IV
JOHNSON ON SHAKESPEARE
The history of Johnson’s dealings with Shakespeare extends over the greater part of his working life. An edition of Shakespeare was the earliest of his larger literary schemes. In 1745, when he was earning a scanty living by work for the booksellers, he published a pamphlet entitled Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with remarks on Sir T. H.’s (Sir Thomas Hanmer’s) Edition of Shakespeare. To this pamphlet, says Boswell, he affixed proposals for a new edition by himself. Then he was discouraged, and changed his mind. When he first thought of editing Shakespeare, he believed that he had only Rowe and Pope and Theobald to contend with and to supersede. But while his notes on Macbeth were in the press, Hanmer’s edition appeared, and it became known to him that the great Warburton was engaged on the same task. Johnson allowed the specimen of his projected edition to go forward, but issued only a bare advertisement of his scheme. The proposals of 1756 cannot have been written at this earlier date, for in them Johnson speaks, with a certain pride, of his labours on the Dictionary. ‘With regard,’ he says, ‘to obsolete or peculiar diction, the editor may perhaps claim some degree of confidence, having had more motives to consider the whole extent of our language than any other man from its first formation.’ But the Dictionary was not planned until the scheme for an edition of Shakespeare had broken down. It was necessary for Johnson, if he was to raise himself above the crowd of venal writers, to inscribe his name on some large monument of scholarship. Shakespeare was his first choice; when, perhaps through the timidity of the booksellers, that failed him, he turned his attention to Shakespeare’s language, and in 1747 issued the Plan for a Dictionary, which he addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield.
The Dictionary was finished in 1755, and Johnson, compelled to find some new means of livelihood, returned to Shakespeare. Warburton’s edition had in the meantime been added to the list of his rivals, but his own confidence had increased and his fame was established. The Proposals for Printing the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, which he issued in 1756, are magnificent in their range and discernment. The whole duty of a Shakespearian commentator and critic is here, for the first time, expounded. The complete collation of the early editions; the tracing of Shakespeare’s knowledge to its sources; the elucidation of obscurities by a careful study of the language and customs of Shakespeare’s time; the comparison of Shakespeare’s work with that of other great poets, ancient and modern—all this and more is promised in the Proposals. He seems to have hoped that his edition would be final, and in order to give it that character he promised to reprint all that seemed valuable in the notes of earlier commentators. The whole project breathes that warm air of imagination in which authors design extensive and laborious works. It is possible, but not likely, that he set to work at once on the edition. He originally promised that it should be published in December, 1757. When December came, he mentioned March, 1758, as the date of publication. In March he said that he should publish before summer. On June 27 of the same year Dr. Grainger wrote to Percy, ‘I have several times called on Johnson to pay him part of your subscription. I say, part, because he never thinks of working, if he has a couple of guineas in his pocket; but if you notwithstanding order me, the whole shall be given him at once.’ Perhaps it was after one of these calls that Johnson, stimulated to unusual effort, wrote to Thomas Warton, on June 1, 1758, ‘Have you any more notes on Shakespeare? I shall be glad of them.’ Five years later a young bookseller waited on him with a subscription, and modestly asked that the subscriber’s name should be inserted in the printed list. ‘I shall print no list of subscribers;’ said Johnson, with great abruptness: then, more complacently, ‘Sir, I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of subscribers;—one, that I have lost all the names,—the other, that I have spent all the money.’ This magnanimous confession almost bears out the charge brought against him by Churchill in his satire, The Ghost, published in the spring of 1762:—
He for subscribers baits his hook,
And takes their cash; but where’s the book?
No matter where; wise fear, we know,
Forbids the robbing of a foe;
But what, to serve our private ends,
Forbids the cheating of our friends?
