Samuel Johnson - Leslie Stephen
Johnson, who had long regarded conversation as the chief amusement, came
in later years to regard it as almost the chief employment of life; and
he had studied the art with the zeal of a man pursuing a favourite
hobby. He had always, as he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, made it a
principle to talk on all occasions as well as he could. He had thus
obtained a mastery over his weapons which made him one of the most
accomplished of conversational gladiators. He had one advantage which
has pretty well disappeared from modern society, and the disappearance
of which has been destructive to excellence of talk. A good talker, even
more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too
vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance. For the
formation of real proficiency in the art, friends should meet often, sit
long, and be thoroughly at ease. A modern audience generally breaks up
before it is well warmed through, and includes enough strangers to break
the magic circle of social electricity. The clubs in which Johnson
delighted were excellently adapted to foster his peculiar talent. There
a man could "fold his legs and have his talk out"--a pleasure hardly to
be enjoyed now. And there a set of friends meeting regularly, and
meeting to talk, learnt to sharpen each other's skill in all dialectic
manoeuvres. Conversation may be pleasantest, as Johnson admitted, when
two friends meet quietly to exchange their minds without any thought of
display. But conversation considered as a game, as a bout of
intellectual sword-play, has also charms which Johnson intensely
appreciated. His talk was not of the encyclopaedia variety, like that of
some more modern celebrities; but it was full of apposite illustrations
and unrivalled in keen argument, rapid flashes of wit and humour,
scornful retort and dexterous sophistry. Sometimes he would fell his
adversary at a blow; his sword, as Boswell said, would be through your
body in an instant without preliminary flourishes; and in the
excitement of talking for victory, he would use any device that came to
hand. "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, quoting a
phrase from Cibber, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down
with the butt-end of it."
Johnson's view of conversation is indicated by his remark about Burke.
"That fellow," he said at a time of illness, "calls forth all my powers.
Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me." "It is when you come close
to a man in conversation," he said on another occasion, "that you
discover what his real abilities are. To make a speech in an assembly is
a knack. Now I honour Thurlow, sir; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he fairly
puts his mind to yours."
Johnson's retorts were fair play under the conditions of the game, as it
is fair play to kick an opponent's shins at football. But of course a
man who had, as it were, become the acknowledged champion of the ring,
and who had an irascible and thoroughly dogmatic temper, was tempted to
become unduly imperious. In the company of which Savage was a
distinguished member, one may guess that the conversational fervour
sometimes degenerated into horse-play. Want of arguments would be
supplied by personality, and the champion would avenge himself by
brutality on an opponent who happened for once to be getting the best of
him. Johnson, as he grew older and got into more polished society,
became milder in his manners; but he had enough of the old spirit left
in him to break forth at times with ungovernable fury, and astonish the
well-regulated minds of respectable ladies and gentlemen.
Anecdotes illustrative of this ferocity abound, and his best
friends--except, perhaps, Reynolds and Burke--had all to suffer in turn.
On one occasion, when he had made a rude speech even to Reynolds,
Boswell states, though with some hesitation, his belief that Johnson
actually blushed. The records of his contests in this kind fill a large
space in Boswell's pages. That they did not lead to worse consequences
shows his absence of rancour. He was always ready and anxious for a
reconciliation, though he would not press for one if his first overtures
were rejected. There was no venom in the wounds he inflicted, for there
was no ill-nature; he was rough in the heat of the struggle, and in such
cases careless in distributing blows; but he never enjoyed giving pain.
None of his tiffs ripened into permanent quarrels, and he seems scarcely
to have lost a friend. He is a pleasant contrast in this, as in much
else, to Horace Walpole, who succeeded, in the course of a long life, in
breaking with almost all his old friends. No man set a higher value upon
friendship than Johnson. "A man," he said to Reynolds, "ought to keep
his friendship in constant repair;" or he would find himself left alone
as he grew older. "I look upon a day as lost," he said later in life,
"in which I do not make a new acquaintance." Making new acquaintances
did not involve dropping the old. The list of his friends is a long one,
and includes, as it were, successive layers, superposed upon each other,
from the earliest period of his life.
This is so marked a feature in Johnson's character, that it will be as
well at this point to notice some of the friendships from which he
derived the greatest part of his happiness. Two of his schoolfellows,
Hector and Taylor, remained his intimates through life. Hector survived
to give information to Boswell, and Taylor, then a prebendary of
Westminster, read the funeral service over his old friend in the Abbey.
