Samuel Johnson - Leslie Stephen
Ingenium ingens
Inculto latet hoc sub corpore.
Langton, who bought the portrait, had the inscription removed. "It was
kind in you to take it off," said Johnson; and, after a short pause,
"not unkind in him to put it on."
Early in their acquaintance, the two young men, Beau and Lanky, as
Johnson called them, had sat up one night at a tavern till three in the
morning. The courageous thought struck them that they would knock up the
old philosopher. He came to the door of his chambers, poker in hand,
with an old wig for a nightcap. On hearing their errand, the sage
exclaimed, "What! is it you, you dogs? I'll have a frisk with you." And
so Johnson with the two youths, his juniors by about thirty years,
proceeded to make a night of it. They amazed the fruiterers in Covent
Garden; they brewed a bowl of bishop in a tavern, while Johnson quoted
the poet's address to Sleep,--
"Short, O short, be then thy reign,
And give us to the world again!"
They took a boat to Billingsgate, and Johnson, with Beauclerk, kept up
their amusement for the following day, when Langton deserted them to go
to breakfast with some young ladies, and Johnson scolded him for
leaving his friends "to go and sit with a parcel of wretched _unidea'd_
girls." "I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house,"
said Garrick when he heard of this queer alliance; and he told Johnson
that he would be in the _Chronicle_ for his frolic. "He _durst_ not do
such a thing. His wife would not let him," was the moralist's retort.
Some friends, known to fame by other titles than their connexion with
Johnson, had by this time gathered round them. Among them was one, whose
art he was unable to appreciate, but whose fine social qualities and
dignified equability of temper made him a valued and respected
companion. Reynolds had settled in London at the end of 1752. Johnson
met him at the house of Miss Cotterell. Reynolds had specially admired
Johnson's _Life of Savage_, and, on their first meeting, happened to
make a remark which delighted Johnson. The ladies were regretting the
loss of a friend to whom they were under obligations. "You have,
however," said Reynolds, "the comfort of being relieved from a burden of
gratitude." The saying is a little too much like Rochefoucauld, and too
true to be pleasant; but it was one of those keen remarks which Johnson
appreciated because they prick a bubble of commonplace moralizing
without demanding too literal an acceptation. He went home to sup with
Reynolds and became his intimate friend. On another occasion, Johnson
was offended by two ladies of rank at the same house, and by way of
taking down their pride, asked Reynolds in a loud voice, "How much do
you think you and I could get in a week, if we both worked as hard as we
could?" "His appearance," says Sir Joshua's sister, Miss Reynolds,
"might suggest the poor author: as he was not likely in that place to be
a blacksmith or a porter." Poor Miss Reynolds, who tells this story,
was another attraction to Reynolds' house. She was a shy, retiring
maiden lady, who vexed her famous brother by following in his steps
without his talents, and was deeply hurt by his annoyance at the
unintentional mockery. Johnson was through life a kind and judicious
friend to her; and had attracted her on their first meeting by a
significant indication of his character. He said that when going home to
his lodgings at one or two in the morning, he often saw poor children
asleep on thresholds and stalls--the wretched "street Arabs" of the
day--and that he used to put pennies into their hands that they might
buy a breakfast.
Two friends, who deserve to be placed beside Reynolds, came from Ireland
to seek their fortunes in London. Edmund Burke, incomparably the
greatest writer upon political philosophy in English literature, the
master of a style unrivalled for richness, flexibility, and vigour, was
radically opposed to Johnson on party questions, though his language
upon the French Revolution, after Johnson's death, would have satisfied
even the strongest prejudices of his old friend. But he had qualities
which commended him even to the man who called him a "bottomless Whig,"
and who generally spoke of Whigs as rascals, and maintained that the
first Whig was the devil. If his intellect was wider, his heart was as
warm as Johnson's, and in conversation he merited the generous applause
and warm emulation of his friends. Johnson was never tired of praising
the extraordinary readiness and spontaneity of Burke's conversation. "If
a man," he said, "went under a shed at the same time with Burke to avoid
a shower, he would say, 'This is an extraordinary man.' Or if Burke went
into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, 'We have
had an extraordinary man here.'" When Burke was first going into
Parliament, Johnson said in answer to Hawkins, who wondered that such a
man should get a seat, "We who know Mr. Burke, know that he will be one
of the first men in the country." Speaking of certain other members of
Parliament, more after the heart of Sir John Hawkins, he said that he
grudged success to a man who made a figure by a knowledge of a few
forms, though his mind was "as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet;"
but then he did not grudge Burke's being the first man in the House of
Commons, for he would be the first man everywhere. And Burke equally
admitted Johnson's supremacy in conversation. "It is enough for me," he
said to some one who regretted Johnson's monopoly of the talk on a
particular occasion, "to have rung the bell for him."
