corporeal actions have any correspondence with theological truth, he did not see how they could enforce it.’ Perhaps the best example of this fixed distaste for demonstrative emotion may be found in his contempt for the actor’s profession. It is dangerous to quarrel with Boswell, but it seems to me impossible to accept his suggestion that Johnson’s opinions concerning stage-players had their origin in jealousy of the success of Garrick. Such jealousy is utterly unlike all that we know of Johnson. On the other hand, a hatred of show and a fierce resentment at the response of his own feelings to cunningly simulated passion are exactly what we should expect in him. The passages in which he has expressed himself on this matter are too many and too various to be attributed to a gust of personal ill-feeling. One of the most delightful of them occurs in his notes on the character of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘Bottom,’ he says, ‘seems to have been bred in a tiring-room. He is for engrossing every part, and would exclude his inferiors from all possibility of distinction.’ Again, ‘Bottom discovers a true genius for the stage by his solicitude for propriety of dress, and his deliberation which beard to choose among many beards, all unnatural.’
The sonorous and ponderous rotundity of Johnson’s style, and the unfailing respect that he pays to law and decorum, have partly concealed from view the wilfulness of his native temper. Obedience to law imposed from without can never be the soul of a man or of a writer. It is the converted rebels who give power to the arm of government. If there has ever been a writer of a sober, slow, and conforming temper, who has left memorable work behind him, it will be found, I think, that for the