He showed, said some of the bystanders, too little feeling. The relation
between the two men was not one of special tenderness; indeed they were
so little congenial that Boswell rather gratuitously suspected his
venerable teacher of having an eye to Taylor's will. It seems fairer to
regard the acquaintance as an illustration of that curious adhesiveness
which made Johnson cling to less attractive persons. At any rate, he did
not show the complacence of the proper will-hunter. Taylor was rector of
Bosworth and squire of Ashbourne. He was a fine specimen of the
squire-parson; a justice of the peace, a warm politician, and what was
worse, a warm Whig. He raised gigantic bulls, bragged of selling cows
for 120 guineas and more, and kept a noble butler in purple clothes and
a large white wig. Johnson respected Taylor as a sensible man, but was
ready to have a round with him on occasion. He snorted contempt when
Taylor talked of breaking some small vessels if he took an emetic.
"Bah," said the doctor, who regarded a valetudinarian as a "scoundrel,"
"if you have so many things that will break, you had better break your
neck at once, and there's an end on't." Nay, if he did not condemn
Taylor's cows, he criticized his bulldog with cruel acuteness. "No, sir,
he is not well shaped; for there is not the quick transition from the
thickness of the fore-part to the _tenuity_--the thin part--behind,
which a bulldog ought to have." On the more serious topic of politics
his Jacobite fulminations roused Taylor "to a pitch of bellowing."
Johnson roared out that if the people of England were fairly polled
(this was in 1777) the present king would be sent away to-night, and his
adherents hanged to-morrow. Johnson, however, rendered Taylor the
substantial service of writing sermons for him, two volumes of which
were published after they were both dead; and Taylor must have been a
bold man, if it be true, as has been said, that he refused to preach a
sermon written by Johnson upon Mrs. Johnson's death, on the ground that
it spoke too favourably of the character of the deceased.
Johnson paid frequent visits to Lichfield, to keep up his old friends.
One of them was Lucy Porter, his wife's daughter, with whom, according
to Miss Seward, he had been in love before he married her mother. He was
at least tenderly attached to her through life. And, for the most part,
the good people of Lichfield seem to have been proud of their
fellow-townsman, and gave him a substantial proof of their sympathy by
continuing to him, on favourable terms, the lease of a house originally
granted to his father. There was, indeed, one remarkable exception in
Miss Seward, who belonged to a genus specially contemptible to the old
doctor. She was one of the fine ladies who dabbled in poetry, and aimed
at being the centre of a small literary circle at Lichfield. Her letters
are amongst the most amusing illustrations of the petty affectations and
squabbles characteristic of such a provincial clique. She evidently
hated Johnson at the bottom of her small soul; and, indeed, though
Johnson once paid her a preposterous compliment--a weakness of which
this stern moralist was apt to be guilty in the company of ladies--he no
doubt trod pretty roughly upon some of her pet vanities.
By far the most celebrated of Johnson's Lichfield friends was David
Garrick, in regard to whom his relations were somewhat peculiar.
Reynolds said that Johnson considered Garrick to be his own property,
and would never allow him to be praised or blamed by any one else
without contradiction. Reynolds composed a pair of imaginary dialogues
to illustrate the proposition, in one of which Johnson attacks Garrick
in answer to Reynolds, and in the other defends him in answer to Gibbon.
The dialogues seem to be very good reproductions of the Johnsonian
manner, though perhaps the courteous Reynolds was a little too much
impressed by its roughness; and they probably include many genuine
remarks of Johnson's. It is remarkable that the praise is far more
pointed and elaborate than the blame, which turns chiefly upon the
general inferiority of an actor's position. And, in fact, this seems to
have corresponded to Johnson's opinion about Garrick as gathered from
Boswell.