The other Irish adventurer, whose career was more nearly moulded upon
that of Johnson, came to London in 1756, and made Johnson's
acquaintance. Some time afterwards (in or before 1761) Goldsmith, like
Johnson, had tasted the bitterness of an usher's life, and escaped into
the scarcely more tolerable regions of Grub Street. After some years of
trial, he was becoming known to the booksellers as a serviceable hand,
and had two works in his desk destined to lasting celebrity. His
landlady (apparently 1764) one day arrested him for debt. Johnson,
summoned to his assistance, sent him a guinea and speedily followed. The
guinea had already been changed, and Goldsmith was consoling himself
with a bottle of Madeira. Johnson corked the bottle, and a discussion of
ways and means brought out the manuscript of the _Vicar of Wakefield_.
Johnson looked into it, took it to a bookseller, got sixty pounds for
it, and returned to Goldsmith, who paid his rent and administered a
sound rating to his landlady.
The relation thus indicated is characteristic; Johnson was as a rough
but helpful elder brother to poor Goldsmith, gave him advice, sympathy,
and applause, and at times criticised him pretty sharply, or brought
down his conversational bludgeon upon his sensitive friend. "He has
nothing of the bear but his skin," was Goldsmith's comment upon his
clumsy friend, and the two men appreciated each other at bottom. Some of
their readers may be inclined to resent Johnson's attitude of
superiority. The admirably pure and tender heart, and the exquisite
intellectual refinement implied in the _Vicar_ and the _Traveller_,
force us to love Goldsmith in spite of superficial foibles, and when
Johnson prunes or interpolates lines in the _Traveller_, we feel as
though a woodman's axe was hacking at a most delicate piece of carving.
The evidence of contemporary observers, however, must force impartial
readers to admit that poor Goldsmith's foibles were real, however amply
compensated by rare and admirable qualities. Garrick's assertion, that
he "wrote like an angel but talked like poor Poll," expresses the
unanimous opinion of all who had actually seen him. Undoubtedly some of
the stories of his childlike vanity, his frankly expressed envy, and his
general capacity for blundering, owe something to Boswell's feeling that
he was a rival near the throne, and sometimes poor Goldsmith's humorous
self-assertion may have been taken too seriously by blunt English wits.
One may doubt, for example, whether he was really jealous of a puppet
tossing a pike, and unconscious of his absurdity in saying "Pshaw! I
could do it better myself!" Boswell, however, was too good an observer
to misrepresent at random, and he has, in fact, explained very well the
true meaning of his remarks. Goldsmith was an excitable Irishman of
genius, who tumbled out whatever came uppermost, and revealed the
feelings of the moment with utter want of reserve. His self-controlled
companions wondered, ridiculed, misinterpreted, and made fewer hits as
well as fewer misses. His anxiety to "get in and share," made him,
according to Johnson, an "unsocial" companion. "Goldsmith," he said,
"had not temper enough for the game he played. He staked too much. A man
might always get a fall from his inferior in the chances of talk, and
Goldsmith felt his falls too keenly." He had certainly some trials of
temper in Johnson's company. "Stay, stay," said a German, stopping him
in the full flow of his eloquence, "Toctor Johnson is going to say
something." An Eton Master called Graham, who was supping with the two
doctors, and had got to the pitch of looking at one person, and talking
to another, said, "Doctor, I shall be glad to see _you_ at Eton." "I
shall be glad to wait on you," said Goldsmith. "No," replied Graham,
"'tis not you I mean, Doctor Minor; 'tis Doctor Major there." Poor
Goldsmith said afterwards, "Graham is a fellow to make one commit
suicide."
Boswell who attributes some of Goldsmith's sayings about Johnson to
envy, said with probable truth that Goldsmith had not more envy than
others, but only spoke of it more freely. Johnson argued that we must be
angry with a man who had so much of an odious quality that he could not
keep it to himself, but let it "boil over." The feeling, at any rate,
was momentary and totally free from malice; and Goldsmith's criticisms
upon Johnson and his idolators seem to have been fair enough. His
objection to Boswell's substituting a monarchy for a republic has
already been mentioned. At another time he checked Boswell's flow of
panegyric by asking, "Is he like Burke, who winds into a subject like a
serpent?" To which Boswell replied with charming irrelevance, "Johnson
is the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle." The last of
Goldsmith's hits was suggested by Johnson's shaking his sides with
laughter because Goldsmith admired the skill with which the little
fishes in the fable were made to talk in character. "Why, Dr. Johnson,
this is not so easy as you seem to think," was the retort, "for if you
were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales."
