Gibbon, entitled to the praise of genius.
Let us all, then, unashamedly and ungrudgingly give the rein to our admiration and love of Boswell. There is a hundred years between us and his follies, and every one of the hundred is full of his claim upon our gratitude. Let us now be ready to pay the debt in full. Let us be sure that there is something more than mere interest or entertainment in a book which so wise a man as Jowett confessed to having read fifty times, of which another lifelong thinker about life, a man very different from Jowett, Robert Louis Stevenson, could write: "I am taking a little Boswell daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read him now until the day I die." And not only in the book but in the author too. Let us be {69} sure with Carlyle that if "Boswell wrote a good book" it was not because he was a fool, but on the contrary "because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth: because of his free insight, of his lively talent, above all of his love and childlike open-mindedness." In the particular business he had to carry through, these qualities were an equipment amounting to a modest kind of genius. They enabled him to produce a book which has given as much pleasure perhaps to intelligent men as any book that ever was written. Let us be careful whenever we think of Boswell to remember this side, the positive, creative, permanent side of him: and not so careful as our grandfathers generally were, to remember the other side which ceased to have any further importance on that night in May 1795 when he ended the fifty-five years of a life in which he had found time for more follies than most men, for more vices perhaps, certainly for more wisdom, but also for what most men never so much as conceive, the preparation and production of a masterpiece.
{70}
These two men, then, are for ever inseparable. They go down the centuries together, Johnson owing most of his immortality to the genius of Boswell, Boswell owing to Johnson that inspiring opportunity without which genius cannot discover that it is genius. There were other men in Johnson's circle, whom he knew longer and respected more; but for us, Boswell's position in relation to Johnson is unique. Beside him the others, even Burke and Reynolds, are, in this connection, shadows. They had their independent fields of greatness in which Johnson had no share: Boswell's greatness is all Johnsonian. We cannot think of him apart from Johnson: and he has so managed that we can scarcely think of Johnson apart from him. No one who occupies himself with the one can ignore the other: in interest and popularity they stand or fall together. It may be well, therefore, before going further, to give the bare facts of both their lives; dismissing Boswell first, as the less important, and then devoting the rest of the chapter to Johnson.
{71}
James Boswell was born in 1740. He came of an ancient family, a fact he never forgot, as, indeed, few people do who have the same advantage. His father was a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Auchinleck. The first of the family to hold the estate of Auchinleck, which is in Ayrshire, was Thomas Boswell, who received a grant of it from James IV in whose army he went to Flodden and shared the defeat and death of his patron. The estate had therefore belonged to the Boswells over two hundred years when the future biographer of Johnson was born. His father and he were never congenial spirits. The judge was a Whig with a practical view of life and had no sympathy with his son's romantic propensities either in religion, politics or literature. A plain Lowland Scot, he did not see why his son should take up with Toryism, Anglicanism, or literary hero-worship. When James, after first attaching himself to Paoli, the leader of the Corsican struggle for independence, returned home and took up the discipleship to Johnson which was to be the central fact in the rest of his life, his father frankly despaired of him, and broke out, according to Walter Scott: "There's nae hope for Jamie, mon. Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He's done wi' Paoli—he's off wi' the {72} landlouping scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon? Adominie, mon—an auld dominie: he keeped a schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy." Well might Boswell say that they were "so totally different that a good understanding is scarcely possible." Beside disliking Paoli and Johnson, Lord Auchinleck cared nothing for some of Boswell's strict feudal notions, had the bad taste to give his son a step-mother, and to be as unlike him as possible in the matter of good spirits. Scarcely anything could interfere with the judge's cheerfulness, while Boswell was always falling into depressions about nothing in particular and perhaps indulging in the "foolish notion," rebuked by Johnson, that "melancholy is a proof of acuteness." But in spite of their differences the father and son managed to avoid anything like a definite breach. Boswell was sincerely anxious to please his father, and was constantly urged in that direction by his great mentor: and after all the judge went some way to meet his singular son, for he paid his debts and entertained both Paoli and Johnson at Auchinleck. The latter visit was naturally a source of some anxiety to Boswell and it did not go off without a storm when the old Whig and the old Tory unluckily got on to the topic of Charles I and Cromwell: but all {73} ended well, and Boswell characteristically ends his story of it, written after both were dead, with the pious hope that the antagonists had by then met in a higher state of existence "where there is no room for Whiggism."
Full of activities as Boswell's life was, the definite facts and dates in it are not very numerous. He was sent to Glasgow University, and wished to be a soldier, but was bred by his father to the law. No doubt he gave some early signs of intellectual promise, for which it was not thought the army provided a fit sphere, for the Duke of Argyle is reported to have said to his father when he was only twenty: "My lord, I like your son: this boy must not be shot at for three-and-sixpence a day." He paid his first visit to London in 1760; and, having heard a good deal about Johnson from one Mr. Gentleman, and from Derrick, a very minor poet, he at once sought an introduction, but had to leave London without succeeding in his object. He was equally unsuccessful when he was in London the next year, during which he published some anonymous poems which would not have helped him to secure the desired introduction. The great event occurred at last in 1763. The day was the 16th of May and the scene the house of Davies, the bookseller. "At last," says Boswell, "on {74} Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,—he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes.'"
So, with characteristic accuracy and characteristic imagination, begins his well-known account of his first meeting with his hero, and the storms to which he was exposed in its course. But all ended satisfactorily, for when the great man was gone, Davies reassured the nervous Boswell by saying: "Don't be uneasy, I can see he likes you very well." A few days afterwards Boswell called on Johnson at his Chambers in the Temple, and the great friendship which was the pleasure and business of his life was definitely begun. Yet it is worth remembering, if only as an additional proof of Boswell's biographical genius, that, according to the calculation of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, when all the weeks and months during which Johnson and Boswell were living within reach of each {75} other are added together, they amount to little more than two years. And of course this includes all the days on which they were both in London, on many, or rather most, of which they did not meet.
