III
JOHNSON WITHOUT BOSWELL
When Boswell was preparing to give to the public his Life of Samuel Johnson, he knew what he was doing. ‘I am absolutely certain,’ he wrote to his friend Temple, in February, 1788, ‘that my mode of biography, which gives not only a History of Johnson’s visible progress through the world, and of his publications, but a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared.’
His confidence was well warranted; he has fairly vanquished all his competitors, and has established his claim to be both the author of the best biography that has ever yet appeared and the single sufficient expositor of his great theme. Yet he was not the first in the field. Johnson died in 1784, and before Boswell’s book was published in 1791 there had been six other attempts to tell the story. The earliest of these, A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1784), was by Thomas Tyers, the son of the founder of Vauxhall Gardens. He was a man of a handsome fortune and a lively temper, impatient of the drudgery of the legal profession, to which he had been bred. ‘He therefore,’ says Boswell, ‘ran about the world with a pleasant carelessness, amusing everybody by his desultory conversation.’ The sketch of Tom Restless in Number 48 of The Idler was intended by Johnson for a portrait of Tyers. Tom ‘does not care to spend much time among authors; for he is of opinion that few books deserve the labour of perusal, that they give the mind an unfashionable cast, and destroy that freedom of thought and easiness of manners indispensably requisite to acceptance in the world. Tom has therefore found another way to wisdom. When he rises he goes into a coffee-house, where he creeps so near to men whom he takes to be reasoners as to hear their discourse, and endeavours to remember something which, when it has been strained through Tom’s head, is so near to nothing that what it once was cannot be discovered.’ Tyers’ sketch of Johnson is a slight piece of work, but it has some vivid detail, and is more than once quoted by Boswell.
The next to adventure was the bookseller Kearsley, who had already, before Johnson’s death, published a selection of Beauties from The Rambler. The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll. D. (1785) published by Kearsley is said to have been compiled by William Cook, of the Middle Temple, barrister-at-law, who subsequently wrote Memoirs of Foote and of Macklin. Cook was a member of the Essex Head Club, founded by Johnson in the last year of his life, but his Life (if it be his) is a mere trading venture, hastily launched to catch the favourable breeze. The Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, which was printed the same year for J. G. Walker, is commonly attributed to the Rev. William Shaw, a native of the Hebrides, whom Johnson had encouraged to prepare a Gaelic dictionary. A much more noteworthy book, by an author with a larger claim in Johnson, was issued the following year. Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson Ll. D. during the last twenty years of his life, by Hester Lynch Piozzi (1786) is Mrs. Thrale’s contribution to our knowledge of her friend and preceptor. It must have agitated Boswell not a little, while his own book was slowly rising on the stocks, to hear that the whole first edition of Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes had sold out on the day of issue, and that four editions at least had been called for within a year after publication. But he bided his time, and, in spite of brief intervals of distraction and dissipation, went on steadily with his work.
An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson, by Joseph Towers, Ll. D. (1786) is the most censorious of these early biographies. It is written to teach Johnson’s eulogists that ‘as he had great excellencies, he had also great weaknesses; and the latter appear sometimes to have been nearly as conspicuous as the former.’ The author, Joseph Towers, had lived a life singularly like Johnson’s in some of its outward aspects. He was the son of a bookseller; he had struggled with poverty, and had attained to Latin and Greek; he had come to London to seek his fortune, and had borne a hand in the Biographia Britannica and other large literary undertakings; he was himself an active political pamphleteer and a writer of Lives, long and short; he had been decorated, by the University of Edinburgh, with the degree of Doctor of Laws. The parallel will stretch no further, for Towers was a dissenting minister and a violent Whig. Boswell, while professing abhorrence for his ‘democratical notions and propensities,’ yet speaks of him kindly as ‘an ingenious, knowing, and very convivial man.’ This, coming from a connoisseur of good company, is strong evidence; yet nothing could be less convivial than the temper of the Essay, which, while it quarrels with Johnson’s fame, adds nothing to our knowledge of his life. Indeed, the sympathy of the writer is given less to Johnson than to certain unnamed virtuous men who have had to content themselves with a smaller share of public approbation. ‘There have been many men, who were more uniformly pious, and more uniformly benevolent, than Dr. Johnson, and who had neither his arrogance, nor his bigotry; and such men, in a moral and religious view, were superior characters. There were such men before the death of this celebrated writer, and there can be no reasonable doubt but that such men are yet remaining.’ What if one of them were Dr. Joseph Towers?
The last of these predecessors of Boswell is Sir John Hawkins, knight, who published his Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1787. Since the early days of The Gentleman’s Magazine, Hawkins had been a friend of Johnson, who called him ‘a most unclubable man,’ but permitted no one else to abuse him. Boswell speaks of his ‘bulky tome’ not without respect—indeed, Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale are the only two biographers of Johnson whom he treats seriously as rivals. If he sometimes seems to envy them, it is envy not of their literary skill, but of their prolonged intimacy with Johnson, and their matchless opportunities. They have both been too much neglected and decried; Boswell has conquered but has not superseded them, and their best reminiscences and anecdotes are almost as good as anything to be found in his own pages.
The stream of independent record was not checked by the appearance of Boswell’s Life. A collected edition of Johnson’s works, in twelve volumes, was published in 1792, with a prefatory Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, written by Arthur Murphy, editor of Fielding, biographer of Garrick, and member of the Essex Head Club. To the formal Lives there must also be added the many valuable memories incidentally preserved by Miss Burney, Miss Hannah More, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Bishop Percy, and others of Johnson’s friends and acquaintances. Never was there a more ignorant fable than the fable which makes Boswell the creator of Johnson’s greatness. ‘The death of Doctor Johnson,’ says Murphy, ‘kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited so much attention.’ ‘His death,’ wrote Hannah More, ‘made a kind of era in literature.’ There is a cloud of witnesses to the pre-eminence and influence of Johnson. Yet Boswell has so far set himself in glory above his peers that no other witnesses are much esteemed. Hence it is worth the pains to inquire—What should we know of Johnson if Boswell had never written? How far is Boswell’s account confirmed by the testimony of others? Can Boswell’s narrative be shown to be in any respect biased, or partial, or erroneous?