There was no evidence that Johnson was in any way perturbed by Churchill’s attack, yet it was the means of hastening the long-deferred edition. ‘His friends,’ says Hawkins, ‘more concerned for his reputation than himself seemed to be, contrived to entangle him by a wager, or some other pecuniary engagement, to perform his task within a certain time.’ In 1764 and 1765, according to Boswell’s account, he was so busily engaged with the edition as to have little leisure for any other literary exertion. That is to say, he worked at it intermittently, and satisfied his conscience, after the manner of authors, by working at nothing else. In October, 1765, at last appeared The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added Notes by Sam. Johnson. He had spent nine years on the work, but a longer delay would have been amply justified by the Preface alone, which Adam Smith styled ‘the most manly piece of criticism that was ever published in any country.’
There is nothing singular or strange in this chapter of literary history. The promises of authors are like the vows of lovers; made in moments of careless rapture, and subject, during the long process of fulfilment, to all kinds of unforeseen dangers and difficulties. Of these difficulties Johnson has left his own account in the Life of Pope. ‘Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure,’ he says, ‘all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against time has an antagonist not subject to casualties.’ Something steadier and more habitual than the fervour of the projecting imagination is required to carry through a long piece of editorial work. This more constant motive was supplied to Johnson by necessity. He did not pretend to write for pleasure. In a letter to his friend Hector, announcing the new edition of Shakespeare, he says: ‘The proposals and receipts may be had from my mother, to whom I beg you to send for as many as you can dispose of, and to remit to her the money which you or your acquaintances shall collect.’ In January, 1759, his mother died, and he wrote Rasselas in the evenings of one week, to defray the expenses of her funeral and to pay some little debts which she had left. The famous saying, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ may thus be regarded as the voice of his own hard experience, but it is something more than that. It is Johnson’s brief and epigrammatic statement of the unvarying relation between author and publisher. Though it has been cried out against as a wilful paradox, it is the creed of the professional author in all countries and at all times. Young poets may be satisfied with fame, rich amateurs with elegance, missionaries and reformers with influence. But the publisher who should depend for his livelihood on the labours of these three classes would be in a poor way, and indeed, if publishers would communicate to the world an account of their intimate transactions, they could tell how the author who is content with reputation for his first book talks of nothing but money when he comes to proffer his second. He has learnt wisdom. The vanity of authors, encouraged by the modesty of their employers and the superstition of the public, has imposed a kind of religious jargon on a purely commercial operation. If there are qualities in literature which are above price, these are also to be found in the world of manufacture and finance in that huge pyramid of loyalty which is modern industry, and that vast network of fidelity which is modern commerce. Yet iron-founders and cotton-brokers do not, in discussing the operations of their profoundly beneficent trades, express themselves wholly in terms of genius and virtue.
The later history of Johnson’s Shakespeare is soon told. It was received, says Boswell, ‘with high approbation by the publick,’ and after passing into a second edition, was in 1773 republished by George Steevens, ‘a gentleman not only deeply skilled in ancient learning, and of very extensive reading in English literature, especially the early writers, but at the same time of acute discernment and elegant taste.’ Dr. Birkbeck Hill throws some doubt on Steevens’ claims to taste. It was Steevens who praised Garrick for producing Hamlet with alterations, ‘rescuing that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act;’ and who recommended that the condemned passages should be presented, as a kind of epilogue, in a farce to be entitled The Grave-Diggers; with the pleasant Humours of Osric, the Danish Macaroni. But Steevens deserves praise for his antiquarian industry and knowledge. To procure all possible assistance Johnson wrote letters to Dr. Farmer of Emmanuel College and to both the Wartons. He was frequently consulted by Steevens, but the extent of his own contributions is best stated by himself in his letter to Farmer: ‘I have done very little to the book.’ He never took kindly to the labours of revision; and his first edition remains the authoritative text of his criticism.