A few months after the first meeting, Boswell went by his father's wish to Utrecht to study law. But before that the friendship was got on to a firm footing, and Boswell had had the pride and pleasure of hearing Johnson say, "There are few people whom I take so much to, as you." A still stronger proof of Johnson's feeling was that he insisted on going with Boswell to Harwich to see him out of England. This was the occasion on which he scarified the good Protestants who were with them in the coach by defending the Inquisition, and invited one of the ladies who said she never allowed her children to be idle to take his own education in hand; "'for I have been an idle fellow all my life.' 'I am sure, sir,' said she, 'you have not been idle.' 'Nay, madam, it is very true, and that gentleman there,' pointing to me, 'has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow where he continued to be idle. He then came to London where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht where he will be as idle as ever.' I asked him privately how he could expose me {76} so. 'Pooh, Pooh!' said he, 'they know nothing about you and will think of it no more.'" When he was not engaged in these alarums and excursions or in reproving Boswell for giving the coachman a shilling instead of the customary sixpence, he was occupied in reading Pomponius MelaDe Situ Orbis. How complete the picture is and how vivid! It once more gives Boswell's method in miniature.
He seems to have stayed at Utrecht about a year, afterwards travelling in Germany, where he visited Wittenberg, and sat down to write to Johnson in the church where the Reformation was first preached, with his paper resting on the tomb of Melanchthon. It is noticeable that, though he had only known Johnson a year, he already hoped to be his biographer. "At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend, I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory." He was also at this time in Italy and Switzerland, where he visited Voltaire and gratified him by quoting a remark of Johnson's that Frederick the Great's writings were the sort of stuff one might expect from "a footboy who had been Voltaire's amanuensis." Nor did this {77} collector of celebrities omit to visit Rousseau, the rival lion of the day, between whom and Voltaire the orthodox Johnson thought it was "difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity." But as far as Boswell's records go, he never said such violent things of Voltaire as of Rousseau, whom he called "a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society and transported to work in the plantations." Boswell, however, was an admirer of theVicaire Savoyard, and said what he could in defence of his host, in return for the hospitality he had enjoyed at Neuchatel, with the usual result, of course, that Johnson only became more outrageous.
In 1765 Boswell made the acquaintance of another distinguished man with whom his name will always be connected. Corsica had at that time been long, and on the whole victoriously, engaged in a struggle to free itself from the hated rule of Genoa. The leader of the Corsicans was a man of high birth, character and abilities, Pascal Paoli, who had acted since 1753 at once as their General and as the head of the civil administration. Both the generous and the curious element in Boswell made him anxious not to return from Italy without seeing something of so interesting a people and so great a hero. Armed with introductions from Rousseau {78} and others and with such protection as a British Captain's letter could give him against Barbary Corsairs, he sailed from Leghorn to Corsica in September 1765. His account of the island and of his tour there, published in 1768, is still very good reading. He soon made his way to the palace where Paoli was residing, with whom he at first felt himself in a presence more awe-inspiring than that of princes, but ventured after a while upon a compliment to the Corsicans. "Sir, I am upon my travels, and have lately visited Rome. I am come from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people: I now see the rise of another." The good sense of Paoli declined any parallel between Rome and his own little people, but he soon received Boswell into his intimacy and spent some hours alone with him almost every day. One fine answer of his, uniting the scholar and the patriot, is worth quoting. Boswell asked him how he, who confessed to his love of society and particularly of the society of learned and cultivated men, could be content to pass his life in an island where no such advantages were to be had; to which Paoli replied at once—
"Vincit amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido."
{79}
Well might Boswell wish to have a statue of him taken at that moment. Even Virgilian quotation has seldom been put to nobler use. Like all the great men of the eighteenth century, Paoli was an enthusiast for the ancients. "A young man who would form his mind to glory," he told Boswell, "must not read modern memoirs;ma Plutarcho, ma Tito Livio." His own mind was formed not only to glory, but also to what so often fails to go with glory, to justice and moderation. Nothing is more remarkable in the conversations with him recorded by Boswell than his good sense and fairness of mind in speaking of the Genoese. Even in the excitement of Corsica, Boswell did not forget Johnson. He says that he quoted specimens of Johnson's wisdom to Paoli, who "translated them to the Corsican heroes with Italian energy"; and, as he had written to his master "from the tomb of Melanchthon sacred to learning and piety," so he also wrote to him "from the palace of Pascal Paoli sacred to wisdom and liberty." Boswell was received with great honour in Corsica, no doubt partly because he was very naturally supposed to have some mission from the British Government. He left the island in December and arrived in London in February 1766, when his intimacy with Johnson was at once resumed, in spite {80} of the visits to Rousseau and Voltaire which drew some inevitable sarcasms from the great man. He soon, however, returned to Scotland, where he was admitted an Advocate in the summer of 1766.
Johnson thought he was too busy about Corsica, and wrote to him: "Empty your head of Corsica, which I think has filled it rather too long." But this was in March 1768, when Boswell'sAccount of Corsicahad already been published. It sold very well, a second and a third edition appearing within the year. Gray and other good judges spoke warmly of it and it seems that a French translation as well as two Dutch ones were made. It caused so much stir and aroused so much sympathy in England that Lord Holland was quite afraid we were going to be "so foolish as to go to war because Mr. Boswell has been in Corsica." After this it was less likely than ever that Boswell would forget that island. Motives of vanity combined with his genuine enthusiasm to keep him full of it, and he replied to Johnson's monition: "Empty my head of Corsica! empty it of honour, empty it of humanity, empty it of friendship, empty it of piety! No! while I live, Corsica and the cause of the brave islanders shall ever employ much of my attention and interest me in the sincerest {81} manner." It seems from his letters to Temple that he found these outbursts a great deal easier than living in a manner worthy of a friend of Paoli. But he did more than talk. He wrote to Chatham to try to interest him in Corsica, and received a reply three pages long applauding his generous warmth; he brought out a volume ofBritish Essays in Favour of the Brave Corsicans, sent Paoli Johnson's Works and, what was more substantial, forwarded a quantity of ordnance, to buy which he had managed to raise a subscription of 700 pounds. His desire to be a well-known man now began to receive some gratification and he frankly confesses his pleasure at having such men as Johnson, Hume and Franklin dining with him at his chambers. Nor will any reasonable man blame him. His snobbishness, if it is to be so called, was always primarily a snobbishness of mind and character, not of wealth or rank.