The first of these questions is easily answered. If Boswell had never lived, or if he had never turned his face towards that noblest prospect for a Scotchman, the high road that leads to England, we should still know more of Johnson than we know of Swift; and we know more of Swift, by way of personal reminiscence, than we know of any other of our great writers before the time of Johnson. The recorded impressions of Delany, Sheridan, Mrs. Pilkington, and others, enable us to see Swift as he lived, and to overhear his casual discourse. Compared with him Addison is a mere ghost. For twelve years of his life Addison resided at Oxford, first at Queen’s College, and then at Magdalen. He is said to have been a social man, though doubtless he was one of those men who are never so frankly and easily social as when they have a pen in the hand. Yet only one fragment of his conversation has been preserved. ‘Mr. Collins, of Magdalen College,’ says Hearne, ‘tells me that Mr. Joseph Addison of their College (who was afterwards Secretary of State) used to please himself mightily with this prologue to a puppet-show: “A certain king said to a beggar, What hast to eat? Beans, quoth the beggar. Beans? quoth the king. Yea, beans, I say, and so forthwith we straight begin the play.”’ This is all that has been rescued of the talk of a wit and a scholar during twelve years of social converse.
Johnson’s talk was remembered and recorded by many of those who had to do with him. His lightest sayings had a quality about them, an appositeness and a sincerity, which often stamped them even upon the laziest imagination. If they sometimes seem more wonderful to the recorder than they seem to a later and less excited audience, that is because they had all the force of a massive character behind them when they were spoken, and not less because they were always opportune, and took a great part of their meaning from circumstances which we cannot perfectly recreate. Boswell is fuller and more accurate in his accounts than any other of the chroniclers. But the work that he did was not peculiar to him, and if he had never written, Johnson’s conversation would still be known to us for a live and luminous thing.
There is no meaning in the facts of life till the mind begins to play upon them. The most exact historian is often surprised, and (if he be a very stupid man) perturbed, to find that the convincing and vivid parts of his narrative are those where he permits himself to be an artist. Boswell was a great artist in portraiture; he desired the world to see the character of his friend as he himself saw it; nor was it without intent that he dedicated his work to Sir Joshua Reynolds, as to one who had ‘perceived all the shades which mingled in the grand composition.’ The choice of details for emphasis is a choice dictated by pleasure, and those traits in Johnson which had given high delight to Boswell are brought into strong relief in his work. All powerful portraits tend to caricature. On the other hand, all exact and truthful histories tend to pay so minute a reverence to fact that they will rather record what seems insignificant than run the risk of losing what may, after all, prove to be essential. Both these tendencies are seen in Boswell’s work. Sometimes he will paint in broad tones; at other times he will give importance to the smallest trifles by the eagerness of his reverence. What the historian might excusably have omitted is not too small for the worshipper. The attitude of Boswell is well described by Miss Burney, in a famous passage. They met, rival satellites, at the table of the Thrales. Boswell had come on a morning visit, and a collation was ordered, where all the guests were assembled. When Boswell was preparing to take the seat next to Johnson, which he regarded as his own by right, he was told, to his surprise and disgust, that that seat was reserved for Miss Burney. He reluctantly got another chair, and placed it at the back of Johnson’s shoulder, so that he might hear what was said. ‘Of everyone else,’ says Miss Burney, ‘when in that presence, he was unobservant, if not contemptuous. In truth, when he met with Dr. Johnson, he commonly forbore even answering anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such exclusive, though merited, homage. But the moment that voice burst forth, the attention which it excited in Mr. Boswell amounted almost to pain. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropped open to catch every syllable that might be uttered: nay, he seemed not only to dread losing a word, but to be anxious not to miss a breathing; as if hoping from it, latently or mystically, some information.’ Presently, Johnson, discovering the intruder at his elbow, ‘turned angrily round upon him, and, clapping his hand rather loudly upon his knee, said, in a tone of displeasure: “What do you do there, Sir? Go to the table, Sir!”’
Mrs. Thrale comments with some asperity on the reverential habits of the biographer. ‘A trick,’ she says, ‘which I have, however, seen played on common occasions, of sitting stealthily down at the other end of the room to write at the moment what should be said in company, either by Dr. Johnson or to him, I never practised myself, nor approved of in another. There is something so ill-bred, and so inclining to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly adopted, all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a conversation assembly-room would become tremendous as a court of justice.’
Boswell did not exaggerate the value, for his record, of what Johnson said to others. What was said to himself, while he had his note-book in hand, was not likely to have much of the ease of social conversation. It is plain that Johnson was often amused, and often irritated, by the habits of his scribe. He disliked, above all, being put to the question. Boswell prided himself on his talent in drawing people out, and certainly was both courageous and skilful at the business. The directness of his assault when he talked to Johnson has this excuse, that Johnson, on the testimony of his friends, never started a topic of conversation. He left others to put up the game, and was content to shoot it. ‘No one,’ says Mrs. Thrale, ‘was less willing to begin any discourse than himself: his friend Mr. Thomas Tyers said, he was like the ghosts, who never speak till they are spoken to: and he liked the expression so well that he often repeated it. He had, indeed, no necessity to lead the stream of chat to a favourite channel, that his fullness on the subject might be shewn more clearly, whatever was the topic; and he usually left the choice to others.’ Boswell tells, in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, how, when they were shown the military stores at Fort George, Johnson made a very good figure in conversation with the officers on the various stages of the manufacture of gunpowder.
