Samuel Johnson - Leslie Stephen
As the end drew near, Johnson accepted the inevitable like a man. After
spending most of the latter months of 1784 in the country with the
friends who, after the loss of the Thrales, could give him most domestic
comfort, he came back to London to die. He made his will, and settled a
few matters of business, and was pleased to be told that he would be
buried in Westminster Abbey. He uttered a few words of solemn advice to
those who came near him, and took affecting leave of his friends.
Langton, so warmly loved, was in close attendance. Johnson said to him
tenderly, _Te teneam moriens deficiente manu_. Windham broke from
political occupations to sit by the dying man; once Langton found Burke
sitting by his bedside with three or four friends. "I am afraid," said
Burke, "that so many of us must be oppressive to you." "No, sir, it is
not so," replied Johnson, "and I must be in a wretched state indeed
when your company would not be a delight to me." "My dear sir," said
Burke, with a breaking voice, "you have always been too good to me;" and
parted from his old friend for the last time. Of Reynolds, he begged
three things: to forgive a debt of thirty pounds, to read the Bible, and
never to paint on Sundays. A few flashes of the old humour broke
through. He said of a man who sat up with him: "Sir, the fellow's an
idiot; he's as awkward as a turnspit when first put into the wheel, and
as sleepy as a dormouse." His last recorded words were to a young lady
who had begged for his blessing: "God bless you, my dear." The same day,
December 13th, 1784, he gradually sank and died peacefully. He was laid
in the Abbey by the side of Goldsmith, and the playful prediction has
been amply fulfilled:--
Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.
The names of many greater writers are inscribed upon the walls of
Westminster Abbey; but scarcely any one lies there whose heart was more
acutely responsive during life to the deepest and tenderest of human
emotions. In visiting that strange gathering of departed heroes and
statesmen and philanthropists and poets, there are many whose words and
deeds have a far greater influence upon our imaginations; but there are
very few whom, when all has been said, we can love so heartily as Samuel
Johnson.
CHAPTER VI.
JOHNSON'S WRITINGS.
It remains to speak of Johnson's position in literature. For reasons
sufficiently obvious, few men whose lives have been devoted to letters
for an equal period, have left behind them such scanty and inadequate
remains. Johnson, as we have seen, worked only under the pressure of
circumstances; a very small proportion of his latter life was devoted to
literary employment. The working hours of his earlier years were spent
for the most part in productions which can hardly be called literary.
Seven years were devoted to the _Dictionary_, which, whatever its
merits, could be a book only in the material sense of the word, and was
of course destined to be soon superseded. Much of his hack-work has
doubtless passed into oblivion, and though the ordinary relic-worship
has gathered together fragments enough to fill twelve decent octavo
volumes (to which may be added the two volumes of parliamentary
reports), the part which can be called alive may be compressed into very
moderate compass. Johnson may be considered as a poet, an essayist, a
pamphleteer, a traveller, a critic, and a biographer. Among his poems,
the two imitations of Juvenal, especially the _Vanity of Human Wishes_,
and a minor fragment or two, probably deserve more respect than would be
conceded to them by adherents of modern schools. His most ambitious
work, _Irene_, can be read by men in whom a sense of duty has been
abnormally developed. Among the two hundred and odd essays of the
_Rambler_, there is a fair proportion which will deserve, but will
hardly obtain, respectful attention. _Rasselas_, one of the
philosophical tales popular in the last century, gives the essence of
much of the _Rambler_ in a different form, and to these may be added the
essay upon Soame Jenyns, which deals with the same absorbing question of
human happiness. The political pamphlets, and the _Journey to the
Hebrides_, have a certain historical interest; but are otherwise
readable only in particular passages. Much of his criticism is pretty
nearly obsolete; but the child of his old age--the _Lives of the
Poets_--a book in which criticism and biography are combined, is an
admirable performance in spite of serious defects. It is the work that
best reflects his mind, and intelligent readers who have once made its
acquaintance, will be apt to turn it into a familiar companion.