Nothing else of importance occurred to him in these years. He was much occupied with the great law-suit about the succession to the Douglas property, on which he wrote two pamphlets and was so sure of the justice of his view that he once dared to tell Johnson he knew nothing about that subject. He was with Johnson at Oxford in 1768 and they were already talking of going to the Hebrides {82} together. The next year, 1769, saw the conquest of Corsica by the French to whom the Genoese had ceded their claims. The result was that Paoli came to London, where he lived till 1789, and Boswell was constantly with him. In this year he did at least one very foolish thing, and at least one very wise one. He made himself ridiculous by going to the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford and appearing in Corsican costume with "Viva la Libertà " embroidered on his cap. He also took the most sensible step of his whole life in marrying his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, on November 25. She never liked Johnson, and her husband had the candour to report an excellent sally of hers at his and his sage's expense: "I have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by a bear." But though, as Boswell says, she could not be expected to like his "irregular hours and uncouth habits," she never failed in courtesy to him: and he on his part was unwearied in sending friendly messages to his "dear enemy" as he called her, and was well aware of her importance to her husband. The event unhappily proved his prescience; for after her death in 1789, Boswell's downward course was visibly accelerated.
After Boswell's marriage there was no {83} communication between him and Johnson for a year and a half, and they did not meet again till March 1772, when Boswell came to London, and stayed some time. The next year he came again, and, by Johnson's active support, was elected a member of "The Club," a small society of friends founded by Reynolds and Johnson in 1764. At first it met weekly for supper, but after a few years the members began the custom of dining together on fixed dates which has continued to the present day. Among the members when Boswell was elected were Johnson and Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and Garrick. Gibbon and Charles Fox came in the next year, and Adam Smith in 1775. In 1780 the number of members was enlarged to forty which is still the limit. "The Club" has always maintained its distinction, and a recent article in theEdinburgh Reviewrecords that fifteen Prime Ministers have been members of it, as well as men like Scott, Tennyson, Hallam, Macaulay and Grote. The first advantage over and above pride and pleasure derived by Boswell from his election was the acquaintance of Burke, which he had long desired and retained through life. Burke said of him that he had so much good humour naturally that it was scarcely a virtue in him.
In the autumn of that year, 1773, Johnson {84} and Boswell made their famous tour to the Hebrides. They, in fact, went over much more than the Hebrides, seeing the four Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Aberdeen and Glasgow, besides many less famous places. Johnson says they were everywhere "received like princes in their progress," and though no doubt hospitality was freer in those days when travellers were few and inns poor, yet the whole story is a remarkable proof of Johnson's fame and Boswell's popularity. The University Professors vied with each other in paying civilities to Johnson, the town of Aberdeen gave him its freedom, and among their hosts were magnates like the Duke of Argyll, Lord Errol and Lord Loudoun, who "jumped for joy" at their coming, and great men of law or learning like Lord Monboddo and Lord Elibank.
By this time all the important events in Boswell's life were over except the publication of his two great books, theTour to the Hebridesand theLife of Johnson. During all the ten years which Johnson still had to live, except 1780 and 1782, the two friends managed to spend some time together, and when they did not, the friendship was maintained by correspondence. Boswell's father died in 1782, and Boswell came into possession of the estate, {85} worth 1,600 pounds a year. Johnson and Boswell took more than one "jaunt" in the country together, visiting Oxford, Lichfield and other places. They were at Oxford together in June 1784; but Johnson was then evidently failing. On their return to London, Boswell busied himself with the help of Reynolds in trying to get Johnson's pension increased, so that he might be able to spend the winter abroad. Johnson was very pleased on hearing of the attempt, saying, when Boswell told him, "'This is taking prodigious pains about a man.' 'O, sir,' said Boswell, 'your friends would do everything for you.' He paused, grew more and more agitated, till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with fervent emotion, 'God bless you all.' I was so affected that I also shed tears. After a short silence he renewed and extended his grateful benediction, 'God bless you all, for Jesus Christ's sake.'" Those were the last words Boswell heard under Johnson's roof. The next day they both dined with Reynolds, and on July 2 Boswell left London, to see Johnson no more. Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784.
Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large part of Boswell's later years. He made some approaches to standing as a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, {86} and again in 1788, was called to the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle. That unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics. Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of literature had brought him. It was not the laird or the lawyer, but the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign Correspondence. And those last years, while they brought him disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a successful author. TheTour to the Hebrideswas published in 1785, and sold out in a few weeks. The third edition was issued within a year of the appearance of the first. It was followed by the publication of Johnson's famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by theLifeitself. A second edition of this was called for in 1793. Boswell only lived two years more. He died on May 19, 1795. He left two sons, Alexander, {87} who became Sir Alexander, was the principal mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third edition of his father's great book, and edited the thirdVariorum Shakespeare, known as Boswell'sMalone, in 1821.
Such were the main outlines of the life of the biographer. We may now turn to those of the life which he owes his fame to recording. They are in most ways very unlike his own. Samuel Johnson was very far from being heir to a large estate and an ancient name. He was the son of a bookseller at Lichfield, and was born there on the 18th of September 1709, in a house which is now preserved in public hands in memory of the event of that day. His father's family was so obscure that he once said, "I can hardly tell who was my grandfather." His mother was Sarah Ford, who came of a good yeoman stock in Warwickshire. She was both a good and an intelligent woman. Samuel was the elder and only ultimately surviving issue of the marriage. A picturesque incident in his childhood is that his mother took him to London to be "touched" by Queen Anne for the scrofula, or "king's evil," as it was called, from which he suffered. He must have been one of the last persons to go through this curious {88} ceremony, which the Georges never performed, though the service for it remained in the Book of Common Prayer for some years after the accession of George I. The boy made an impression upon people from the first. He liked to recall in later life that the dame who first taught him to read brought him a present of gingerbread when he was starting for Oxford, and told him he was the best scholar she had ever had. Afterwards he went to Lichfield School, and at the age of fifteen to Stourbridge. At both he was evidently held in respect by boys and masters alike. Probably the curious combination in him of the invalid and the prize-fighter which was conspicuous all through his life, already arrested attention in his boyhood. He played none of the ordinary games, but yet, as we have already seen, was acknowledged as a leader by the boys, and his abilities were the pride of the school. He already exhibited the amazing memory which enabled him in later life to dictate to Boswell his famous letter to Chesterfield rather than search for a copy, and to confute a person who praised a bad translation from Martial by a contemptuous "Why, sir, the original is thus," followed by a recitation not only of the Latin original which it is not likely he had looked at for years, but also of the translation which he had only read {89} once. So on another occasion when Baretti, who had read a little Ariosto with him some years before, proposed to give him some more lessons, but feared he might have forgotten their previous readings, "Who forgets, sir?" said Johnson, and immediately repeated three or four stanzas of theOrlando. To the lover of literature there is no possession more precious than a good verbal memory, and this Johnson enjoyed to a very unusual degree all through his life. But it is worth noting that he was entirely free from the defect which commonly results from an exceptional memory. He always thought and spoke for himself, and was never prevented from using his own mind and his own words by the fact that his memory supplied him abundantly with those of others. His scholarly friend Langton annoyed him by depending upon books too much in his conversation, and one of his compliments to Boswell was, "You and I do not talk from books."