This is how it comes about that Johnson’s retorts are sometimes not fully expressive of himself, and must not be taken to convey his most deeply cherished convictions. He did not choose the subject, and when others chose it he was often displeased by the choice.
Boswell, for instance, attributes to him in many passages an almost sentimental horror of the very name of death. It is true that Johnson thought often of death; but he did not think of it sentimentally. ‘When we were alone,’ says Boswell, under the year 1769, ‘I introduced the subject of death, and endeavoured to maintain that the fear of it might be got over.’ After some exchange of argument, Johnson answered, in a passion, ‘No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time…. A man knows it must be so and submits. It will do him no good to whine.’ ‘I attempted,’ says Boswell, ‘to continue the conversation. He was so provoked, that he said, “Give us no more of this;” and was thrown into such a state of agitation that he expressed himself in a way that alarmed and distressed me; showed an impatience that I should leave him, and when I was going away, called to me sternly, “Don’t let us meet to-morrow.”’
Is it not easy to imagine the scene? The pleasant, excitable, insistent voice of Boswell,—‘With regard to death, Sir;’ Johnson’s brief, wise verdict, and dismissal of the topic; Boswell’s mosquito-like return, and Johnson’s outburst of wrath. It was not death that he feared; it was Boswell on death. He did not always shun the subject. His friend, John Hoole, tells how on November 30th, 1784, less than a fortnight before his death, ‘Frank bringing him a note, as he opened it he said an odd thought struck him, that one should receive no letters in the grave.’ Grim fancies on death were natural to him; tittle-tattle about it he could not bear.
If Boswell is sometimes all unconscious of the meaning of Johnson’s reproofs, so is Mrs. Thrale. Mrs. Thrale was a lively, feather-headed lady, with a good deal of natural wit, and a perfect confidence in the exercise of it. Boswell disliked her, as his most highly-favoured competitor, but it is impossible to read her Anecdotes without falling under the spell of her easy, irresponsible charm. There is no sufficient reason to challenge her good faith, but her code of truth is not severe, and many of the facts that she narrates become lies under her touch. So, in speaking of Johnson’s expressions of contempt, she gives as an instance a retort that he made to her. ‘He was no gentler with myself, or those for whom I had the greatest regard. When I one day lamented the loss of a first cousin killed in America—“Prithee, my dear (said he), have done with canting: how would the world be worse for it, I may ask, if all your relations were at once spitted like larks, and roasted for Presto’s supper?” Presto was the dog that lay under the table while we talked.’
One story is good till another is told. Joseph Baretti, who had been for some years a tutor in the Thrales’ house, was fortunately present at this conversation, and gave his version, which, on the face of it, is the true one. ‘Mrs. Thrale,’ he says, ‘while supping very heartily upon larks, laid down her knife and fork, and abruptly exclaimed, “O, my dear Mr. Johnson, do you know what has happened? The last letters from abroad have brought us an account that our poor cousin’s head was taken off by a cannon-ball.” Johnson, who was shocked both at the fact, and her light, unfeeling manner of mentioning it, replied, “Madam, it would give you very little concern if all your relations were spitted like those larks and drest for Presto's supper.”’
Is not this a live piece of drama? Mrs. Thrale, quite unaware of any cause in herself, and her flow of pleasant chatter, for Johnson’s reproof, took it as a gratuitous display of surliness and rudeness, showing how a great philosopher can be deficient in humane feeling. She does not even mention that she was eating larks, so that the larks, which were her own supper, become, under her light hand, a merely rhetorical adornment of Johnson’s invective. Yet it is strange that she did not see what he meant, for she understood and put on record several similar reproofs. Here is one of them: ‘I was saying to a friend one day that I did not like goose; one smells it so while it is roasting, said I. “But you, Madam (replies the Doctor), have been at all times a fortunate woman, having always had your hunger so forestalled by indulgence, that you never experienced the delight of smelling your dinner beforehand.” “Which pleasure,” answered I pertly, “is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge-Island of a morning.” “Come, come (says he gravely), let’s have no sneering at what is so 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 gratifications they are not able to obtain: you are certainly not better than all of them; give God thanks that you are happier.”’
These retorts, to Boswell and to Mrs. Thrale, show Johnson as he was, unfailingly serious and sympathetic and imaginative about the great elemental things. Boswell had not thought deeply about death, Mrs. Thrale had not experienced poverty or imagined it in its effects; Boswell was argumentative, like a Scottish philosopher, on death; Mrs. Thrale was flippant, like a fashionable lady, on poverty—hence the fierceness of Johnson’s replies.
It would be easy to show how each of the biographies of Johnson is limited and coloured by the predilections of the writer, and by the nature of his, or her, relationship to the great man. Johnson’s talk, even though it be faithfully recorded, loses most of its value when it is taken out of its setting. No one says all that he thinks in talk. He selects only what has some relation to the company and the circumstances. We must know the company and the circumstances before we can understand the talk. It is one of Boswell’s greatest merits that he is careful of his background; wherever it is possible he gives us a full and true account of the persons present, and the incidents and remarks that prompted Johnson’s speech.