If it is easy to assign the causes which limited the quantity of
Johnson's work, it is more curious to inquire what was the quality which
once gained for it so much authority, and which now seems to have so far
lost its savour. The peculiar style which is associated with Johnson's
name must count for something in both processes. The mannerism is
strongly marked, and of course offensive; for by "mannerism," as I
understand the word, is meant the repetition of certain forms of
language in obedience to blind habit and without reference to their
propriety in the particular case. Johnson's sentences seem to be
contorted, as his gigantic limbs used to twitch, by a kind of mechanical
spasmodic action. The most obvious peculiarity is the tendency which he
noticed himself, to "use too big words and too many of them." He had to
explain to Miss Reynolds that the Shakesperian line,--
You must borrow me Garagantua's mouth,
had been applied to him because he used "big words, which require the
mouth of a giant to pronounce them." It was not, however, the mere
bigness of the words that distinguished his style, but a peculiar love
of putting the abstract for the concrete, of using awkward inversions,
and of balancing his sentences in a monotonous rhythm, which gives the
appearance, as it sometimes corresponds to the reality, of elaborate
logical discrimination. With all its faults the style has the merits of
masculine directness. The inversions are not such as to complicate the
construction. As Boswell remarks, he never uses a parenthesis; and his
style, though ponderous and wearisome, is as transparent as the smarter
snip-snap of Macaulay.
This singular mannerism appears in his earliest writings; it is most
marked at the time of the _Rambler_; whilst in the _Lives of the Poets_,
although I think that the trick of inversion has become commoner, the
other peculiarities have been so far softened as (in my judgment, at
least), to be inoffensive. It is perhaps needless to give examples of a
tendency which marks almost every page of his writing. A passage or two
from the _Rambler_ may illustrate the quality of the style, and the
oddity of the effect produced, when it is applied to topics of a trivial
kind. The author of the _Rambler_ is supposed to receive a remonstrance
upon his excessive gravity from the lively Flirtilla, who wishes him to
write in defence of masquerades. Conscious of his own incapacity, he
applies to a man of "high reputation in gay life;" who, on the fifth
perusal of Flirtilla's letter breaks into a rapture, and declares that
he is ready to devote himself to her service. Here is part of the
apostrophe put into the mouth of this brilliant rake. "Behold,
Flirtilla, at thy feet a man grown gray in the study of those noble arts
by which right and wrong may be confounded; by which reason may be
blinded, when we have a mind to escape from her inspection, and caprice
and appetite instated in uncontrolled command and boundless dominion!
Such a casuist may surely engage with certainty of success in
vindication of an entertainment which in an instant gives confidence to
the timorous and kindles ardour in the cold, an entertainment where the
vigilance of jealousy has so often been clouded, and the virgin is set
free from the necessity of languishing in silence; where all the
outworks of chastity are at once demolished; where the heart is laid
open without a blush; where bashfulness may survive virtue, and no wish
is crushed under the frown of modesty."
Here is another passage, in which Johnson is speaking upon a topic more
within his proper province; and which contains sound sense under its
weight of words. A man, he says, who reads a printed book, is often
contented to be pleased without critical examination. "But," he adds,
"if the same man be called to consider the merit of a production yet
unpublished, he brings an imagination heated with objections to passages
which he has never yet heard; he invokes all the powers of criticism,
and stores his memory with Taste and Grace, Purity and Delicacy, Manners
and Unities, sounds which having been once uttered by those that
understood them, have been since re-echoed without meaning, and kept up
to the disturbance of the world by constant repercussion from one
coxcomb to another. He considers himself as obliged to show by some
proof of his abilities, that he is not consulted to no purpose, and
therefore watches every opening for objection, and looks round for every
opportunity to propose some specious alteration. Such opportunities a
very small degree of sagacity will enable him to find, for in every work
of imagination, the disposition of parts, the insertion of incidents,
and use of decorations may be varied in a thousand ways with equal
propriety; and, as in things nearly equal that will always seem best to
every man which he himself produces, the critic, whose business is only
to propose without the care of execution, can never want the
satisfaction of believing that he has suggested very important
improvements, nor the power of enforcing his advice by arguments, which,
as they appear convincing to himself, either his kindness or his vanity
will press obstinately and importunately, without suspicion that he may
possibly judge too hastily in favour of his own advice or inquiry
whether the advantage of the new scheme be proportionate to the labour."