His work on Shakespeare gave Johnson as good an opportunity as he ever enjoyed for exercising what he believed to be his chief literary talent. ‘There are two things,’ he once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion showing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the authour promised to himself and to the publick.’ The first of these things he did to admiration in his Proposals; the second he attempts in some parts of his Preface. It is plain that he had not been able to do as much as he had hoped by way of restoration and illustration, but it is no less plain that he took pleasure in the accomplished work. Macaulay’s statement that ‘it would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless, edition of any great classic,’ has nothing but emphasis to commend it. Its author was the inventor of that other tedious paradox, that Johnson’s mind was a strange composite of giant powers and low prejudices.[1] A wiser man than Macaulay, James Boswell, had already answered Macaulay’s condemnation, which is even better answered in Johnson’s own words: ‘I have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the whole work has appeared to me corrupt, which I have not endeavoured to restore; or obscure, which I have not endeavoured to illustrate. In many I have failed like others; and from many, after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse.’ Johnson is the most punctiliously truthful of all English writers, and from this statement there is no appeal. If his notes are not so considerable in bulk as those of some of his fellow critics it is because he had not, like Warburton, ‘a rage for saying something when there was nothing to be said.’ It is true that his knowledge of Elizabethan literature and Elizabethan manners cannot compare with the knowledge of Theobald before him or of Malone after him. It is true also that he undertook no special course of study with a view to his edition. He had read immensely for the Dictionary, but the knowledge of the English language which he had thus acquired was not always serviceable for a different purpose. In some respects it was even a hindrance. Johnson’s Dictionary was intended primarily to furnish a standard of polite usage, suitable for the classic ideals of the new age. He was therefore obliged to forego the use of the lesser Elizabethans, whose authority no one acknowledged, and whose freedom and extravagance were enemies to his purpose. But for all this, and even in the explanation of archaic modes of expression, he can hold his own with the best of his rivals and successors. Most of the really difficult passages in Shakespeare are obscure not from the rarity of the words employed, but from the confused and rapid syntax. Johnson’s strong grasp of the main thread of the discourse, his sound sense, and his wide knowledge of humanity, enable him, in a hundred passages, to go straight to Shakespeare’s meaning, while the philological and antiquarian commentators kill one another in the dark, or bury all dramatic life under the far-fetched spoils of their learning. A reader of the new Variorum edition of Shakespeare soon falls into the habit, when he meets with an obscure passage, of consulting Johnson’s note before the others. Whole pages of complicated dialectic and minute controversy are often rendered useless by the few brief sentences which recall the reader’s attention to the main drift, or remind him of some perfectly obvious circumstance.
It must not be forgotten that Johnson was, after all, a master of the English language. He was not an Elizabethan specialist, but his brief account of the principal causes of Shakespeare’s obscurities has never been bettered. Some of these obscurities are due to the surreptitious and careless manner of publication; some to the shifting fashions, and experimental licence of Elizabethan English. In a few terse sentences Johnson adds an account of those other obscurities which belong to the man rather than to the age. ‘If Shakespeare has difficulties above other writers, it is to be imputed to the nature of his work, which required the use of common colloquial language, and consequently admitted many phrases allusive, elliptical and proverbial;… to which might be added the fullness of idea, which might sometimes load his words with more sentiment than they could conveniently carry, and that rapidity of imagination which might hurry him to a second thought before he had fully explained the first. But my opinion is, that very few of his lines were difficult to his audience, and that he used such expressions as were then common, though the paucity of contemporary writers makes them now seem peculiar.’ Let this be compared with what Coleridge, nearly eighty years later, has to say on the same question: ‘Shakespeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him…. I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence.’ In so far as Coleridge seems to allude to Shakespeare’s very characteristic style, his remarks are true. In so far as he is speaking of the wider problem of language, the verdict of modern Shakespearian scholars is wholly on Johnson’s side.
These extracts from two great critics are here compared because they show that Johnson’s work on Shakespeare has not been superseded. He has been neglected and depreciated ever since the nineteenth century brought in the new aesthetic and philosophical criticism. The twentieth century, it seems likely, will treat him more respectfully. The romantic attitude begins to be fatiguing. The great romantic critics, when they are writing at their best, do succeed in communicating to the reader those thrills of wonder and exaltation which they have felt in contact with Shakespeare’s imaginative work. This is not a little thing to do; but it cannot be done continuously, and it has furnished the workaday critic with a vicious model. There is a taint of insincerity about romantic criticism, from which not even the great romantics are free. They are never in danger from the pitfalls that waylay the plodding critic; but they are always falling upward, as it were, into vacuity. They love to lose themselves in an O altitudo. From the most worthless material they will fashion a new hasty altar to the unknown God. When they are inspired by their divinity they say wonderful things; when the inspiration fails them their language is maintained at the same height, and they say more than they feel. You can never be sure of them.