Another cause of Boswell’s superiority is his care for truth, even in the minutest details. Some part of this care he may have learned from his master; like Reynolds, he was ‘of Johnson’s school.’ Perhaps no book so rich in opportunities for error has ever come through a century of minute study and criticism with so little damage to its reputation as Boswell’s Life. The author invented nothing and suppressed nothing, and his book stands. Yet in the main his details contribute to the portrait, and that portrait is Boswell’s Johnson. A little emphasis here and there, a judicious management of the light, a lively touch of the brush or of the pen,—these are enough for the painter or the biographer who wishes to convey his own meaning. All later writers on Johnson are copyists of Boswell. Macaulay exaggerated the picture and vulgarized it, but suggestions for his caricature are already to be found in Boswell. Take, for instance, the question of Johnson’s manner of eating. Boswell’s description is well known. ‘I never knew any man who relished good eating as he did. When at table, he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks seemed rivetted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.’ No doubt Boswell had seen Johnson on one or more occasions, as he here describes him. Hawkins says, ‘It was, at no time of his life, pleasing to see him at a meal.’ On the other hand, Bishop Percy, under whose roof Johnson lived for many weeks, says that Boswell’s description is extremely exaggerated. ‘He ate heartily, having a good appetite, but not with the voraciousness described by Mr. Boswell; all whose extravagant accounts must be read with caution and abatement.’ And Richard Cumberland says, ‘He fed heartily but not voraciously, and was extremely courteous in his commendations of any dish that pleased his palate.’ In the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Boswell himself had remarked, ‘I observed that he was disgusted whenever he met with coarse manners.’
These quotations make it plain that here is a question of degree, to be determined ‘not dogmatically, but deliberately.’ It is perhaps fair to conclude that Johnson ate zealously, and with conviction. The fervour of his temper expressed itself in a hundred ways, and this no doubt was one of them. Boswell’s account is probably a little exaggerated; the most vivid of his memories of Johnson at table is imposed upon the reader as if it were a daily experience. Then came Macaulay; he seized upon the most picturesque of Boswell’s scattered descriptive phrases, joined them in a single sentence, and heightened the picture out of all human recognition. ‘The old philosopher is still among us, in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.’
The whole-hearted delight that was felt by Boswell in Johnson’s dialectical triumphs, and particularly in his well-known knock-out blow, has perhaps given too strong an impression of his violence and rudeness in conversation. The roaring down of timid objectors, the loud, personal retorts, the attack on his adversaries with the butt-end of his pistol, these things are recorded by all, and cannot be denied. Yet it must be remembered that Johnson himself was hardly aware of them. The explosive force of his utterances was produced by the strong workings of his mind. He meant no offence, and was surprised and disquieted when he found that offence was taken. He was willing to fight on the smallest provocation, but he hated quarrels, and the feelings that beget quarrels. ‘The cup of life,’ he said, ‘is surely bitter enough, without squeezing in the hateful rind of resentment.’ He believed that the innocence of his heart was reflected in his manners. ‘I look upon myself,’ he once said to Boswell, ‘as a very polite man.’ And again, to Mrs. Thrale, he gave an even more complacent account. ‘You may observe,’ he said, ‘that I am well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity. No man is so cautious not to interrupt another; no man thinks it so necessary to appear attentive when others are speaking; no man so steadily refuses preference to himself, or so willingly bestows it on another, as I do; nobody holds so strongly as I do the necessity of ceremony, and the ill effects which follow the breach of it: yet people think me rude.’ Some part of this defence is supported by the testimony of Sir John Hawkins: ‘He encouraged others, particularly young men, to speak, and paid a due attention to what they said.’ And there is no doubt that when he took care of his own behaviour, and was conscious of it, his manners were polished and courtly.
But when he joined issue in debate, he gave no quarter. ‘In mixed company,’ says Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘the most light and airy dispute was with him a dispute in the arena. He fought on every occasion as if his whole reputation depended upon the victory of the minute, and he fought with all the weapons. If he was foiled in argument, he had recourse to abuse and rudeness. That he was not thus strenuous for victory with his intimates in tête-à-tête conversations, may be easily believed.’ Once, when he was reproached for too great warmth in a dispute with Burke, ‘It may be so,’ he replied, ‘for Burke and I should have been of one opinion if we had had no audience.’ And Reynolds lays great stress on the necessity of distinguishing the behaviour of Johnson in the prize-ring of debate from ‘his natural disposition seen in his quiet hours.’
Boswell, of course, knew Johnson well in both moods. It is not so certain that he agreed with Johnson in preferring the quietness of intimate talk. ‘That is the happiest conversation,’ said Johnson, ‘where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.’ But that is not the kind of conversation which Boswell has most fully recorded. The place of his meeting with Johnson was commonly a tavern or a social assembly, and his portrait is largely gladiatorial. There is nothing unfair in this; as a gladiator Johnson was known to a wide circle of social acquaintance, and he took a pride in his achievements. His description of his joy in battle has been preserved for us by Hawkins: ‘As soon as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience an oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude: when I am seated, I find the master courteous, and the servants obsequious to my call; anxious to know and ready to supply my wants: wine there exhilarates my spirits, and prompts me to free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love: I dogmatize and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions and sentiments I find delight.’ The company shared in this delight, and posterity has been made free of it. But the affection felt for Johnson by his friends had another root. All his dialectic dropped from him when he found himself alone, or in the presence of a single intimate. We come to closer quarters with Johnson in the best pages of The Rambler than in the most brilliant of the conversations recalled by Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a wise and tender confessor.