In spite of sundry little sparrings, Johnson fully appreciated
Goldsmith's genius. Possibly his authority hastened the spread of public
appreciation, as he seemed to claim, whilst repudiating Boswell's too
flattering theory that it had materially raised Goldsmith's position.
When Reynolds quoted the authority of Fox in favour of the _Traveller_,
saying that his friends might suspect that they had been too partial,
Johnson replied very truly that the _Traveller_ was beyond the need of
Fox's praise, and that the partiality of Goldsmith's friends had always
been against him. They would hardly give him a hearing. "Goldsmith," he
added, "was a man who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any
other man could do." Johnson's settled opinion in fact was that embodied
in the famous epitaph with its "nihil tetigit quod non ornavit," and,
though dedications are perhaps the only literary product more generally
insincere than epitaphs, we may believe that Goldsmith too meant what he
said in the dedication of _She Stoops to Conquer_. "It may do me some
honour to inform the public that I have lived many years in intimacy
with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to inform them that
the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most
unaffected piety."
Though Johnson was thus rich in friendship, two connexions have still
to be noticed which had an exceptional bearing upon his fame and
happiness. In January, 1765, he made the acquaintance of the Thrales.
Mr. Thrale was the proprietor of the brewery which afterwards became
that of Barclay and Perkins. He was married in 1763 to a Miss Hester
Lynch Salisbury, who has become celebrated from her friendship with
Johnson.[1] She was a woman of great vivacity and independence of
character. She had a sensitive and passionate, if not a very tender
nature, and enough literary culture to appreciate Johnson's intellectual
power, and on occasion to play a very respectable part in conversation.
She had far more Latin and English scholarship than fell to the lot of
most ladies of her day, and wit enough to preserve her from degenerating
like some of the "blues," into that most offensive of beings--a feminine
prig. Her marriage had been one of convenience, and her husband's want
of sympathy, and jealousy of any interference in business matters,
forced her, she says, to take to literature as her sole resource. "No
wonder," she adds, "if I loved my books and children." It is, perhaps,
more to be wondered at that her children seem to have had a rather
subordinate place in her affections. The marriage, however, though not
of the happiest, was perfectly decorous. Mrs. Thrale discharged her
domestic duties irreproachably, even when she seems to have had some
real cause of complaint. To the world she eclipsed her husband, a solid
respectable man, whose mind, according to Johnson, struck the hours very
regularly, though it did not mark the minutes.
[Footnote 1: Mrs. Thrale was born in 1740 or 1741, probably the latter.
Thrale was born in 1724.]
The Thrales were introduced to Johnson by their common friend, Arthur
Murphy, an actor and dramatist, who afterwards became the editor of
Johnson's works. One day, when calling upon Johnson, they found him in
such a fit of despair that Thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing his
hand before it. The pair then joined in begging Johnson to leave his
solitary abode, and come to them at their country-house at Streatham. He
complied, and for the next sixteen years a room was set apart for him,
both at Streatham and in their house in Southwark. He passed a large
part of his time with them, and derived from the intimacy most of the
comfort of his later years. He treated Mrs. Thrale with a kind of
paternal gallantry, her age at the time of their acquaintance being
about twenty-four, and his fifty-five. He generally called her by the
playful name of "my mistress," addressed little poems to her, gave her
solid advice, and gradually came to confide to her his miseries and
ailments with rather surprising frankness. She flattered and amused him,
and soothed his sufferings and did something towards humanizing his
rugged exterior. There was one little grievance between them which
requires notice. Johnson's pet virtue in private life was a rigid regard
for truth. He spoke, it was said of him, as if he was always on oath. He
would not, for example, allow his servant to use the phrase "not at
home," and even in the heat of conversation resisted the temptation to
give point to an anecdote. The lively Mrs. Thrale rather fretted against
the restraint, and Johnson admonished her in vain. He complained to
Boswell that she was willing to have that said of her, which the best of
mankind had died rather than have said of them. Boswell, the faithful
imitator of his master in this respect, delighted in taking up the
parable. "Now, madam, give me leave to catch you in the fact," he said
on one occasion; "it was not an old woman, but an old man whom I
mentioned, as having told me this," and he recounts his check to the
"lively lady" with intense complacency. As may be imagined, Boswell and
Mrs. Thrale did not love each other, in spite of the well-meant efforts
of the sage to bring about a friendly feeling between his disciples.