After he left Stourbridge he spent two years at home in desultory reading, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod," the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the Master of his College said he was "the best qualified for the University that {90} he had ever known come there." His College was Pembroke, of which he became a Commoner (not a Servitor, as Carlyle said) in 1728. The Oxford of that day was not a place of much discipline and the official order of study was very laxly maintained. It seems not to have meant much to Johnson, and he is described as having spent a good deal of his time "lounging at the College gates with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit and keeping from their studies." Most good talkers find the first real sphere for their talent when they get to the University, and the best of all was not likely to be an exception, nor to resist that strongest of the intellectual temptations. But he did some solid reading, especially Greek, though he seemed to himself to be very idle, perhaps because his standard was so high that he used to say in later life, "I never knew a man who studied hard." So when he confesses the imperfections of his Greek scholarship, and other people exaggerate his confession, it is well to remember the reply made by Jacob Bryant when Gifford in an argument quoted Johnson's admission that "he was not a good Greek scholar," "Sir, it is not easy for us to say what such a man as Johnson would call a good Greek scholar." A man whose remedy for {91} sleeplessness was to turn Greek epigrams into Latin was at any rate not ignorant of Greek.
Johnson was prevented by his poverty from getting the full advantages either out of the life or the studies of Oxford. His want of shoes prevented his attending lectures, his pride forbad him to receive doles of help, the friend, said to be a Mr. Corbet of Shropshire, on whose promises of support he had relied in going to Oxford, failed him, his father's business went from little to less; with the inevitable result that he had to leave Oxford without a degree. This was in December 1729. But he had made an impression there, had a strong affection for his College, and liked going to stay there in the days of his glory. His usual host was one Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke, who had once been his tutor but told Boswell that the relation was only nominal; "he was above my mark." When he left Oxford he returned to his Lichfield home, where his father died two months later, leaving so little behind him that all that Johnson received of his estate was twenty pounds. He seems to have remained at Lichfield, where the poverty of his family did not prevent his mixing with the most cultivated society of a town rich in cultivated people, till 1732, when he became an usher in a school at Market Bosworth. He hated this monotonous drudgery {92} and left it after a few months, going to live with a Mr. Warren, a Birmingham bookseller of good repute, whom he helped by his knowledge of literature. While in Birmingham he did a translation of a Jesuit book about Abyssinia, for which Warren paid him five guineas. In 1734 he returned to Lichfield, tried without success to obtain subscribers for an edition of the poems of Politian, and offered to write in theGentleman's Magazine. It is difficult to see how he supported himself at this period: perhaps he was helped by his mother or by his brother who carried on the bookselling business till his death a little later. Anyhow it was just at this time that he took a step for which poverty generally finds the courage more quickly than wealth. He married Elizabeth Porter at St. Werburgh's Church, Derby, in July 1735. Mrs. Porter was a widow twice his age and not of an attractive appearance; but there is no doubt that Johnson's love for her was sincere and lasting. To the end of his life he remembered her frequently in his prayers "if it were lawful," and kept the anniversary of her death with prayers and tears. Eighteen years after she died he could write in his private note-books that his grief for her was not abated and that he had less pleasure in any good that happened to him, because she could not share {93} it: and in 1782 when she had been dead thirty years, and he was drawing near his own end, he prays for her and after doing so, noted "perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me."
This was the inner truth of the relation between Johnson and his elderly wife, but it was natural and indeed inevitable that the world, the little world of their acquaintances, should have been chiefly alive to the humorous external aspect of the marriage, and one does not wonder that Beauclerk, whose married life was a scandal following on a divorce, should have enjoyed relating that Johnson had said to him, "Sir, it was a love marriage on both sides!" Johnson's own account of the actual wedding is singular enough. "Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should {94} soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears."
Mrs. Johnson was the widow of a Birmingham draper, and brought her husband several hundred pounds, part of which was at once spent in hiring and furnishing a large house at Edial near Lichfield where Johnson proposed to take pupils. But no pupils came except David Garrick and his brother, the sons of an old Lichfield friend, and the "academy" was abandoned after a year and a half. The lack of pupils, however, was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for it enabled Johnson to write most of his tragedyIrene, with which he went to London in March 1737. His pupil, David Garrick, went with him to study law, and when Garrick was a rich, famous and rather vain man, Johnson, who liked to curb the "insolence of wealth" once referred to 1737 as the year "when I came to London with twopence half-penny in my pocket; and thou, Davy, with three-halfpence in thine." Nothing came of this first visit to the capital. He lived as best he could, dining for eightpence, and seeing a few friends, one of whom was Henry Hervey, son of the Earl of Bristol, of whose kindness he always retained an affectionate memory, so that he once said to Boswell, "If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him." In the summer he returned to Lichfield, and finished his {95} tragedy, after which he brought his wife back with him to London which was his home for the rest of his life. Efforts to getIreneperformed were unsuccessful, but he soon began to write regularly for theGentleman's Magazine, of which he held so high an opinion that he looked "with reverence" on the house where it was printed. To this he contributed essays and was soon employed to write theParliamentary Debateswhich, in the days before reporters, were made up with fictitious names from such scanty notes as could be got of the actual speeches. There is a story of his being, many years later, in a company who were praising a famous oration of Chatham, and were naturally a good deal startled by his quietly saying, "That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street." He continued to do this work till 1743 when he became aware that the speeches were taken as authentic and refused to be "accessory to the propagation of falsehood." But, while engaged in it, he had had no scruples about taking care "that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it."