The two men had at bottom a considerable regard for each other, founded
upon old association, mutual services, and reciprocal respect for
talents of very different orders. But they were so widely separated by
circumstances, as well as by a radical opposition of temperament, that
any close intimacy could hardly be expected. The bear and the monkey are
not likely to be intimate friends. Garrick's rapid elevation in fame and
fortune seems to have produced a certain degree of envy in his old
schoolmaster. A grave moral philosopher has, of course, no right to look
askance at the rewards which fashion lavishes upon men of lighter and
less lasting merit, and which he professes to despise. Johnson, however,
was troubled with a rather excessive allowance of human nature. Moreover
he had the good old-fashioned contempt for players, characteristic both
of the Tory and the inartistic mind. He asserted roundly that he looked
upon players as no better than dancing-dogs. "But, sir, you will allow
that some players are better than others?" "Yes, sir, as some dogs dance
better than others." So when Goldsmith accused Garrick of grossly
flattering the queen, Johnson exclaimed, "And as to meanness--how is it
mean in a player, a showman, a fellow who exhibits himself for a
shilling, to flatter his queen?" At another time Boswell suggested that
we might respect a great player. "What! sir," exclaimed Johnson, "a
fellow who claps a hump upon his back and a lump on his leg and cries,
'_I am Richard III._'? Nay, sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he
does two things: he repeats and he sings; there is both recitation and
music in his performance--the player only recites."
Such sentiments were not very likely to remain unknown to Garrick nor to
put him at ease with Johnson, whom, indeed, he always suspected of
laughing at him. They had a little tiff on account of Johnson's Edition
of Shakspeare. From some misunderstanding, Johnson did not make use of
Garrick's collection of old plays. Johnson, it seems, thought that
Garrick should have courted him more, and perhaps sent the plays to his
house; whereas Garrick, knowing that Johnson treated books with a
roughness ill-suited to their constitution, thought that he had done
quite enough by asking Johnson to come to his library. The revenge--if
it was revenge--taken by Johnson was to say nothing of Garrick in his
Preface, and to glance obliquely at his non-communication of his
rarities. He seems to have thought that it would be a lowering of
Shakspeare to admit that his fame owed anything to Garrick's exertions.
Boswell innocently communicated to Garrick a criticism of Johnson's upon
one of his poems--
I'd smile with the simple and feed with the poor.
"Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," was Johnson's
tolerably harmless remark. Garrick, however, did not like it, and when
Boswell tried to console him by saying that Johnson gored everybody in
turn, and added, "_foenum habet in cornu_." "Ay," said Garrick
vehemently, "he has a whole mow of it." The most unpleasant incident
was when Garrick proposed rather too freely to be a member of the Club.
Johnson said that the first duke in England had no right to use such
language, and said, according to Mrs. Thrale, "If Garrick does apply,
I'll blackball him. Surely we ought to be able to sit in a society like
ours--
'Unelbowed by a gamester, pimp, or player!'"
Nearly ten years afterwards, however, Johnson favoured his election, and
when he died, declared that the Club should have a year's widowhood. No
successor to Garrick was elected during that time.
Johnson sometimes ventured to criticise Garrick's acting, but here
Garrick could take his full revenge. The purblind Johnson was not, we
may imagine, much of a critic in such matters. Garrick reports him to
have said of an actor at Lichfield, "There is a courtly vivacity about
the fellow;" when, in fact, said Garrick, "he was the most vulgar
ruffian that ever went upon boards."
In spite of such collisions of opinion and mutual criticism, Johnson
seems to have spoken in the highest terms of Garrick's good qualities,
and they had many pleasant meetings. Garrick takes a prominent part in
two or three of the best conversations in Boswell, and seems to have put
his interlocutors in specially good temper. Johnson declared him to be
"the first man in the world for sprightly conversation." He said that
Dryden had written much better prologues than any of Garrick's, but that
Garrick had written more good prologues than Dryden. He declared that it
was wonderful how little Garrick had been spoilt by all the flattery
that he had received. No wonder if he was a little vain: "a man who is
perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived: so many
bellows have blown the fuel, that one wonders he is not by this time
become a cinder!" "If all this had happened to me," he said on another
occasion, "I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking
before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way. Consider, if
all this had happened to Cibber and Quin, they'd have jumped over the
moon. Yet Garrick speaks to us," smiling. He admitted at the same time
that Garrick had raised the profession of a player. He defended Garrick,
too, against the common charge of avarice. Garrick, as he pointed out,
had been brought up in a family whose study it was to make fourpence go
as far as fourpence-halfpenny. Johnson remembered in early days drinking
tea with Garrick when Peg Woffington made it, and made it, as Garrick
grumbled, "as red as blood." But when Garrick became rich he became
liberal. He had, so Johnson declared, given away more money than any man
in England.
