III.
We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and
Lockhart's "Life" which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the
four big grey volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print
edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." I emphasize the large print,
for that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English
Classics which come now into the market. With subjects which are in
the least archaic or abstruse you need good clear type to help you
on your way. The other is good neither for your eyes nor for your
temper. Better pay a little more and have a book that is made for
use.
That book interests me--fascinates me--and yet I wish I could join
heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully
has enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to "clear
one's mind of cant" upon the subject, for when you have been
accustomed to look at him through the sympathetic glasses of
Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to take them off, to rub one's
eyes, and to have a good honest stare on one's own account at the
man's actual words, deeds, and limitations. If you try it you are
left with the oddest mixture of impressions. How could one express
it save that this is John Bull taken to literature--the exaggerated
John Bull of the caricaturists--with every quality, good or evil,
at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a kindly heart, the
explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the want of
sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness,
the overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle,
and every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who
was the great grandfather of the present good-natured Johnnie.
If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his
huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
the whole world with his hero worship. It was most natural that he
should himself admire him. The relations between the two men were
delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a
safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met,
Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth
year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent
and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation
with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was
bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made
unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between
ordinary father and son. Up to the end this was the unbroken
relation between them.
It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but
it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the
language. He had some great and rare literary qualities. One was
a clear and vivid style, more flexible and Saxon than that of his
great model. Another was a remarkable discretion which hardly once
permitted a fault of taste in this whole enormous book where he must
have had to pick his steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They
say that he was a fool and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so
with a pen in his hand. Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson,
where he ventured some little squeak of remonstrance, before the
roaring "No, sir!" came to silence him, there are few in which his
views were not, as experience proved, the wiser. On the question
of slavery he was in the wrong. But I could quote from memory at
least a dozen cases, including such vital subjects as the American
Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious Toleration, and so on,
where Boswell's views were those which survived.
But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those
little things that you want to know. How often you read the life of
a man and are left without the remotest idea of his personality. It
is not so here. The man lives again. There is a short description
of Johnson's person--it is not in the Life, but in the Tour to the
Hebrides, the very next book upon the shelf, which is typical of
his vivid portraiture. May I take it down, and read you a paragraph
of it?--
"His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the
gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance
was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat
disfigured by the scars of King's evil. He was now in his
sixty-fourth year and was become a little dull of hearing. His
sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so much does mind
govern and even supply the deficiencies of organs that his
perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and
sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like
the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed
by cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that
distemper called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full suit of
plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same
colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted
stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets
which might almost have held the two volumes of his folio
dictionary, and he carried in his hand a large English oak
stick."
You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
that it is not Mr. Boswell's fault--and it is but one of a dozen
equally vivid glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just
these pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts
and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and
his tricks with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate
the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than
his writings could have done.
For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life
to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely--that stilted romance. "The Lives of
the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of
ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary,
a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable
to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to
the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with a number of political
and other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely it
must be admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant
place in English literature, and that we must turn to his humble,
much-ridiculed biographer for the real explanation.
And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such
distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this
is a sign of a narrow finality--impossible to the man of sympathy
and of imagination, who sees the other side of every question and
understands what a little island the greatest human knowledge must
be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which surround us. Look at
the results. Did ever any single man, the very dullest of the race,
stand convicted of so many incredible blunders? It recalls the
remark of Bagehot, that if at any time the views of the most learned
could be stamped upon the whole human race the result would be
to propagate the most absurd errors. He was asked what became of
swallows in the winter. Rolling and wheezing, the oracle answered:
"Swallows," said he, "certainly sleep all the winter. A number of
them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all
in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a
river." Boswell gravely dockets the information. However, if I
remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of Selborne
had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are Johnson's
misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one would
have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
would seem monstrous to a modern taste. "Shakespeare," he said,
"never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit
two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad
ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's
"Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything
good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was
a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be
honest men.
And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I
suppose even in those days they were reactionary. "A poor man has no
honour." "Charles the Second was a good King." "Governments should
turn out of the Civil Service all who were on the other side."
"Judges in India should be encouraged to trade." "No country is the
richer on account of trade." (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the
company when this proposition was laid down!) "A landed proprietor
should turn out those tenants who did not vote as he wished." "It is
not good for a labourer to have his wages raised." "When the balance
of trade is against a country, the margin must be paid in current
coin." Those were a few of his convictions.
And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion.