It is time to close this list of friends with the inimitable Boswell.
James Boswell, born in 1740, was the eldest son of a Whig laird and lord
of sessions. He had acquired some English friends at the Scotch
universities, among whom must be mentioned Mr. Temple, an English
clergyman. Boswell's correspondence with Temple, discovered years after
his death by a singular chance, and published in 1857, is, after the
Life of Johnson, one of the most curious exhibitions of character in the
language. Boswell was intended for the Scotch bar, and studied civil law
at Utrecht in the winter of 1762. It was in the following summer that he
made Johnson's acquaintance.
Perhaps the fundamental quality in Boswell's character was his intense
capacity for enjoyment. He was, as Mr. Carlyle puts it, "gluttonously
fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a
stomachic character." His love of good living and good drink would have
made him a hearty admirer of his countryman, Burns, had Burns been
famous in Boswell's youth. Nobody could have joined with more thorough
abandonment in the chorus to the poet's liveliest songs in praise of
love and wine. He would have made an excellent fourth when "Willie
brewed a peck of malt, and Rab and Allan came to see," and the drinking
contest for the Whistle commemorated in another lyric would have excited
his keenest interest. He was always delighted when he could get Johnson
to discuss the ethics and statistics of drinking. "I am myself," he
says, "a lover of wine, and therefore curious to hear whatever is
remarkable concerning drinking." The remark is _a propos_ to a story of
Dr. Campbell drinking thirteen bottles of port at a sitting. Lest this
should seem incredible, he quotes Johnson's dictum. "Sir, if a man
drinks very slowly and lets one glass evaporate before he takes another,
I know not how long he may drink." Boswell's faculty for making love was
as great as his power of drinking. His letters to Temple record with
amusing frankness the vicissitudes of some of his courtships and the
versatility of his passions.
Boswell's tastes, however, were by no means limited to sensual or
frivolous enjoyments. His appreciation of the bottle was combined with
an equally hearty sensibility to more intellectual pleasures. He had not
a spark of philosophic or poetic power, but within the ordinary range of
such topics as can be discussed at a dinner-party, he had an abundant
share of liveliness and intelligence. His palate was as keen for good
talk as for good wine. He was an admirable recipient, if not an
originator, of shrewd or humorous remarks upon life and manners. What in
regard to sensual enjoyment was mere gluttony, appeared in higher
matters as an insatiable curiosity. At times this faculty became
intolerable to his neighbours. "I will not be baited with what and why,"
said poor Johnson, one day in desperation. "Why is a cow's tail long?
Why is a fox's tail bushy?" "Sir," said Johnson on another occasion,
when Boswell was cross-examining a third person about him in his
presence. "You have but two subjects, yourself and me. I am sick of
both." Boswell, however, was not to be repelled by such a retort as
this, or even by ruder rebuffs. Once when discussing the means of
getting a friend to leave London, Johnson said in revenge for a previous
offence, "Nay, sir, we'll send you to him. If your presence doesn't
drive a man out of his house, nothing will." Boswell was "horribly
shocked," but he still stuck to his victim like a leech, and pried into
the minutest details of his life and manners. He observed with
conscientious accuracy that though Johnson abstained from milk one
fast-day, he did not reject it when put in his cup. He notes the
whistlings and puffings, the trick of saying "too-too-too" of his idol:
and it was a proud day when he won a bet by venturing to ask Johnson
what he did with certain scraped bits of orange-peel. His curiosity was
not satisfied on this occasion; but it would have made him the prince of
interviewers in these days. Nothing delighted him so much as rubbing
shoulders with any famous or notorious person. He scraped acquaintance
with Voltaire, Wesley, Rousseau, and Paoli, as well as with Mrs. Rudd, a
forgotten heroine of the _Newgate Calendar_. He was as eager to talk to
Hume the sceptic, or Wilkes the demagogue, as to the orthodox Tory,
Johnson; and, if repelled, it was from no deficiency in daring. In 1767,
he took advantage of his travels in Corsica to introduce himself to Lord
Chatham, then Prime Minister. The letter moderately ends by asking,
"_Could your lordship find time to honour me now and then with a
letter?_ I have been told how favourably your lordship has spoken of me.
To correspond with a Paoli and with a Chatham is enough to keep a young
man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame." No other young man of
the day, we may be sure, would have dared to make such a proposal to the
majestic orator.