We may still notice a "repercussion" of words from one coxcomb to
another; though somehow the words have been changed or translated.
Johnson's style is characteristic of the individual and of the epoch.
The preceding generation had exhibited the final triumph of common sense
over the pedantry of a decaying scholasticism. The movements represented
by Locke's philosophy, by the rationalizing school in theology, and by
the so-called classicism of Pope and his followers, are different phases
of the same impulse. The quality valued above all others in philosophy,
literature, and art was clear, bright, common sense. To expel the
mystery which had served as a cloak for charlatans was the great aim of
the time, and the method was to appeal from the professors of exploded
technicalities to the judgment of cultivated men of the world. Berkeley
places his Utopia in happy climes,--
Where nature guides, and virtue rules,
_Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
The pedantry of courts and schools_.
Simplicity, clearness, directness are, therefore, the great virtues of
thought and style. Berkeley, Addison, Pope, and Swift are the great
models of such excellence in various departments of literature.
In the succeeding generation we become aware of a certain leaven of
dissatisfaction with the aesthetic and intellectual code thus inherited.
The supremacy of common sense, the superlative importance of clearness,
is still fully acknowledged, but there is a growing undertone of dissent
in form and substance. Attempts are made to restore philosophical
conceptions assailed by Locke and his followers; the rationalism, of the
deistic or semi-deistic writers is declared to be superficial; their
optimistic theories disregard the dark side of nature, and provide no
sufficient utterance for the sadness caused by the contemplation of
human suffering; and the polished monotony of Pope's verses begins to
fall upon those who shall tread in his steps. Some daring sceptics are
even inquiring whether he is a poet at all. And simultaneously, though
Addison is still a kind of sacred model, the best prose writers are
beginning to aim at a more complex structure of sentence, fitted for the
expression of a wider range of thought and emotion.
Johnson, though no conscious revolutionist, shares this growing
discontent. The _Spectator_ is written in the language of the
drawing-room and the coffee-house. Nothing is ever said which might not
pass in conversation between a couple of "wits," with, at most, some
graceful indulgence in passing moods of solemn or tender sentiment.
Johnson, though devoted to society in his own way, was anything but a
producer of small talk. Society meant to him an escape from the gloom
which beset him whenever he was abandoned to his thoughts. Neither his
education nor the manners acquired in Grub Street had qualified him to
be an observer of those lighter foibles which were touched by Addison
with so dexterous a hand. When he ventures upon such topics he flounders
dreadfully, and rather reminds us of an artist who should attempt to
paint miniatures with a mop. No man, indeed, took more of interest in
what is called the science of human nature; and, when roused by the
stimulus of argument, he could talk, as has been shown, with almost
unrivalled vigour and point. But his favourite topics are the deeper
springs of character, rather than superficial peculiarities; and his
vigorous sayings are concentrated essence of strong sense and deep
feeling, not dainty epigrams or graceful embodiments of delicate
observation. Johnson was not, like some contemporary antiquarians, a
systematic student of the English literature of the preceding centuries,
but he had a strong affection for some of its chief masterpieces.
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ was, he declared, the only book which
ever got him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished. Sir Thomas
Browne was another congenial writer, who is supposed to have had some
influence upon his style. He never seems to have directly imitated any
one, though some nonsense has been talked about his "forming a style;"
but it is probable that he felt a closer affinity to those old scholars,
with their elaborate and ornate language and their deep and solemn tone
of sentiment, than to the brilliant but comparatively superficial
writers of Queen Anne's time. He was, one may say, a scholar of the old
type, forced by circumstances upon the world, but always retaining a
sympathy for the scholar's life and temper. Accordingly, his style
acquired something of the old elaboration, though the attempt to conform
to the canons of a later age renders the structure disagreeably
monotonous. His tendency to pomposity is not redeemed by the _naivete_
and spontaneity of his masters.