Those who approach the study of Shakespeare under the sober and vigorous guidance of Johnson will meet with fewer exciting adventures, but they will not see less of the subject. They will hear the greatness of Shakespeare discussed in language so quiet and modest as to sound tame in ears accustomed to hyperbole, but they will not, unless they are very dull or very careless, fall into the error of supposing that Johnson’s admiration for Shakespeare was cold or partial. ‘This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.’ The great moments of Shakespeare’s drama had thrilled and excited Johnson from his boyhood up. When he was nine years old, and was reading Hamlet alone in his father’s kitchen, the ghost scene made him hurry upstairs to the street door, that he might see people about him, and be saved from the terrors of imagination. Perhaps he remembered this early experience when he wrote, in his notes on Macbeth—‘He that peruses Shakespeare looks round alarmed, and starts to find himself alone.’ In his mature age he could not bear to read the closing scenes of King Lear and Othello. His notes on some of Shakespeare’s minor characters, as, for instance, his delightful little biographical comment on the words ‘Exit Pistol,’ in King Henry V., show with what keenness of zest he followed the incidents of the drama and with what sympathy he estimated the persons.[2] It is difficult to find a meaning for those who assert that Johnson was insensible to what he himself called ‘the transcendent and unbounded genius’ of Shakespeare.
His Preface was not altogether pleasing to idolaters of Shakespeare even in his own age. It was virulently attacked, and although he published no reply, his defence of himself is expressed in a letter to Charles Burney. ‘We must confess the faults of our favourite,’ he says, ‘to gain credit to our praise of his excellencies. He that claims, either in himself or for another, the honours of perfection, will surely injure the reputation which he designs to assist.’ The head and front of Johnson’s offending was that he wrote and spoke of Shakespeare as one man may fitly speak of another. He claimed for himself the citizenship of that republic in which Shakespeare is admittedly pre-eminent; and dared to enumerate Shakespeare’s faults. The whole tale of these, as they are catalogued by Johnson, might be ranged under two heads—carelessness, and excess of conceit. It would be foolish to deny these charges: the only possible reply to them is that Shakespeare’s faults are never defects; they belong to superabundant power—power not putting forth its full resources even in the crisis of events; or power neglecting the task in hand to amuse itself with irresponsible display. The faults are of a piece with the virtues; and Johnson as good as admits this when he says that they are ‘sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.’ None but Shakespeare, that is to say, could move easily and triumphantly under the weight of Shakespeare’s faults. The detailed analysis of the faults is a fine piece of criticism, and has never been seriously challenged.
A deep-lying cause, not very easy to explain, which has interfered with the modern appreciation of Johnson, is to be found in the difference between the criticism of his day and the criticism which is now addressed to a large and ignorant audience. He assumed in his public a fair measure of knowledge and judgement; he ventured to take many things for granted, and to discuss knotty points as a man might discuss them in the society of his friends and equals. He was not always successful in his assumptions, and more than once had to complain of the stupidity which imagined him to deny the truths that he honoured with silence. When he quoted the description of the temple, in Congreve’s Mourning Bride, as being superior in its kind to anything in Shakespeare, he encountered a storm of protest, the echoes of which persist to this day. His answer to Garrick’s objections deserves a wider application: ‘Sir, this is not comparing Congreve on the whole with Shakespeare on the whole; but only maintaining that Congreve has one finer passage than any that can be found in Shakespeare. Sir, a man may have no more than ten guineas in the world, but he may have those ten guineas in one piece; and so may have a finer piece than a man who has ten thousand pounds: but then he has only one ten-guinea piece. What I mean is, that you can shew me no passage where there is simply a description of material objects, without any intermixture of moral notions, which produces such an effect.’ A few days later, in conversation with Boswell, he again talked of the passage in Congreve, and said, ‘Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion. If I come to an orchard, and say there’s no fruit here, and then comes a poring man, who finds two apples and three pears, and tells me, “Sir, you are mistaken, I have found both apples and pears,” I should laugh at him: what would that be to the purpose?’ Johnson is not attacking Shakespeare; he is assuming his greatness, and helping to define it by combating popular follies. He knew well that Shakespeare towers above the greatest writers of the correct school. ‘Corneille is to Shakespeare,’ he once said, ‘as a clipped hedge is to a forest.’ But he had small patience with the critics who would have everything for their idol, and who claimed for the forest all the symmetry and neatness of the hedge. ‘These fellows,’ he said, ‘know not how to blame, nor how to commend.’