His absurd vanity, and the greedy craving for notoriety at any cost,
would have made Boswell the most offensive of mortals, had not his
unfeigned good-humour disarmed enmity. Nobody could help laughing, or be
inclined to take offence at his harmless absurdities. Burke said of him
that he had so much good-humour naturally, that it was scarcely a
virtue. His vanity, in fact, did not generate affectation. Most vain men
are vain of qualities which they do not really possess, or possess in a
lower degree than they fancy. They are always acting a part, and become
touchy from a half-conscious sense of the imposture. But Boswell seems
to have had few such illusions. He thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoyed
his own peculiarities, and thought his real self much too charming an
object to be in need of any disguise. No man, therefore, was ever less
embarrassed by any regard for his own dignity. He was as ready to join
in a laugh at himself as in a laugh at his neighbours. He reveals his
own absurdities to the world at large as frankly as Pepys confided them
to a journal in cypher. He tells us how drunk he got one night in Skye,
and how he cured his headache with brandy next morning; and what an
intolerable fool he made of himself at an evening party in London after
a dinner with the Duke of Montrose, and how Johnson in vain did his best
to keep him quiet. His motive for the concession is partly the wish to
illustrate Johnson's indulgence, and, in the last case, to introduce a
copy of apologetic verses to the lady whose guest he had been. He
reveals other weaknesses with equal frankness. One day, he says, "I
owned to Johnson that I was occasionally troubled with a fit of
narrowness." "Why, sir," said he, "so am I. _But I do not tell it_."
Boswell enjoys the joke far too heartily to act upon the advice.
There is nothing, however, which Boswell seems to have enjoyed more
heartily than his own good impulses. He looks upon his virtuous
resolution with a sort of aesthetic satisfaction, and with the glow of a
virtuous man contemplating a promising penitent. Whilst suffering
severely from the consequences of imprudent conduct, he gets a letter of
virtuous advice from his friend Temple. He instantly sees himself
reformed for the rest of his days. "My warm imagination," he says,
"looks forward with great complacency on the sobriety, the
healthfulness, and worth of my future life." "Every instance of our
doing those things which we ought not to have done, and leaving undone
those things which we ought to have done, is attended," as he elsewhere
sagely observes, "with more or less of what is truly remorse;" but he
seems rather to have enjoyed even the remorse. It is needless to say
that the complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution
vanished like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told
Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate
sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and
of daring resolution so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest of
the [purely hypothetical] battle." "Sir," replied Johnson, "I should
never hear it, if it made me such a fool." Elsewhere he expresses a wish
to "fly to the woods," or retire into a desert, a disposition which
Johnson checked by one of his habitual gibes at the quantity of easily
accessible desert in Scotland. Boswell is equally frank in describing
himself in situations more provocative of contempt than even drunkenness
in a drawing-room. He tells us how dreadfully frightened he was by a
storm at sea in the Hebrides, and how one of his companions, "with a
happy readiness," made him lay hold of a rope fastened to the masthead,
and told him to pull it when he was ordered. Boswell was thus kept
quiet in mind and harmless in body.
This extreme simplicity of character makes poor Boswell loveable in his
way. If he sought notoriety, he did not so far mistake his powers as to
set up for independent notoriety.[1] He was content to shine in
reflected light: and the affectations with which he is charged seem to
have been unconscious imitations of his great idol. Miss Burney traced
some likeness even in his dress. In the later part of the _Life_ we meet
phrases in which Boswell is evidently aping the true Johnsonian style.
So, for example, when somebody distinguishes between "moral" and
"physical necessity;" Boswell exclaims, "Alas, sir, they come both to
the same thing. You may be as hard bound by chains when covered by
leather, as when the iron appears." But he specially emulates the
profound melancholy of his hero. He seems to have taken pride in his
sufferings from hypochondria; though, in truth, his melancholy diverges
from Johnson's by as great a difference as that which divides any two
varieties in Jaques's classification. Boswell's was the melancholy of a
man who spends too much, drinks too much, falls in love too often, and
is forced to live in the country in dependence upon a stern old parent,
when he is longing for a jovial life in London taverns. Still he was
excusably vexed when Johnson refused to believe in the reality of his
complaints, and showed scant sympathy to his noisy would-be
fellow-sufferer. Some of Boswell's freaks were, in fact, very trying.
Once he gave up writing letters for a long time, to see whether Johnson
would be induced to write first. Johnson became anxious, though he
half-guessed the truth, and in reference to Boswell's confession gave
his disciple a piece of his mind. "Remember that all tricks are either
knavish or childish, and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon
the constancy of a friend as upon the chastity of a wife."