After Garrick's death, Johnson took occasion to say, in the _Lives of
the Poets_, that the death "had eclipsed the gaiety of nations and
diminished the public stock of harmless pleasures." Boswell ventured to
criticise the observation rather spitefully. "Why _nations_? Did his
gaiety extend further than his own nation?" "Why, sir," replied Johnson,
"some imagination must be allowed. Besides, we may say _nations_ if we
allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety--which they have
not." On the whole, in spite of various drawbacks, Johnson's reported
observations upon Garrick will appear to be discriminative, and yet, on
the whole, strongly favourable to his character. Yet we are not quite
surprised that Mrs. Garrick did not respond to a hint thrown out by
Johnson, that he would be glad to write the life of his friend.
At Oxford, Johnson acquired the friendship of Dr. Adams, afterwards
Master of Pembroke and author of a once well-known reply to Hume's
argument upon miracles. He was an amiable man, and was proud to do the
honours of the university to his old friend, when, in later years,
Johnson revisited the much-loved scenes of his neglected youth. The
warmth of Johnson's regard for old days is oddly illustrated by an
interview recorded by Boswell with one Edwards, a fellow-student whom he
met again in 1778, not having previously seen him since 1729. They had
lived in London for forty years without once meeting, a fact more
surprising then than now. Boswell eagerly gathered up the little scraps
of college anecdote which the meeting produced, but perhaps his best
find was a phrase of Edwards himself. "You are a philosopher, Dr.
Johnson," he said; "I have tried, too, in my time to be a philosopher;
but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in." The phrase,
as Boswell truly says, records an exquisite trait of character.
Of the friends who gathered round Johnson during his period of struggle,
many had vanished before he became well known. The best loved of all
seems to have been Dr. Bathurst, a physician, who, failing to obtain
practice, joined the expedition to Havannah, and fell a victim to the
climate (1762). Upon him Johnson pronounced a panegyric which has
contributed a proverbial phrase to the language. "Dear Bathurst," he
said, "was a man to my very heart's content: he hated a fool and he
hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig; he was a _very good hater_." Johnson
remembered Bathurst in his prayers for years after his loss, and
received from him a peculiar legacy. Francis Barker had been the negro
slave of Bathurst's father, who left him his liberty by will. Dr.
Bathurst allowed him to enter Johnson's service; and Johnson sent him
to school at considerable expense, and afterwards retained him in his
service with little interruption till his own death. Once Barker ran
away to sea, and was discharged, oddly enough, by the good offices of
Wilkes, to whom Smollett applied on Johnson's behalf. Barker became an
important member of Johnson's family, some of whom reproached him for
his liberality to the nigger. No one ever solved the great problem as to
what services were rendered by Barker to his master, whose wig was "as
impenetrable by a comb as a quickset hedge," and whose clothes were
never touched by the brush.
Among the other friends of this period must be reckoned his biographer,
Hawkins, an attorney who was afterwards Chairman of the Middlesex
Justices, and knighted on presenting an address to the King. Boswell
regarded poor Sir John Hawkins with all the animosity of a rival author,
and with some spice of wounded vanity. He was grievously offended, so at
least says Sir John's daughter, on being described in the _Life of
Johnson_ as "Mr. James Boswell" without a solitary epithet such as
celebrated or well-known. If that was really his feeling, he had his
revenge; for no one book ever so suppressed another as Boswell's Life
suppressed Hawkins's. In truth, Hawkins was a solemn prig, remarkable
chiefly for the unusual intensity of his conviction that all virtue
consists in respectability. He had a special aversion to "goodness of
heart," which he regarded as another name for a quality properly called
extravagance or vice. Johnson's tenacity of old acquaintance introduced
him into the Club, where he made himself so disagreeable, especially, as
it seems, by rudeness to Burke, that he found it expedient to invent a
pretext for resignation. Johnson called him a "very unclubable man,"
and may perhaps have intended him in the quaint description: "I really
believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; though, to be sure, he is
rather penurious, and he is somewhat mean; and it must be owned he has
some degree of brutality, and is not without a tendency to savageness
that cannot well be defended."