The inferiority of Johnson's written to his spoken utterances is
indicative of his divided life. There are moments at which his writing
takes the terse, vigorous tone of his talk. In his letters, such as
those to Chesterfield and Macpherson and in occasional passages of his
pamphlets, we see that he could be pithy enough when he chose to descend
from his Latinized abstractions to good concrete English; but that is
only when he becomes excited. His face when in repose, we are told,
appeared to be almost imbecile; he was constantly sunk in reveries, from
which he was only roused by a challenge to conversation. In his
writings, for the most part, we seem to be listening to the reverie
rather than the talk; we are overhearing a soliloquy in his study, not a
vigorous discussion over the twentieth cup of tea; he is not fairly put
upon his mettle, and is content to expound without enforcing. We seem to
see a man, heavy-eyed, ponderous in his gestures, like some huge
mechanism which grinds out a ponderous tissue of verbiage as heavy as it
is certainly solid.
The substance corresponds to the style. Johnson has something in common
with the fashionable pessimism of modern times. No sentimentalist of
to-day could be more convinced that life is in the main miserable. It
was his favourite theory, according to Mrs. Thrale, that all human
action was prompted by the "vacuity of life." Men act solely in the hope
of escaping from themselves. Evil, as a follower of Schopenhauer would
assert, is the positive, and good merely the negative of evil. All
desire is at bottom an attempt to escape from pain. The doctrine neither
resulted from, nor generated, a philosophical theory in Johnson's case,
and was in the main a generalization of his own experience. Not the
less, the aim of most of his writing is to express this sentiment in one
form or other. He differs, indeed, from most modern sentimentalists, in
having the most hearty contempt for useless whining. If he dwells upon
human misery, it is because he feels that it is as futile to join with
the optimist in ignoring, as with the pessimist in howling over the
evil. We are in a sad world, full of pain, but we have to make the best
of it. Stubborn patience and hard work are the sole remedies, or rather
the sole means of temporary escape. Much of the _Rambler_ is occupied
with variations upon this theme, and expresses the kind of dogged
resolution with which he would have us plod through this weary world.
Take for example this passage:--"The controversy about the reality of
external evils is now at an end. That life has many miseries, and that
those miseries are sometimes at least equal to all the powers of
fortitude is now universally confessed; and, therefore, it is useful to
consider not only how we may escape them, but by what means those which
either the accidents of affairs or the infirmities of nature must bring
upon us may be mitigated and lightened, and how we may make those hours
less wretched which the condition of our present existence will not
allow to be very happy.
"The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but
palliative. Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven
with our being; all attempts, therefore, to decline it wholly are
useless and vain; the armies of pain send their arrows against us on
every side, the choice is only between those which are more or less
sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less malignity; and the
strongest armour which reason can supply will only blunt their points,
but cannot repel them.
"The great remedy which Heaven has put in our hands is patience, by
which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a
great measure preserve the peace of the mind, and shall suffer only the
natural and genuine force of an evil, without heightening its acrimony
or prolonging its effects."
It is hardly desirable for a moralist to aim at originality in his
precepts. We must be content if he enforces old truths in such a manner
as to convince us of the depth and sincerity of his feeling. Johnson, it
must be confessed, rather abuses the moralist's privilege of being
commonplace. He descants not unfrequently upon propositions so trite
that even the most earnest enforcement can give them little interest.
With all drawbacks, however, the moralizing is the best part of the
_Rambler_. Many of the papers follow the precedent set by Addison in the
_Spectator_, but without Addison's felicity. Like Addison, he indulges
in allegory, which, in his hands, becomes unendurably frigid and clumsy;
he tries light social satire, and is fain to confess that we can spy a
beard under the muffler of his feminine characters; he treats us to
criticism which, like Addison's, goes upon exploded principles, but
unlike Addison's, is apt to be almost wilfully outrageous. His odd
remarks upon Milton's versification are the worst example of this
weakness. The result is what one might expect from the attempt of a
writer without an ear to sit in judgment upon the greatest master of
harmony in the language.
These defects have consigned the _Rambler_ to the dustiest shelves of
libraries, and account for the wonder expressed by such a critic as M.