When Mrs. Thrale and Boswell knew him, Johnson, it must be remembered, was already famous. He was often liable to the intrusion of foolish persons, who came without invitation to consult him on their private affairs. They had heard of him as a celebrated man, and were willing to believe him an oracle. Mrs. Thrale has given an account, which we could ill spare, of some of these visitors. In his happy retreat at Streatham Johnson would sometimes tell stories of his experiences. Once he told the following tale: ‘A person (said he) had for these last five weeks often called at my door, but would not leave his name or other message, but that he wished to speak with me. At last we met, and he told me that he was oppressed by scruples of conscience: I blamed him gently for not applying, as the rules of our church direct, to his parish priest or other discreet clergyman; when, after some compliments on his part, he told me, that he was clerk to a very eminent trader, at whose warehouses much business consisted in packing goods in order to go-abroad: that he was often tempted to take paper and packthread enough for his own use, and that he had indeed done so so often, that he could recollect no time when he ever had bought any for himself.—But probably (said I), your master was wholly indifferent with regard to such trivial emoluments; you had better ask for it at once, and so take your trifles with consent.—Oh, Sir! replies the visitor, my master bid me have as much as I pleased, and was half angry when I talked to him about it.—Then pray, Sir (said I), teize me no more about such airy nothings and was going to be very angry, when I recollected that the fellow might be mad perhaps; so I asked him, When he left the counting-house of an evening?—At seven o’clock, Sir.—And when do you go to bed, Sir?—At twelve o’clock.—Then (replied I) I have at least learned thus much by my new acquaintance, that five hours of the four-and-twenty unemployed are enough for a man to go mad in; so I would advise you, Sir, to study algebra, if you are not an adept already in it: your head would get less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbours about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.’
Another visitor was a young gentleman whose father had become wealthy, and who wished to qualify for genteel society. Johnson recommended the university: ‘for you read Latin, Sir, with facility?’ ‘I read it a little, to be sure, Sir.’ ‘But do you read it with facility, I say?’ ‘Upon my word, Sir, I do not very well know, but I rather believe not.’ Mr. Johnson now began, says Mrs. Thrale, to recommend other branches of science. ‘There arose some talk about animals and their divisions into oviparous and viviparous; And the cat here, Sir, said the youth who wished for instruction, pray in which class is she? Our doctor’s patience and desire of doing good began now to give way to the natural roughness of his temper. You would do well (said he) to look for some person to be always about you, Sir, who is capable of explaining such matters, and not come to us (there were some literary friends present as I recollect) to know whether the cat lays eggs or not: get a discreet man to keep you company, there are so many who would be glad of your table and fifty pounds a year.’
These stories were told by Johnson himself to Mrs. Thrale, who adds that what he told, or suffered to be told before his face without contradicting, has every possible mark of real and genuine authenticity. If the circumstances had been less fully explained, no doubt Johnson’s replies would have been quoted as examples of unprovoked rudeness in retort.
The long years of poverty and obscurity were not a school of social ease. When prosperity came, Johnson’s manners softened, yet he never attained to that ideal of smooth and tactful politeness which he has described with inimitable truth in his portrait of Mr. Fitzherbert: ‘There was no sparkle, no brilliancy in Fitzherbert; but I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made everybody quite easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said.’ Such characters are the oil of society, yet a society made wholly of such characters would have no taste. Johnson’s dogmatic freedom often made difficulties for those who associated with him; indeed, as he himself remarked, it kept people of rank and fashion away from his company. ‘I never courted the great,’ he said to Boswell; ‘they sent for me; but I think they now give me up. They are satisfied; they have seen enough of me.’ Boswell, always eager to keep a topic alive, suggested that they must surely be highly pleased with his conversation, but he answered, ‘No, Sir; great lords and great ladies don’t love to have their mouths stopped.’ It is remarked by Dr. Birkbeck Hill that only one man of hereditary title, Sir Charles Bunbury, was among the mourners at Johnson’s funeral.
However dogmatic and fierce Johnson’s conversation may have been, it was always extraordinarily free from egotism. He takes the floor with all comers, and does not make for himself a place apart, sheltered and superior. He has no exquisite reasons, and looks at life, not from a delicate angle of his own, but from the broad standing-ground of common humanity. A very large number of his most famous sayings are cast in a single mould; almost all that he has to say can be expressed in sentences which have for subject ‘A man,’ or ‘Every man.’ ‘A man loves to review his own mind.’ ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ ‘No man loves labour for itself.’ If he had found his own tastes and opinions out of sympathy with average sentiment, he would have distrusted them, or rather, perhaps, would have thought them too trivial to mention. The true egotist nurses his singularity, and if he does not talk much of himself, desires at least that others should. Johnson nourished his intellect and his feelings on what he shared with all mankind. He had the soul of good manners, though at times it was not perfectly embodied in act.
The tradition of Johnson’s fixed antipathy to the Scottish people owes a great part of its strength and persistence to Boswell, who not only recorded Johnson’s railing speeches against the Scotch, but provoked the larger number of them. His apologetic speech in Davies’s shop, on his first introduction, put him at Johnson’s mercy for the rest of his life. ‘Mr. Johnson (said I), I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ From that time forward, Johnson delighted to indulge his humour, playful rather than hostile, on the sensitive nationality of his friend. The best of his sallies are written in the Life; but some, which Boswell omitted or forgot, are recorded by other writers. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Campbell notes in his Diary how Johnson ‘seems fond of Boswell, and yet he is always abusing the Scots before him, by way of joke… Boswell lamented there was no good map of Scotland. “There never can be a good map of Scotland,” says the Doctor sententiously. This excited Boswell to ask wherefore. “Why, Sir, to measure land, a man must go over it; but who could think of going over Scotland?”’