In a list of Johnson's friends it is proper to mention Richardson and
Hawkesworth. Richardson seems to have given him substantial help, and
was repaid by favourable comparisons with Fielding, scarcely borne out
by the verdict of posterity. "Fielding," said Johnson, "could tell the
hour by looking at the clock; whilst Richardson knew how the clock was
made." "There is more knowledge of the heart," he said at another time,
"in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_." Johnson's
preference of the sentimentalist to the man whose humour and strong
sense were so like his own, shows how much his criticism was biassed by
his prejudices; though, of course, Richardson's external decency was a
recommendation to the moralist. Hawkesworth's intimacy with Johnson
seems to have been chiefly in the period between the _Dictionary_ and
the pension. He was considered to be Johnson's best imitator; and has
vanished like other imitators. His fate, very doubtful if the story
believed at the time be true, was a curious one for a friend of
Johnson's. He had made some sceptical remarks as to the efficacy of
prayer in his preface to the South Sea Voyages; and was so bitterly
attacked by a "Christian" in the papers, that he destroyed himself by a
dose of opium.
Two younger friends, who became disciples of the sage soon after the
appearance of the _Rambler_, are prominent figures in the later circle.
One of these was Bennet Langton, a man of good family, fine scholarship,
and very amiable character. His exceedingly tall and slender figure was
compared by Best to the stork in Raphael's cartoon of the Miraculous
Draught of Fishes. Miss Hawkins describes him sitting with one leg
twisted round the other as though to occupy the smallest possible space,
and playing with his gold snuff-box with a mild countenance and sweet
smile. The gentle, modest creature was loved by Johnson, who could warm
into unusual eloquence in singing his praises. The doctor, however, was
rather fond of discussing with Boswell the faults of his friend. They
seem to have chiefly consisted in a certain languor or sluggishness of
temperament which allowed his affairs to get into perplexity. Once, when
arguing the delicate question as to the propriety of telling a friend of
his wife's unfaithfulness, Boswell, after his peculiar fashion, chose to
enliven the abstract statement by the purely imaginary hypothesis of Mr.
and Mrs. Langton being in this position. Johnson said that it would be
useless to tell Langton, because he would be too sluggish to get a
divorce. Once Langton was the unconscious cause of one of Johnson's
oddest performances. Langton had employed Chambers, a common friend of
his and Johnson's, to draw his will. Johnson, talking to Chambers and
Boswell, was suddenly struck by the absurdity of his friend's appearing
in the character of testator. His companions, however, were utterly
unable to see in what the joke consisted; but Johnson laughed
obstreperously and irrepressibly: he laughed till he reached the Temple
Gate; and when in Fleet Street went almost into convulsions of hilarity.
Holding on by one of the posts in the street, he sent forth such peals
of laughter that they seemed in the silence of the night to resound from
Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.
Not long before his death, Johnson applied to Langton for spiritual
advice. "I desired him to tell me sincerely in what he thought my life
was faulty." Langton wrote upon a sheet of paper certain texts
recommending Christian charity; and explained, upon inquiry, that he was
pointing at Johnson's habit of contradiction. The old doctor began by
thanking him earnestly for his kindness; but gradually waxed savage and
asked Langton, "in a loud and angry tone, What is your drift, sir?" He
complained of the well-meant advice to Boswell, with a sense that he had
been unjustly treated. It was a scene for a comedy, as Reynolds
observed, to see a penitent get into a passion and belabour his
confessor.
Through Langton, Johnson became acquainted with the friend whose manner
was in the strongest contrast to his own. Topham Beauclerk was a man of
fashion. He was commended to Johnson by a likeness to Charles II., from
whom he was descended, being the grandson of the first Duke of St.
Alban's. Beauclerk was a man of literary and scientific tastes. He
inherited some of the moral laxity which Johnson chose to pardon in his
ancestor. Some years after his acquaintance with Boswell he married Lady
Diana Spencer, a lady who had been divorced upon his account from her
husband, Lord Bolingbroke. But he took care not to obtrude his faults of
life, whatever they may have been, upon the old moralist, who
entertained for him a peculiar affection. He specially admired
Beauclerk's skill in the use of a more polished, if less vigorous, style
of conversation than his own. He envied the ease with which Beauclerk
brought out his sly incisive retorts. "No man," he said, "ever was so
free when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that expressed
that it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed
that it had come." When Beauclerk was dying (in 1780), Johnson said,
with a faltering voice, that he would walk to the extremity of the
diameter of the earth to save him. Two little anecdotes are expressive
of his tender feeling for this incongruous friend. Boswell had asked him
to sup at Beauclerk's. He started, but, on the way, recollecting
himself, said, "I cannot go; but _I do not love Beauclerk the less_."
Beauclerk had put upon a portrait of Johnson the inscription,--