In these and such-like passages we hear Johnson talking in language suitable enough for a literary club. There is nothing sectarian about his praise; he speaks as an independent man of letters, and will not consent to be sealed of the tribe of Shakespeare. Modern criticism is seldom so free and intimate; it has more the tone of public exposition and laudation; it seeks to win souls to Shakespeare’s poetry, and, for fear of misunderstanding, avoids the mention of his faults. It is always willing to suppose that Shakespeare had good and sufficient reason for what he wrote, and seldom permits itself the temerity of Johnson, who points out, for instance, what decency and probability require in the closing act of All’s Well that Ends Well, and adds: ‘Of all this Shakespeare could not be ignorant, but Shakespeare wanted to conclude his play.’
It would not be difficult to show that much new light has been thrown on parts of Shakespeare’s work by the more reverential treatment. Yet perhaps it has obscured as much as it has elucidated. So fixed a habit of appreciation is the death of individuality and taste. Discipleship is a necessary stage in the study of any great poet; it is not a necessary qualification of the mature critic. The acclamation of his following is not so honourable a tribute to a prize-fighter as the respect of his antagonist. In a certain sense Johnson was antagonistic to Shakespeare. His own taste in tragedy may be learned from his note on the scene between Queen Katherine and her attendants at the close of Act IV. of Henry VIII.: ‘This scene is, above any other part of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps above any scene of any other poet, tender and pathetick, without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the help of romantick circumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation, and without any throes of tumultuous misery.’ But although this describes the kind of drama that Johnson preferred, he can praise, in words that have become a commonplace of criticism, the wildness of romance in The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and can enumerate and admire the ‘touches of Judgement and genius’ which add horror to the incantation of the witches in Macbeth. Like all great critics, he can understand the excellences of opposite kinds. Indeed, in his defence of Shakespeare’s neglect of the unities he passes over to the side of the enemy, and almost becomes a romantic.[3]
The history of Shakespeare criticism would be shorter than it is if Johnson’s views on the emendation of the text had been more extensively adopted. ‘It has been my settled principle,’ he says, ‘that the reading of the ancient books is probably true, and therefore is not to be disturbed for the sake of elegance, perspicuity, or mere improvements of the sense…. As I practised conjecture more, I learned to trust it less; and after I had printed a few plays, resolved to insert none of my own readings in the text. Upon this caution I now congratulate myself, for every day encreases my doubt of my emendations.’ A good part of his work on the text consisted in restoring the original readings in place of the plausible conjectures of Pope and Warburton. Yet he sometimes pays to their readings a respect which he would not challenge for his own, and retains them in the text. He adopts Warburton’s famous reading in the speech of Hamlet to Polonius:—‘If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion’—and remarks on it, ‘This is a noble emendation, which almost sets the critick on a level with the authour.’ Admiration for Warburton’s ingenuity caused him to break his own rule, which is sound, and should never be broken. The original reading—‘a good kissing carrion’—has a meaning; and therefore, on Johnson’s principle should stand. Its meaning, moreover, is better suited to Hamlet and to Shakespeare than the elaborate mythological argument implied in Warburton’s emendation. If the ‘good kissing carrion’ be understood by the common analogy of ‘good drinking water’ or ‘good eating apples,’ the grimness of the thought exactly falls in with Hamlet’s utter disaffection to humanity. ‘Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive.’ To bring the amended reading into relation with Hamlet’s thought Warburton is compelled to write a most elaborate disquisition; and Johnson might have remembered and applied his own warning: ‘I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.’