The truth of this matter is better explained by other less agitated historians than by Boswell himself. ‘Johnson’s invectives against Scotland,’ says Bishop Percy, ‘were more in pleasantry and sport than real or malignant; for no man was more visited by natives of that country, nor were there any for whom he had a greater esteem.’ The ground of the antipathy is explained by Reynolds: ‘Against the Irish he entertained no prejudice, he thought they united themselves very well with us; but the Scotch, when in England, united and made a party by employing only Scotch servants and Scotch tradesmen. He held it right for Englishmen to oppose a party against them.’ For some years before Johnson’s meeting with Boswell Lord Bute had been in power, and had the name of showing undue favour to his own countrymen. How little of real hostile feeling there was in Johnson’s light satire may be seen in his Journey to the Western Islands. He had a warm admiration, and a natural sympathy, for the feudal society of the Highlands, its courtesy and its pride. Richard Cumberland tells how he remonstrated with Johnson, urging that some passages in the Journey were too sharp upon a country and people that had showed him such generous hospitality: ‘Do you think so, Cumbey?’ said Johnson. ‘Then I give you leave to say, and you may quote me for it, that there are more gentlemen in Scotland than there are shoes.’ A people that is poor and proud could desire no finer compliment.
Boswell’s care for the unity of his picture is well seen in his treatment of Goldsmith. The title of his book committed him to something more than a portrait of Johnson. It runs: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll. D. comprehending an Account of his studies and numerous works, in chronological order; a series of his epistolary correspondence and conversations with many eminent persons; and various original pieces of his composition, never before published: the whole exhibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century, during which he flourished. By James Boswell, Esq. But Johnson was to have the centre of the picture, with no rival. Goldsmith himself complained of this. ‘One evening,’ says Boswell, ‘in a circle of wits, he found fault with me for talking of Johnson as entitled to the honour of unquestionable superiority. “Sir (said he), you are for making a monarchy of what should be a republick.”’ The accusation was true; Boswell acknowledged but one king, and made short work of all possible pretenders. Of these pretenders, Goldsmith was by far the most formidable. He was a much more popular author than Johnson. He was styled, by Johnson himself, ‘a very great man.’ But there was no room in Boswell’s book for two very great men. So, in perfect good faith, and almost unconsciously, Boswell set himself to belittle Goldsmith. He introduces him as ‘one of the brightest ornaments of the Johnsonian school,’ and thereafter consistently exhibits him as a humble disciple who was sometimes vain and foolish enough to enter into competition with his great master. For this view of Goldsmith Boswell more than once attempted to get Johnson’s support. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘he is much indebted to you for his getting so high in the publick estimation.’ Johnson’s fairness of mind was proof against these temptations. ‘Why, Sir,’ he replied, ‘he has perhaps got sooner to it by his intimacy with me.’
Partly, no doubt, Boswell was jealous of the older friend. Partly he was incapable of understanding the Irish humour, and thought it mere folly. The instances which he gives to illustrate Goldsmith’s ridiculous envy are a strange proof of his own misapprehensions. Once when Goldsmith was travelling abroad in the company of the beautiful Miss Hornecks, and they all stood together in the window of their hotel at Lisle, to see the soldiers in the square, the beauty of the sisters excited marked admiration from below, and Goldsmith (who was not a handsome man), turning on his heel, remarked, with an air of pique, that he, too, had his admirers elsewhere, The incident is narrated by Boswell in these words: ‘When he was accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him.’ The other instance needs no gloss: ‘Once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next to him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, “Pshaw! I can do it better myself.” He went home with Mr. Burke to supper; and broke his shin by attempting to exhibit to the company how much better he could jump over a stick than the puppets.’
If these incidents had occurred in one of Goldsmith’s plays, they would have been taken, quite rightly, for delicate examples of sly humour. That Goldsmith should make himself ridiculous for his own and the company’s amusement was not intelligible to Boswell. But indeed all Goldsmith’s circle of friends and acquaintances were in a kind of conspiracy to despise him for his simplicity and quaintness. ‘Whenever I write anything,’ Goldsmith once complained, ‘the publick make a point to know nothing about it.’ Whenever he said anything original or quaint, his friends made a point to see in it nothing but childish absurdity. Hawkins is as bad as Boswell. He records some most winning and delightful sayings with angry and contemptuous comments. Here are a few of them:—
He was used to say that he could play on the German-flute as well as most men.
He would frequently preface a story thus:—‘I’ll now tell you a story of myself, which some people laugh at, and some do not.’
In a large company he once said, ‘Yesterday I heard an excellent story, and I would relate it now if I thought any of you able to understand it.’ The company laughed, and one of them said, ‘Doctor, you are very rude;’ but he made no apology.
‘People,’ said he, ‘are greatly mistaken in me: a notion goes about that when I am silent I mean to be impudent; but I assure you, gentlemen, my silence arises from bashfulness.’
The whole problem of Ireland is illustrated in epitome by the commentators on Goldsmith. Johnson, it is true, did justice to him, and even Boswell is constrained to admit that ‘he was often very fortunate in his witty contests, even when he entered the lists with Johnson himself.’ The affair of the little fishes and the whales is narrated by Boswell. Goldsmith had one day said that he believed he could write a good fable, and could make the animals talk in character. ‘For instance (said he), the fable of the little fishes, who saw birds fly over their heads, and envying them, petitioned Jupiter to be changed into birds. The skill (continued he) consists in making them talk like little fishes.’ Johnson laughed at this speech—is it possible he was remembering that fishes cannot talk? But his laughter produced the famous retort—‘if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like WHALES.’
The attitude of his friends to Goldsmith remains a puzzle. Perhaps the solution is that Miss Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls marks a new era in the history of the national intellect, and that few Englishmen, and fewer Scotsmen, before her time, understood that fanciful form of speech, where wisdom masquerades as absurdity. However this may be, it is certain that the misunderstanding of Goldsmith continued long after his death. Samuel Rogers, the poet, made inquiry concerning Goldsmith of William Cook, who has been already mentioned in the list of Johnson’s biographers. Cook was an old man when Rogers met him; he had been acquainted with Goldsmith in his youth. When he was asked what Goldsmith was like in conversation, his answer was prompt. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘he was a fool. The right word never came to him. If you gave him back a bad shilling, he’d say, “Why, it’s as good a shilling as ever was born.” You know he ought to have said coined. Coined, sir, never entered his head. He was a fool, sir.’