A much more important matter than this hack-work was the publication of hisLondon, a poem in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. This appeared in May 1738. He got ten guineas for it, which he was in no position to despise; but he also got something {96} much more important, an established name in the world of letters. Every one talked of him, and Pope, who published his "1738" in the same year, was not only generous enough to inquire about him, and to say when told that the author ofLondonwas some obscure man, "He will soon bedéterré," but also to try to get him an Irish degree of M.A. This was in view of some attempts Johnson made to escape from dependence on journalism for his daily bread: but they were all unsuccessful, and till he received his pension his only source of income was what his various writings produced. In such circumstances he naturally wrote many things of quite ephemeral interest which call for no mention now. Perhaps the only prose work of permanent value he produced in these years was the life of his mysterious friend, Richard Savage. This curious volume appeared in 1744. The subject of it died in 1743. He and Johnson had been companions both in extreme poverty and in the intellectual pleasures which in such men poverty is unable to annihilate. Mrs. Johnson seems to have been out of London at this time, and the two struggling men of letters often passed nights together, walking and talking in the streets and squares without the price of a night's lodging between them. Johnson's account of {97} his friend did not fill his pocket, but must have contributed something to his fame as it was very favourably criticized. It was the occasion of Reynolds first becoming acquainted with his name. He was so interested by the book that, having taken it up while standing with his arm leaning upon a chimney-piece, he read the whole without sitting down and found his arm quite benumbed when he got to the end.
"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." Johnson had now been seven years in London, but had not yet found the way to do anything worthy of his powers. If he had died then, only the curious and the learned would have known his name to-day. A single satire in verse would never, by itself, have had the force to push its way through the ever-increasing crowd of applicants that besiege the attention of posterity. But the next year, 1745, is the literary turning-point of his life. Before it was over he had begun to deal with two subjects with which much of his remaining life was occupied, and on which much of his fame depends. He had published a pamphlet upon Shakespeare'sMacbethwhich won the praise of Warburton, for which Johnson always felt and showed his gratitude ("He praised me at a time when praise was of value to me"); and, if Boswell is right, he had begun to occupy {98} himself with the idea of making an English Dictionary. Thus, poor and obscure as he was in those years, sick with deferred hope as he must have been, he had in fact laid the foundation-stones of the authority and fame he was soon to enjoy as the Editor of Shakespeare and above all as "Dictionary Johnson." Now at last he began to do work worthier of his powers. The "Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language" was published in 1747 and in the same year he wrote the admirableProloguefor the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, of which his pupil, David Garrick, more fortunate than the master with whom he had come to London, was now become manager.
Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy ofIrene. It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later years. There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot called it "the finest tragedy of modern times," to which his only reply was, "If Pot says so, Pot lies." But this hardly has the genuine ring about it. Even Garrick's talent and friendship could not makeIrenea success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds. In the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was given {99} by the appearance ofThe Vanity of Human Wishes, another Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first. From 1750 to 1752 he was writingThe Rambler, a sort of newspaper essay which appeared every Tuesday and Friday. He wrote it almost entirely himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was calling for it. No one will now wonder that it never had a large circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from sermons. But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to intellectual frivolity. We have seen that the idlest sort of reading Johnson could think of for a boy was "voyages and travels"; novels he does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by them, he of course could not so much as conceive.The Ramblerhad no sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for its two years of life. The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was the praise of his wife, who said to him, "I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this." That was just the discovery a good {100} many people beside his wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that whenThe Ramblerappeared as a book, it sold well and had gone through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author's life.
Three years after the cessation ofThe Ramblerand, unhappily, also three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary appeared. It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever accomplished a literary task of such vast extent. The mere labour, one might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the materials of such a work is enormous. Nor could any literary labour bring with it greater temptations. Johnson's success is not more due to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never failed him and the strong will which he could generally exert when he chose. He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface, "with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature"; but that, of course, was where the danger lay. A man of an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw {101} that these visions of intellectual pleasure were "the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer"; and that, if he was to do the thing he had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable perfection, which is the constant parent of futility. He realized, as so many men of letters have failed to realize, that "to deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much improvement"; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he attempted.
The praise he deserved was somewhat slow in coming, as is commonly the case with the greatest literary achievements. But though, as he sadly says in the last words of his great Preface, most of those whom he wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had therefore little to hope or fear from praise or censure, yet he was always and before all things a human being, and only a creature above or below humanity could have been insensible to the pleasure of the new fame, the new authority and the new friends which his {102} Dictionary gradually brought him. Before many years had passed the "harmless drudge," as he himself had defined a lexicographer, had become the acknowledged law-giver and dictator of English letters; he had gathered round him a society of the finest minds of that generation, he had received a public pension which secured his independence, he had begun the long friendship which gave him a second home for more than fifteen years. These things did not all come at once—he did not know the Thrales till 1764 or 1765—but the true turning-point in his career is the publication of his Dictionary. He was still poor for some years after that, and still much occupied in the production of hack-work: but he was never again obscure and was soon to be famous. Within a year after the appearance of the Dictionary he had issued hisProposals for an Edition of Shakespeare, the second in time and perhaps in importance of his three great works. His new position secured him a good number of subscribers and he intended to publish it the next year, 1757; but the interruptions of indolence, business and pleasure, as he himself says of Pope, usually disappoint the sanguine expectations of authors, and the book did not in fact appear till 1765.
Neither Shakespeare nor idleness had {103} occupied the whole of the intervening years. From 1758 to 1760 he produced a weekly paper calledThe Idler, of the same character asThe Rambler. In 1759 he wrote his once famous storyRasselasto pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. It was written in the evenings of a single week. Good judges thought that, if he had known how to make a bargain, he ought to have received as much as four hundred pounds for this book, which was translated into most of the European languages; but he did not in fact receive more than a hundred pounds for the first and twenty-five for the second edition. By this time he could visit Oxford, from which University he had received the degree of M.A. when his Dictionary was on the eve of publication: and another sign of the position he was beginning to occupy is that we find Smollet writing of him in 1759 as the "great Cham of literature." More substantial evidences followed in 1762 when George III was advised by Bute to grant him a pension of 300 pounds a year, an income which must have seemed boundless affluence to a man who had never known a time when five pounds was not an important sum to him.