In our more generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider
those of Johnson! When they were all eliminated there was not so
very much left. He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He detested
Nonconformists (a young lady who joined them was "an odious wench").
He loathed Americans. So he walked his narrow line, belching fire
and fury at everything to the right or the left of it. Macaulay's
posthumous admiration is all very well, but had they met in life
Macaulay would have contrived to unite under one hat nearly
everything that Johnson abominated.
It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong
principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal
interests demanded it. This is one of the weak points of his record.
In his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by
which the State imposed slavery upon hirelings. When he wrote the
unfortunate definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable
contingency, but when George III., either through policy or charity,
offered him one a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting
it. One would have liked to feel that the violent expression of his
convictions represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts
in this instance seem against it.
He was a great talker--but his talk was more properly a monologue.
It was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from
his subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man
who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most
vital questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views,
or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common
ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he
could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: "If his
pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."
In the face of that "rhinoceros laugh" there was an end of gentle
argument. Napoleon said that all the other kings would say "Ouf!"
when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that the
older men of Johnson's circle must have given a sigh of relief when
at last they could speak freely on that which was near their hearts,
without the danger of a scene where "Why, no, sir!" was very likely
to ripen into "Let us have no more on't!" Certainly one would like
to get behind Boswell's account, and to hear a chat between such
men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the difference in the freedom and
atmosphere of the Club on an evening when the formidable Doctor was
not there, as compared to one when he was.
No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not
make due allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and
early middle age. His spirit was as scarred as his face. He was
fifty-three when the pension was given him, and up to then his
existence had been spent in one constant struggle for the first
necessities of life, for the daily meal and the nightly bed. He had
seen his comrades of letters die of actual privation. From childhood
he had known no happiness. The half blind gawky youth, with dirty
linen and twitching limbs, had always, whether in the streets of
Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the coffee-houses of
London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement. With a proud
and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have brought some
bitter humiliation. Such an experience must either break a man's
spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that
roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which
caused Boswell's father to christen him "Ursa Major." If his nature
was in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had
gone to the rending of it. His good was innate, his evil the result
of a dreadful experience.
And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He
had read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not
merely in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read,
but with every particular of place and date. If it were poetry, he
could quote it by the page, Latin or English. Such a memory has its
enormous advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect.
With the mind so crammed with other people's goods, how can you have
room for any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I
think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other
exceptions. The slate must be clear before you put your own writing
upon it. When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when
did he ever reach forward into the future, or throw any fresh light
upon those enigmas with which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the
past, he had space for nothing else. Modern developments of every
sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France
a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world has ever
known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once
responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible
around him. We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him
over his brewery and supplied him with statistics as to his output
of beer. It was the same foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the
drums to drown Louis' voice at the scaffold. The association shows
how near the unconscious sage was to the edge of that precipice and
how little his learning availed him in discerning it.
He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would
think, could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In
either case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent
sense of piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top.
His brain, working within its own limitations, was remarkable. There
is no more wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of
Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the
Scotch judges. That an outsider with no special training should at
short notice write such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and
reason, is, I think, as remarkable a tour de force as literature can
show.
Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must
count for much. His was a large charity, and it came from a small
purse. The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge
in which several strange battered hulks found their last moorings.
There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams,
and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing--a trying
group amid which to spend one's days. His guinea was always ready
for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might
not preface his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous
sentences bore the hall-mark of their maker. It is the rough,
kindly man, the man who bore the poor street-walker home upon his
shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least forgive, the dogmatic
pedantic Doctor of the Club.
There is always to me something of interest in the view which a
great man takes of old age and death. It is the practical test of
how far the philosophy of his life has been a sound one. Hume saw
death afar, and met it with unostentatious calm. Johnson's mind
flinched from that dread opponent. His letters and his talk during
his latter years are one long cry of fear. It was not cowardice, for
physically he was one of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived.
There were no limits to his courage. It was spiritual diffidence,
coupled with an actual belief in the possibilities of the other
world, which a more humane and liberal theology has done something
to soften. How strange to see him cling so desperately to that crazy
body, with its gout, its asthma, its St. Vitus' dance, and its six
gallons of dropsy! What could be the attraction of an existence
where eight hours of every day were spent groaning in a chair, and
sixteen wheezing in a bed? "I would give one of these legs," said
he, "for another year of life." None the less, when the hour did
at last strike, no man could have borne himself with more simple
dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent him how
you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without getting
some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some insight
into human learning or character, which should leave you a better
and a wiser man.