From all this it follows that Boswell’s opinion of Goldsmith is hardly of greater value than Carlyle’s opinion of Lamb. ‘A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom-fool,’ wrote Carlyle, ‘I do not know….’ ‘Poor Lamb! Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius!’ Boswell did not pillory himself in quite this zealous fashion, but his treatment of Goldsmith remains the most conspicuous of his errors.
The memories of Johnson preserved by Mrs. Thrale help out the picture of the non-combative side of his character. He lived with the Thrales as a member of their family; he joined in the children’s games, and was not at all offended when, choosing animals as the counterparts of their various acquaintance, they pitched upon the elephant as his resemblance. If Boswell had passed so long a time under the same roof with him, we should doubtless have had a minute account of the course of his daily life. Mrs. Thrale has left us nothing of the kind; she observes the reticence of a hostess, and gives us barely a hint of the domestic problems that must have been presented to her by the habits of her exacting guest. She has been accused of writing her Anecdotes in self-defence, as a kind of apology for the last sad alienation, but there is little enough ground for this charge; her work is the work of a generous temper, and is a credit to her memory. Life at Streatham was at that time life in the country, and she is able to exhibit the sage of Fleet Street in new and unfamiliar attitudes. Johnson rode on Mr. Thrale’s old hunter, which must have been a strong and trustworthy beast, for its rider was heavy and short-sighted. He would follow the hounds fifty miles on end, but would never own himself either tired or amused. His comment on this much-esteemed sport is worthy of the author of Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes. ‘I have now learned,’ said he, ‘by hunting, to perceive that it is no diversion at all, nor ever takes a man out of himself for a moment; the dogs have less sagacity than I could have prevailed on myself to suppose; and the gentlemen often call to me not to ride over them. It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.’
Some of the sayings set down by Mrs. Thrale are a valuable commentary on Johnson’s published opinions. He objects, for instance, in his Preface to Shakespeare, to the extravagant importance often given by the drama to the passion of love; and adds, ‘Love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him.’ This is a hard saying, not quite true perhaps either of Shakespeare or of life. Johnson may have been thinking of the excesses of the Heroic drama. But whenever he is betrayed into a too emphatic statement, the corrective may commonly be found elsewhere among his words and works. A lady at Mrs. Thrale’s house said one day that she would make him talk about love; and took her measures accordingly, deriding the novels of the day because they treated about love. Johnson joined battle in a moment. ‘It is not,’ he said, ‘because they treat, as you call it, about love, but because they treat of nothing, that they are despicable: we must not ridicule a passion which he who never felt never was happy, and he who laughs at never deserves to feel—a passion which has caused the change of empires and the loss of worlds—a passion which has inspired heroism and subdued avarice.’
Perhaps Boswell shows Johnson in too uniformly solemn a light. The seriousness of his own attitude, and his strong predilection for argument on grave topics, may have conduced to this. He must have felt that the whimsical and humorous side of Johnson’s character did not sufficiently appear in the Life, for he appealed to Miss Burney to give him some material of a lighter kind. She was well able to do this, but was thrifty and wise enough to keep what she had for her own use. Doubtless when Boswell saw Johnson talking with great gaiety and pleasantry to Miss Burney, he was disquieted to recognize a vein that was not common in his own discourses with the sage. The other biographers almost all make a point of Johnson’s playfulness. ‘In the talent of humour,’ says Hawkins, ‘there hardly ever was his equal, except perhaps among the old comedians, such as Tarleton, and a few others mentioned by Cibber.’ ‘Dr. Johnson has more fun,’ said Miss Burney, ‘and comical humour, and love of nonsense about him, than almost anybody I ever saw.’ Mr. Murphy, according to Mrs. Thrale, always said that he was incomparable at buffoonery. All this may no doubt be inferred from Boswell’s pages, but is not very fully represented there, so that some of the most fascinating passages of Miss Burney’s Diary surprise us by the novelty of the portrait. Yet the eternal play of fancy in his mind is what gives their originality and delight to most of his sayings. What could be happier than his description of the habit of bustle—‘it is getting on horseback in a ship?’ Or than his remark on education—‘You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done, that they do not delight in your company?’ A sentiment often felt and often expressed will almost always gain vividness and quaintness from Johnson’s rendering of it. He received with contempt, says Mrs. Thrale, the praises of a certain pretty lady’s face and behaviour. ‘She says nothing, sir,’ he replied, ‘a talking blackamoor were better than a white creature who adds nothing to life, and by sitting down before one thus desperately silent, takes away the confidence one should have in the company of her chair, if she were once out of it.’ His criticism of a sermon on Friendship, delivered at ‘the trading end of the town,’ shows the same activity of the faculty that bodies forth the forms of things unseen. ‘Why now,’ he said to Mrs. Thale, '‘is it not strange that a wise man, like our dear little Evans, should take it in his head to preach on such a subject, in a place where no one can be thinking of it?’ ‘Why, what are they thinking upon, sir?’ said she. ‘Why, the men are thinking on their money, I suppose, and the women are thinking of their mops.’
A distinguished psychologist has said that if the stupidest man on earth could be permitted for a moment to have a view of what is passing in the mind of a dog, he would be appalled at the total absence of fancy there. In the play of fancy Johnson excelled the stupid man as much as the stupid man excels the dog. If this power is, as some have thought it, the chief difference between man and beast, it seems natural enough that he who surpassed other men in humanity should have surpassed them also in playfulness of mind.