Next year came the event which was even more important to his fame than the receipt of the pension was to his comfort. In 1763 {104} he met Boswell for the first time. Fortune now began to smile upon him in good earnest and evidences of his established position and prosperity follow each other in rapid succession. "The Club" (its proper and still existing name, though Boswell occasionally calls it The Literary Club) was founded in 1764 and provided him for the rest of his life with an ideal theatre for the display of his amazing powers of talk, though it appears that he was not in his later years a very regular attendant. The next year, 1765, was probably the year in which he first met Thrale, the great brewer, and his clever and ambitious wife. No event contributed so much to the happiness of his after years. Thrale was a man of character and understanding, and was not without scholarly tastes. He at once saw the value of such a friend as Johnson, lived in the closest intimacy with him for the rest of his days, and named him executor in his will, which gave Johnson an opportunity such as he always liked, of mixing in business, and incidentally also, of saying the best thing that ever was said at the sale of a brewery. He appeared at the auction, according to the story told by Lord Lucan, "bustling about with an inkhorn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and, on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the {105} property, answered, 'We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.'" The brewery was sold for 135,000 pounds to Mr. Barclay, the founder of the present firm of Barclay & Perkins, who now put Johnson's head on the labels of their beer bottles. But it was not so much on the silent and busy Thrale himself as on his wife, a quick and clever woman fond of literary society, that the visible burden, honour and pleasure of the long friendship with Johnson fell. Till the breach caused by her second marriage just before he died no one had so much of his society as Mrs. Thrale. She soon became "my mistress" to him, an adaptation of his from the "my master" which was her phrase for her husband. And for him, too, Thrale was "my master." A somewhat masterful servant, no doubt, to them both, but he loved them sincerely and was deeply grateful for their kindness. He lived at their house at Streatham as much as he liked, and had his own room reserved for him both there and at their London house. At Streatham he sometimes remained for several months, and it is chiefly there that Boswell's only rival, Fanny Burney, saw him. It may be said that the Thrales' house was more of a home to him than anything else he ever knew: it was at {106} least the only house since his childhood in which he ever lived with children. There in the garden or in the library he studied and idled and talked at his ease; there many of his friends gathered round him; there his wishes were anticipated and his words listened to, sometimes with fear, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with reverence, always with affection and almost always with admiration. Well might he write to Mrs. Thrale as he did in October 1777: "I cannot but think on your kindness and my master's. Life has upon the whole fallen short, very short, of my early expectation; but the acquisition of such a friendship, at an age when new friendships are seldom acquired, is something better than the general course of things gives man a right to expect. I think on it with great delight. I am not very apt to be delighted."
Johnson had now become a comparatively prosperous man, and the lives of the prosperous have a way of producing little to record. He received many honours and compliments of different sorts. Dublin University made him LL.D. in 1765, he had his well-known interview with George III in 1767, the Royal Academy appointed him their Professor in Ancient Literature in 1769, and in 1775 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. But the only events {107} of any special importance in the last twenty years of his life were the publication of hisShakespearein 1765, his journey in Scotland with Boswell in 1773, and the writing of his last and most popular book,The Lives of the Poets. This he undertook in 1777 and completed in 1781. Its easier style, pleasant digressions, and occasional bits of autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson's life. He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the earlier works it substitutes an old man's kindliness of retrospect. Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of hisJourney to the Western Islands, of thePrologueto Goldsmith'sGood-Natured Manand of his political pamphlets,The False Alarm,Falkland's Islands,The Patriot, andTaxation no Tyranny. But none of these things except theLives of the Poetsoccupied much of his time, and his principal occupation in his old age was talking to his friends. He travelled a good deal, often visiting Oxford, his old home at Lichfield, and his friend Taylor's house in Derbyshire. In 1775 he went to France with the Thrales, and even in his last year was planning a tour to Italy. But by that time the motive was rather health than pleasure. He had a {108} paralytic stroke in 1783 and lost his powers of speech for some days. One of the doctors who attended him was Dr. Heberden, who had cured Cowper of a still graver illness twenty years earlier. His strong constitution enabled him to recover rapidly, and within a month he was paying visits in Kent and Wiltshire. But he had other complaints, and never again knew even that modest measure of health which he had once enjoyed.
The inevitable loss of friends, that saddest and most universal sorrow of old age, joined with illness to depress his last years. Beauclerk died in 1780, Thrale in 1781, Levett and Mrs. Williams, two of the humble friends to whom his charity had given a home in his house, in 1782 and 1788. He was left almost alone. Yet the old courage and love of society asserted itself to the last, and he founded a new dining club the year before he died. But it was too late. The year 1784 opened with a prolonged illness lasting for months, and though in the summer he was well enough to get away to Oxford with Boswell once more, all could see that the end could not be far off. It came on the 18th of December 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20th. Burke and Windham, with Colman the dramatist and Sir Joseph Bankes the President of the Royal Society, were among the {109} pall-bearers, and the mourners included Reynolds and Paoli. Seldom has the death of a man of letters created such a sense of loss either in the public at large or among his friends. Murphy, the editor of Fielding, and biographer of Garrick, says in his well-known essay that Johnson's death "kept the public mind in agitation beyond all previous example." Those great men, then, who attended his funeral represented not merely themselves and his other friends but the intelligence of the whole nation, which saw in the death of Johnson the fall of one of the mighty in the moral and intellectual Israel.
Something has already been said in the first chapter of this book about the character of Johnson. The argument of that chapter was that the singular position of Johnson as, in a way, the most national of our men of letters, was due not so much to anything he wrote, or even to anything written about him, as to the quality of his own mind and character, to a sort of central sanity that there was about him which Englishmen like {110} to think of as a thing peculiarly English. We may now pass on to look at this character in a little more detail.
Visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round the space under the dome to come upon a statue which (but for the roll with a Greek inscription upon it) would appear to be that of a retired gladiator meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it represents Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but is not one of his best works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture, clothed only in a loose robe which leaves legs, arms, and one shoulder bare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous, and probably valetudinarian sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right. And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant. The body and the mind are inextricably interwoven in all of us, and certainly in Johnson's case the influence of the body was obvious and {111} conspicuous. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his entire indifference to pain, were partly due to his great bodily strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St. Vitus's Dance. He never knew, Boswell says, "the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters." All accounts agree that his strange gesticulations and contortions were painful for his friends to witness and attracted crowds of starers in the streets. But Reynolds says that he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength. He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a valetudinarian, and was determined not to be one {112} himself. He had known what it was to live on fourpence halfpenny a day and scorned the life of sofa cushions and beef-tea into which well-attended old gentlemen so easily slip. Once, when Mrs. Thrale asked him how he was, his reply was "Ready to become a scoundrel, Madam" (his word for a self-indulgent invalid); "with a little more spoiling you will make me a complete rascal." But in that she never succeeded. Rather he carried the war into her camp, and when they were driving together would never allow her to complain of rain, dust, or any such inconveniences. "How do other people bear them?" he would ask, and would treat those who talked of such topics as evidently having nothing intelligent to say. "A mill that goes without grist is as good a companion as such creatures," he once broke out. He required no valeting, or nursing; bathed at Brighton in October when he was nearing sixty, refused to be carried to land by the boatmen at Iona, as Boswell and Sir Allan Maclean were, but sprang into the sea and waded ashore; would not change his clothes when he got wet at Inverary; was a hundred years before his time in his love of open windows, and rode fifty miles with fox-hounds, only to declare that hunting was a dull business and that its popularity merely showed the paucity of human pleasures. {113} Mrs. Thrale says that no praise ever pleased him more than when some one said of him on Brighton Downs, "Why, Johnson rides as well as the most illiterate fellow in England." He was always eager to show that his legs and arms could do as much as other people's. When he was past sixty-six he ran a race in the rain at Paris with his friend Baretti. He insisted on rolling down a hill like a schoolboy when staying with Langton in Lincolnshire: once at Lichfield when he was over seventy he slipped away from his friends to find a railing he used to jump when he was a boy, threw away his coat, hat, and wig, and, as he reported with pride, leapt over it twice; and on another occasion at Oxford was bold enough to challenge a Fellow, "eminent for learning and worth," and "of an ancient and respectable family in Berkshire," to climb over a wall with him. Apparently, however, the climbing did not actually take place, for the dignified person very properly refused to compromise his dignity.
It is evident that this runner of races and climber of walls was very far from being the sedentary weakling, afraid to enjoy the pleasures of the body or face its pains, in whom popular imagination fancies it sees the man of letters. No man was ever more fearless of {114} pain than Johnson. The only thing he was afraid of was death. Of the extent and even violence of that fear in him till within a few days of the actual event, the evidence, in spite of what Sir Walter Raleigh has said, is conclusive and overwhelming. It comes from every one who knew him. But that was a moral and intellectual fear. Of physical fear he knew nothing. The knife of the surgeon had terrors then which our generation has happily forgotten. But it had none for Johnson. When he lay dying his only fear was that his doctors, one of whom he called "timidorum timidissimus," would spare him pain which if inflicted might have prolonged his life. He called to them to cut deeper when they were operating, and finally took the knife into his own hands and did for himself what he thought the surgeon had failed to do. "I will be conquered, I will not capitulate," were his words: and he acted on them till the very last days were come.
Nor was this courage merely desperation in the presence of the great Terror. He was as brave in health as in illness. He was perfectly quiet and unconcerned during a dangerous storm between Skye and Mull; and on being told that it was doubtful whether they would make for Mull or Col cheerfully replied, "Col for my money." Roads in {115} those days were not what they are now: but he never would admit that accidents could happen and pooh-poohed them when they did. Nor was his courage merely passive. Beauclerk did not find it so when at his country house he saw Johnson go up to two large dogs which were fighting and beat them till they stopped: nor did Langton when he warned Johnson against a dangerous pool where they were bathing, only to see Johnson swim straight into it; nor did the four ruffians who once attacked him in the street and were surprised to find him more than a match for the four of them. Whoever trifled with him was apt to learn sooner than he wished thatnemo me impune lacessitwas a saying which was to be taken very literally from Johnson's mouth. Garrick used to tell a story of a man who took a chair which had been placed for Johnson at the Lichfield theatre and refused to give it up when asked, upon which Johnson simply tossed man and chair together into the pit. He proposed to treat Foote, the comic actor, in much the same way. Hearing of Foote's intention to caricature him on the stage he suddenly at dinner asked Davies, a friend of Foote's, "what was the common price of an oak stick," and being answered sixpence, "Why then, sir (said he), give me leave to send your servant to purchase {116} a shilling one. I'll have a double quantity; for I am told Foote means to take me off, as he calls it, and I am determined the fellow shall not do it with impunity." The threat was sufficient; as Johnson said, "he knew I would have broken his bones." Years afterwards Foote, perhaps in half-conscious revenge, amused himself by holding Johnson up to ridicule in a private company at Edinburgh. Unluckily for him Boswell was present and naturally felt Foote's behaviour an act of rudeness to himself. So he intervened and pleaded that Johnson must be allowed to have some sterling wit, adding that he had heard him say a very good thing about Foote himself. "Ah," replied the unwary Foote, "my old friend Sam; no man says better things: do let us have it." On which Boswell related how he had once said to Johnson when they were talking of Foote, "Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?" to which Johnson had replied, "I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject." Boswell's story was as effective as his master's stick. There was no more question that night of taking off Johnson: Foote had enough to do to defend himself against the cannonade of laughter that Boswell had brought upon him. {117} A man of the mettle Johnson shows in those stories was certain to have no more fears about defending the public than about defending himself. So when he thought the so-called poems of Ossian a fabrication he said so everywhere without hesitation; and when their editor or author Macpherson, finding other methods fail, tried to silence him by bluster and threats, he received the reply which is only less famous than its author's letter to Lord Chesterfield.
"I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered meI shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the lawshall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting whatI think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.
"What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable, and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.
{118}
The first thing then to get clear about Johnson is that there was a very vigorous animal at the base of the mind and soul that we know in his books and in his talk. Part of the universal interest he has inspired lies in that. The people who put off the body in this life may be divine, though that is far from certain, but they are apt to affect us little because we do not feel them to be human. There is much in Johnson—a turn for eating seven or eight peaches in the garden before breakfast, for instance—which gives unregenerate beings like schoolboys a feeling of confidence at once. And older persons, not yet altogether regenerate, are apt to have a weakness for a man who was willing to be knocked up at three in the morning by some young roysterers, and turn out with them for a "frisk" about the streets and taverns and down the river in a boat. The "follies of the wise" are never altogether follies. Johnson at midnight outside the Temple roaring with Gargantuan laughter that echoed from Temple Bar to what we now call Ludgate Circus is a picture his wisest admirers would be slowest to forget. The laugh and the frisk and the peaches are so many hall-marks to assure us that the philosopher is still a man and has not forgotten that he was once a boy: that he has always had five senses like the rest of us; and {119} that if he bids us take a grave view of life it is not because he knows nothing about it.