Taine at the English love of Johnson. Certainly if that love were
nourished, as he seems to fancy, by assiduous study of the _Rambler_, it
would be a curious phenomenon. And yet with all its faults, the reader
who can plod through its pages will at least feel respect for the
author. It is not unworthy of the man whose great lesson is "clear your
mind of cant;"[1] who felt most deeply the misery of the world, but from
the bottom of his heart despised querulous and sentimental complaints on
one side, and optimist glasses upon the other. To him, as to some others
of his temperament, the affectation of looking at the bright side of
things seems to have presented itself as the bitterest of mockeries; and
nothing would tempt him to let fine words pass themselves off for
genuine sense. Here are some remarks upon the vanity in which some
authors seek for consolation, which may illustrate this love of
realities and conclude our quotations from the _Rambler_.
[Footnote 1: Of this well-known sentiment it may be said, as of some
other familiar quotations, that its direct meaning has been slightly
modified in use. The emphasis is changed. Johnson's words were "Clear
your _mind_ of cant. You may talk as other people do; you may say to a
man, sir, I am your humble servant; you are _not_ his most humble
servant.... You may _talk_ in this manner; it is a mode of talking in
society; but don't _think_ foolishly."]
"By such acts of voluntary delusion does every man endeavour to conceal
his own unimportance from himself. It is long before we are convinced of
the small proportion which every individual bears to the collective body
of mankind; or learn how few can be interested in the fortune of any
single man; how little vacancy is left in the world for any new object
of attention; to how small extent the brightest blaze of merit can be
spread amidst the mists of business and of folly; and how soon it is
clouded by the intervention of other novelties. Not only the writer of
books, but the commander of armies, and the deliverer of nations, will
easily outlive all noisy and popular reputation: he may be celebrated
for a time by the public voice, but his actions and his name will soon
be considered as remote and unaffecting, and be rarely mentioned but by
those whose alliance gives them some vanity to gratify by frequent
commemoration. It seems not to be sufficiently considered how little
renown can be admitted in the world. Mankind are kept perpetually busy
by their fears or desires, and have not more leisure from their own
affairs than to acquaint themselves with the accidents of the current
day. Engaged in contriving some refuge from calamity, or in shortening
their way to some new possession, they seldom suffer their thoughts to
wander to the past or future; none but a few solitary students have
leisure to inquire into the claims of ancient heroes or sages; and names
which hoped to range over kingdoms and continents shrink at last into
cloisters and colleges. Nor is it certain that even of these dark and
narrow habitations, these last retreats of fame, the possession will be
long kept. Of men devoted to literature very few extend their views
beyond some particular science, and the greater part seldom inquire,
even in their own profession, for any authors but those whom the present
mode of study happens to force upon their notice; they desire not to
fill their minds with unfashionable knowledge, but contentedly resign to
oblivion those books which they now find censured or neglected."
The most remarkable of Johnson's utterances upon his favourite topic of
the Vanity of Human Wishes is the story of _Rasselas_. The plan of the
book is simple, and recalls certain parts of Voltaire's simultaneous but
incomparably more brilliant attack upon Optimism in _Candide_. There is
supposed to be a happy valley in Abyssinia where the royal princes are
confined in total seclusion, but with ample supplies for every
conceivable want. Rasselas, who has been thus educated, becomes curious
as to the outside world, and at last makes his escape with his sister,
her attendant, and the ancient sage and poet, Imlac. Under Imlac's
guidance they survey life and manners in various stations; they make the
acquaintance of philosophers, statesmen, men of the world, and recluses;
they discuss the results of their experience pretty much in the style of
the _Rambler_; they agree to pronounce the sentence "Vanity of
Vanities!" and finally, in a "conclusion where nothing is concluded,"
they resolve to return to the happy valley. The book is little more than
a set of essays upon life, with just story enough to hold it together.
It is wanting in those brilliant flashes of epigram, which illustrate
Voltaire's pages so as to blind some readers to its real force of
sentiment, and yet it leaves a peculiar and powerful impression upon the
reader.
The general tone may be collected from a few passages. Here is a
fragment, the conclusion of which is perhaps the most familiar of
quotations from Johnson's writings. Imlac in narrating his life
describes his attempts to become a poet.