Yet his fancy always plays about life, like the lightning about a ship. He made no empty jests, nor willingly listened to them. Once he made a pun—or rather, recognized that what he had said was a pun, and accepted the situation. A man was mentioned who anointed himself with oil, after the Greek fashion. ‘This man of Greece,’ said Johnson, alluding to him, ‘or grease, as you please to take it.’ This was a solitary accident. He hated all that tinsel of the mind under which jesters conceal their penury. His conversation is a record of human life and character, or a criticism on it. He paid an almost superstitious regard to exact truth in narration, not from care for his own reputation for veracity, but from a passionate interest in the science of human life, which would be immensely advanced if men would but record their feelings and experiences with minute care. He censured John Wesley for not making careful inquiry into the evidence for a story about a ghost. ‘What, sir!’ said Miss Seward, ‘about a ghost?’ ‘Yes, Madam,’ said Johnson, ‘this is a question which, after five thousand years, is yet undecided; a question, whether in theology or philosophy, one of the most important that can come before the human understanding.’
The best stories that are told of Johnson are not good stories at all, in the ordinary sense; they are specimens of human character. Boswell does not seem to have selected the sayings he records, though his memory would no doubt exercise a certain unconscious choice. He makes use of all he can remember, yet how many must be lost! They can never be recovered, or even guessed at; they were inspired by the circumstances of the case, and are as various as the incidents of human life. No such searching ordeal has ever been applied to any human character with the same result. Everything that Johnson said in conversation during the later part of his life was liable to be recorded for posterity. A merely clever man, talking for reputation, would have crumpled under the test; Johnson has emerged from it unscathed. His truth and his humanity were a match for all they met; so that to lose a year of his commentary on life is to lose a year, not of talk, but of life itself. There is a strange reality about his slightest recorded remark. All the little artifices of mutual self-deceit vanish at his approach. No one ever felt more keenly the death of a friend or relative. ‘The death of my mother,’ he wrote, ten years before it happened, ‘is one of the few calamities on which I think with terror.’ Yet he would not permit others to speak extravagantly of their losses; ‘for,’ said he, ‘we must either outlive our friends, you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no man that would hesitate about the choice.’
What is the virtue of even the most trivial stories concerning Johnson? Their power does not depend on anything exceptional in thought. His verdicts express common tastes, and seem to add value to the facts of every day. He took a gloomy view, sometimes, of the prospects of children when they should come to full age. But girls were less displeasing to him than boys; ‘and he loved (he said) to see a knot of little misses dearly.’ One of the most characteristic of the pictures of him is given us by his friend Edmund Malone, who called on him in his lodging, a year or so before his death. ‘I found him,’ says Malone, ‘in his arm-chair by the fire-side, before which a few apples were laid. He was reading. I asked him what book he had got. He said the History of Birmingham. Local histories, I observed, were generally dull. ‘It is true, sir, but this has a peculiar merit with me; for I passed some of my early years, and married my wife there.’ I supposed the apples were preparing as medicine. ‘Why, no, sir; I believe they are only there because I want something to do. These are some of the solitary expedients to which we are driven by sickness. I have been confined this week past; and here you find me roasting apples, and reading the History of Birmingham.’
Boswell knew Johnson during only a single period of his life—a period of established pre-eminence and prosperity. Even so, he knew him chiefly in one aspect, as the great Cham of literature, taking his ease among his courtiers, and basking in the sunshine of his late-won success. He never knew him as Mrs. Thrale knew him in the every-day round of domestic life; nor as Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds knew him a fellow-craftsman to be treated on terms of equality and brotherhood; nor as Hannah More and Frances Burney knew him—playful, gentle, nonsensical, and protective. Least of all did he know him as Savage knew him—a young and proud man, stoical and ambitious, happy to be the disciple and confidant of an acknowledged poet, who could encourage him in his ideas and schemes for the future. All these, in many ways, knew Johnson better than Boswell knew him. But Boswell has distanced them all, in spite of their advantages, not because he was a fool, as Macaulay thinks, but because he loved Johnson better than they did. The Life is a monument to an affection that was almost a passion. Savage was attentive to Johnson, and patronized him, and borrowed money of him; Mrs. Thrale grew tired, before the end, of the burden of his masterful ways; Goldsmith and Reynolds were companionable and friendly when they met him, and had many other things to think of when he was absent. Boswell was never tired, never preoccupied with other thoughts, never superior to his opportunities. He was faithful, humble, and devoted, so that he has been laughed at for his almost dog-like attachment. But Johnson was worth it; and it is Boswell’s high distinction that he knew that Johnson was worth it. The world is not so constructed that a fool, by sheer force of loquacity and indiscretion, can make a pompous old dogmatist into one of the great live figures of its history. What happened was something very different. A man of profound humanity and conquering intellect lived a private life in London, never seeking public fame or exalted company, content to amuse his leisure hours with the conversation of his friends. So great was the force of his mind and character that he became famous in spite of himself, and his lightest sayings were treasured and chronicled by those about him. But only one of them fully saw what was passing before the eyes of all. Not every one can see a great event while it happens, or a great man while he lives. If Boswell had this power, it was because his mind, naturally quick and curious, was made almost preternaturally sensible by the overwhelming reverence and affection that he felt for Johnson. What a pity it is that neither Swift nor Goldsmith was worshipped as Johnson was worshipped, by a brother in the craft! These had no Boswell. The fate that gave Boswell to Johnson may have been a blind fate. But there is a hidden justice in things, and I suggest that no other so well deserved the tribute. It was not Boswell who made Johnson; it was Johnson who by his wealth of tenderness and sympathy, his understanding of the human situation, its joys and sorrows, awoke in the breast of his own generation a response which, diffused at first, and speaking in many voices, at last gathered strength and definiteness, and expressed itself in the voice of James Boswell.