Another note of catholicity in Johnson is his wide experience of social conditions. The man in him never for an instant disappeared in the "gentleman." Very few of our great men of letters have ever known poverty in the real sense of the word, in the way the really poor know it. Johnson had, and he never forgot it. It is true that like most people who have known what it is to be uncertain about to-morrow's dinner he did not much care to talk about these experiences. No one does perhaps except politicians who find them useful bids for popularity at a mass meeting. Johnson at any rate when he had arrived at comparatively easy social conditions frankly admitted that he did not like "low life." His sympathy with the poor, was, as we shall see, one of the strongest things in him, and made one of the deepest marks in his actual life; but he never thought it necessary to indulge in polite or political fictions about the superior virtue or wisdom of the working class. "Poverty," he once wrote in words that come at first sight rather startlingly from the mouth of so strictly Biblical a Christian as he, "is a great enemy to human happiness . . . it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult." {120} "Of riches," he said on another occasion, "it is not necessary to write the praise." No doubt the opposition between such remarks as these, meant as Johnson meant them, and certain sayings in the Gospels, is like the opposition between many contrasted pairs of sayings in the New Testament itself, more verbal than real. But it is as strong a proof as could be given of the power and universality in the eighteenth century of the temper which Butler called "cool and reasonable," the temper which hated and despised "enthusiasm," that such a man as Johnson, a man, too, who owed his religious faith to Law'sSerious Call, could use such words without the slightest consciousness of their needing explanation.
The fact is that Johnson never, even in his religion, left his open eye or his common sense behind him: and common sense told him, what a brighter light concealed from St. Francis but the history of his Order was to show too plainly within half a century of his death, that poverty is at least for ordinary men no assured school of the Christian virtues. Johnson's attitude towards the poor, in fact, included the whole of sympathy and understanding but not one tittle of sentiment. They had the benefit of the greater part of his small income; he gave constantly, both to those who {121} had claims on him and to those who had none, really loving the poor, says Mrs. Thrale, "as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy," and insisting on giving them, not merely relief, but indulgence and pleasure. He wished them to have something more than board and lodging, some "sweeteners of their existence," and he was not always frightened if the sweeteners preferred were gin and tobacco. His very home he made into a retreat, as Mrs. Thrale says with little exaggeration, for "the lame, the blind, the sad and the sorrowful"; and he gave these humble friends more than board and lodging, treating them with at least as ceremonious a civility as he would have used to so many people of fashion.
He held no theories of political or social equality; on the contrary, he looked upon such theories as mischievous nonsense: but the respect paid to him in his later years by great personages never made him take a Mayfair or "county-family" view of life. He might stay at Inverary, visit Alnwick and be invited to Chatsworth, but it took more than the civilities of three Dukes to blind him to the fact that on a map of humanity all the magnates in the world occupy but a small space. Even in the days when he lived at {122} his ease in a rich man's house and, when in his own, would dine out every day for a fortnight, he never surrendered himself, as so many who have at last reached comfort do, to the subtle unrealities of the drawing-room. He would not allow the well-do-to to call themselves "the world": and when Sir Joshua said one day that nobody wore laced coats any longer and that once everybody had worn them, "See now," said Johnson, "how absurd that is; as if the bulk of mankind consisted of fine gentlemen that came to him to sit for their pictures. If every man who wears a laced coat (that he can pay for) was extirpated, who would miss them?" So when Mrs. Thrale once complained of the smell of cooking he told her she was a fortunate woman never to have experienced the delight of smelling her dinner beforehand. "Which pleasure," she answered, "is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge Island of a morning!" Johnson's answer was the grave rebuke of a man from whose mind the darker side of a prosperous world was never long absent. "Come, come, let's have no sneering at what is serious to so many: hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear lady, turn another way that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge Island to wish for {123} gratifications they are not able to obtain: you are certainly not better than all of them: give God thanks that you are happier." It is Mrs. Thrale who herself tells the story: and it is to her credit that she calls Johnson's answer a just rebuke.
But Johnson's equality was that of the moralist, not that of the politician. He was the exact opposite of a leveller, believing in the distinction of ranks as not only a necessity of society, but an addition to its strength and to the variety and interest of its life. He himself scrupulously observed the formalities of social respect, and would no doubt, like Mr. Gladstone, have repudiated with horror the idea of being placed at dinner above the obscurest of peers. His bow to an Archbishop is described as a studied elaboration of temporal and spiritual homage, and he once went so far as to imply that nothing would induce him to contradict a Bishop. There no doubt he promised more than the presence of a stupid Bishop or a Whig Bishop would have allowed him to perform. For no considerations of rank ever prevented him from expressing his own opinions or trampling upon those of other people. Except Swift, perhaps, he was the most independent man that ever lived. Of Swift's jealous and angry arrogance he had nothing. But he was full of what he {124} himself called "defensive pride." That was his answer when he was accused of showing at least as much pride as Lord Chesterfield in the affair of the Dictionary; "but mine," he said, "was defensive pride." He was always on his guard against the very appearance of accepting the patronage of the great. Even Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of snobbery in him. At Inverary he would not let Boswell call before dinner lest it should look like fishing for an invitation; and when he dined there the next day and sat next the Duke, he did not refrain, even in that Whig holy of holies, from chaffing about one of the Campbells who "had been bred a violent Whig but afterwards kept better company and became a Tory"! So once, when he dined at Bowood with Lord Shelburne he refused to repeat a story at the request of his host, saying that he would not be dragged in as story-teller to the company. And he would never give the authority for any fact he mentioned, if the authority happened to be a lord. Indeed he carried his sturdy independence so far that in his last years he fancied that his company was no longer desired in these august circles. "I never courted the great," he said; "they sent for me, but I think they now give me up"; adding, in reply to Boswell's polite disbelief, "No, sir; great lords and great {125} ladies don't love to have their mouths stopped."
Here again Johnson represented the typical Englishman as foreigners then and since have read his character. An accepter and respecter of rank as a social fact and a political principle, he was as proud in his way as the proudest man in the land. Tory as he was, for him every freeborn Englishman was one of the "lords of human kind": a citizen of no mean city, but of one in which—
". . . e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan, And learns to venerate himself as man!"
He had all an Englishman's pride in England, as was prettily seen in his reply to Mrs. Thrale in the theatre at Versailles; "Now we are here what shall we act, Dr. Johnson? The Englishman at Paris?" "No, no; we will try to act Harry the Fifth"; and at bottom he thought that a free Englishman was too great a man to be patronized by any one on earth.