Johnson’s treatment of his predecessors and rivals is uniformly generous; he never attempts to raise his own credit on their mistakes and extravagance. Once, when a lady at Miss Hannah More’s house talked of his preface to Shakespeare as superior to Pope’s: ‘I fear not, Madam,’ said he, ‘the little fellow has done wonders.’ Hanmer he speaks of as ‘a man, in my opinion, eminently qualified by nature for such studies.’ Warburton was fated to suffer at his hands more than any other commentator, but it is plain from the Preface that he had a grateful remembrance of Warburton’s kindness to the early Observations on Macbeth. ‘He praised me,’ Johnson once said, ‘at a time when praise was of value to me.’ Such praise Johnson never forgot; but he did not allow it to bias his work as a critic. It may be said that he unduly exalts Warburton at the expense of Theobald (‘O, Sir, he’d make two-and-fifty Theobalds, cut into slices’), but it was not only personal gratitude which dictated that judgement. Theobald was, without doubt, a better scholar and a better editor than Warburton: there can be no question which of the two has done more for the text of Shakespeare. But Warburton was a man of large general powers, who wrote an easy and engaging style. His long, fantastic, unnecessary notes on Shakespeare are, almost without exception, good reading; which is more than can be said of Theobald’s. Johnson’s regard for the dignity of letters made him too severe on one who was destitute of the literary graces. Modern opinion has reinstated Theobald, and is inclined to adopt Foote’s, rather than Johnson’s, opinion of Warburton. When Foote visited Eton, the boys came round him in the college quadrangle. ‘Tell us, Mr. Foote,’ said the leader, ‘the best thing you ever said.’ ‘Why,’ said Foote, ‘I once saw a little blackguard imp of a chimney-sweeper, mounted on a noble steed, prancing and curvetting in all the pride and magnificence of nature,—There, said I, goes Warburton upon Shakespeare.’
Johnson himself would not have been ready to allow any weight to the critical opinions of stage-players. One of his heterodox opinions, says Boswell, was a contempt for tragic acting. In The Idler he describes the Indian war-cry, and continues: ‘I am of opinion that by a proper mixture of asses, bulls, turkeys, geese, and tragedians a noise might be procured equally horrid with the war-cry.’ He was more than once reproached by Boswell for omitting all mention of Garrick in the Preface to Shakespeare, but he was not to be moved. ‘Has Garrick not brought Shakespeare into notice?’ asked Boswell. ‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘to allow that would be to lampoon the age. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are the worse for being acted: Macbeth, for instance.’ This was the belief also of Charles Lamb, who expounded it in his essay On the Tragedies of Shakespeare. ‘There is something in the nature of acting,’ he concludes, ‘which levels all distinctions…. Did not Garrick shine, and was he not ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced—the productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns—and shall he have the honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind!’ It is a strange kind of heresy that is the fixed belief of two such critics as Johnson and Lamb.
But let it be a heresy; one of the chief fascinations of Johnson’s notes on Shakespeare is that they introduce us to not a few of his private heretical opinions, and record some of his most casual reminiscences. We are enabled to trace his reading in the Life of Sir Thomas More, and in Sir Walter Raleigh’s political remains, and in the fashionable guide to conversation translated from the French of Scudery. We learn some things which Boswell does not tell us; some even (if a bold thought may be indulged) which Boswell did not know. We are introduced in the Life to Johnson’s cat Hodge, for whom Johnson used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. But we are not told, what is proved by a note on Cymbeline, that Johnson passionately protested against physiological experiments on live animals.[4] Again, is it not certain that Boswell, if he had known it, would have told us that his hero wore his boots indifferently, either on either foot, and further, which is yet a stranger thing, believed that all other boot-wearers practise the same impartiality? Boswell can hardly have known this; yet Johnson’s note on the tailor in King John, who, in his haste, falsely thrusts his slippers upon contrary feet, leaves no room for doubt. ‘Shakespeare,’ says Johnson, ‘seems to have confounded a man’s shoes with his gloves. He that is frighted or hurried may put his hand into the wrong glove, but either shoe will equally admit either foot. The authour seems to be disturbed by the disorder which he describes.’ This is a topic which demands, and would well repay, the expert labours of academic research. Very little is known about Johnson’s boots.
A great part of an editor’s work is in its nature perishable. Some of his notes are in time superseded; some are shown to be wrong; some are accepted and embodied in the common stock of knowledge. Of all Johnson’s annotations on Shakespeare those which record his own tastes and habits have preserved most of freshness and interest. It is a privilege to be able to hear him talking without the intervention of Boswell; we can in some ways come closer to him when that eager presence is removed. It is the greatness of Boswell’s achievement that he has made Johnson familiar to us; but the very zeal and reverence of the biographer inevitably infect the reader, who is admitted to the intimacies of a man of companionable genius as if to a shrine. Boswell made of biography a passionate science; and viewed his hero in a detached light. Nothing hurt him so much as the implication that any single detail or remark of his recording was inaccurately or carelessly set down. His self-abnegation is complete; where he permits himself to appear it is only that he may exhibit his subject to greater advantage. He invented the experimental method, and applied it to the determination of human character. At great expenditure of time and forethought he brought Johnson into strange company, the better to display his character and behaviour. He plied him with absurd questions, in the hope of receiving valuable answers. All this was not the conduct of a friend, but of a remorseless investigator. And when to this is added Boswell’s spirit of humble adoration, it is easy to understand how the whole process has made Johnson clear indeed in every outline, but a little too remote. His eccentricities take up too much of the picture, so that to the vulgar intelligence he has always seemed something of a monster. Even those who love Johnson fall too easily into Boswell’s attitude, and observe, and listen, and wonder. It is good to remember that the dictator, when he was in a happy vein, was, above most men, sensible, courteous, and friendly. The best of his notes on Shakespeare, like the best of his spoken remarks, invite discussion and quicken thought. What a conversation might have been started at the club by his brief observation on Gaunt’s speech in Richard II.:
Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow,
And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow.
‘It is matter of very melancholy consideration,’ says Johnson, ‘that all human advantages confer more power of doing evil than good.’ No doubt the reflection is highly characteristic of its author, but we are too much accustomed to let our interest in the character overshadow our interest in the truth. Johnson’s talk was free from self-consciousness; but Boswell, when he was in the room, was conscious of one person only, so that a kind of self-consciousness by proxy is the impression conveyed. There is no greater enemy to the freedom and delight of social intercourse than the man who is always going back on what has just been said, to praise its cleverness, to guess its motive, or to show how it illustrates the character of the speaker. Boswell was not, of course, guilty of this particular kind of ill-breeding; but the very necessities of his record produce something of a like effect. The reader who desires to have Johnson to himself for an hour, with no interpreter, cannot do better than turn to the notes on Shakespeare. They are written informally and fluently; they are packed full of observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that they are all too few.
- ↑ ‘Perhaps the lightness of the matter may conduce to the vehemence of the agency; when the truth to be investigated is so near to inexistence, as to escape attention, its bulk is to be enlarged by rage and exclamation.’—Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare.
- ↑ ‘The comick scenes of the history of Henry the fourth and fifth are now at an end, and all the comick personages are now dismissed. Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly are dead; Nym and Bardolph are hanged; Gadshill was lost immediately after the robbery; Poins and Peto have vanished since, one knows not how; and Pistol is now beaten into obscurity. I believe every reader regrets their departure.’
- ↑ The transformation was completed after his death. I am indebted to Mr. W. P. Ker for pointing out to me that Henri Beyle in his Racine el Shakespeare (1822) translates all that Johnson says on the unities, and appropriates it as the manifesto of the young romantics. ‘But he told not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.’
- ↑ Act i., Scene vii. (i. v. 18–24):
‘Queen.I will try the forces
Of these thy compounds on such creatures as
We count not worth the hanging, but none human…
Cornelius.Your Highness
Shall from this practice but make hard your heart.
There is in this passage nothing that much requires a note, yet I cannot forbear to push it forward into observation. The thought would probably have been more amplified, had our authour lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been published in later times, by a race of men that have practised tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings.Cape saxa manu, cape robora, pastor.’