Six Essays on Johnson/Essay 2
II
ON THE TWO-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF JOHNSON’S BIRTH
SEPTEMBER 18, 1909.
The two hundred years that have passed since Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield have given him a secure and unique position in the affections of his countrymen. He has almost become the tutelary genius of the English people. He embodies all that we most admire in ourselves. When we pretend to laugh at our national character, we call it John Bull; when we wish to glorify it, we call it Samuel Johnson. There have been greater writers among the English, but none of them would be so readily accepted as a public trustee. The supremacy of Shakespeare is not to be challenged, but Shakespeare is too great, too catholic, and, when all is said, too unintelligible, to stand for the typical Englishman. Moreover, Shakespeare is first of all a poet; his business is a kind of universal sympathy; and we do not know how to count on the man who exercised a faculty so illimitable and so chameleon-like. Johnson was an author almost by accident; it is the man who is dear to us, the man with all his dogmatic prejudices, his stoical courage, his profound melancholy, his hatred of sentimental palliatives, his fits of narrowness, his tenderness to all human frailty. If he has had less reputation than he deserves as a writer, it is because he has overshadowed his own fame. His success with the pen is like the success of a personal friend; it pleases us, and enables us to vindicate our affection in the presence of those who have not yet learned to love him. As for ourselves, we know that he was capable of this, and more than this. He writes noble prose, but we read between the lines to find a more intimate delight. The splendid confident march of a reasoned paragraph is less to us than the traces we detect in it of our boon-fellow and teacher, with his exuberances and petulances and impulses of love and hate.
It is a wonderful triumph of character, and we feel it to be as creditable to us as to Johnson himself. If a purely literary history were made of the story of his life, the esteem in which he is held, amounting almost to idolatry, would indeed be difficult to explain. His greatest work, The Lives of the Poets, was produced, with pain and reluctance, when he was seventy years of age. In his early years, when he sought the notice of the public, he wrote two satires in verse, grave indeed and full of a sad sincerity, but not altogether unlike the imitative literary exercises of an admirer of Juvenal. Then followed a tale of anonymous essays, prefaces, and translations, sufficient for their purpose, not rescued and reprinted until the close of the eighteenth century. The Dictionary, great work though it be, might have been successfully carried through by a merely mechanical genius. The Rambler was never popular; for every one reader that it found Addison’s Spectator found sixty. The Idler was hardly more successful. Rasselas, that most melancholy of fables, and the Journey to the Western Hebrides, that most ceremonious of diaries, enjoyed what can only be called a success of esteem. In short, no one of Johnson’s works marked a sudden or decisive conquest of the public, unless it were the Dictionary, which was a laborious piece of compilation. Yet their effect was cumulative; their author went on living and talking and writing in London, until by a slow and insensible process he was recognized as the greatest man of his time. Superstition began to attach to his sayings and doings. He had never made any advances to the public; and the public, which is like a cat in its devotion to those who ignore it, came to him and fawned on him. The tribute was paid, not to his success in pleasing, but to his careless strength. The public, after all, is a shrewd critic of its worshippers and sectaries. When a man studies it and flatters it, it is pleased, but not deceived. It knows itself to be the patron of its most zealous suitors, and treats them with a certain proprietary kindness. No one ever dared to approach Johnson in this fashion; he never had a patron, he never went a yard out of his way to court public approbation, for twenty years he held on without complaint, until in the end he dominated and enslaved the opinion that he had not sought to conciliate. Some writers are great by their power of self-expression; they distil themselves in a book, and give away all their secrets. A small man can produce a great book if he knows how to put almost the whole of himself into it. What remains is a mere husk, to disappoint admirers of the book who seek for a more personal contact with its author. Rousseau, whom Johnson held to be a very bad man, might be regarded in another light as a very empty man, the wasted matrix of a very remarkable book. Johnson was great by his reserves; the best of him was withheld from literature; his books were mere outworks. Behind those ramparts his life was passionately private, so that those who gained access to the warmth and light that were within felt privileged indeed. They had not to fear that they would be betrayed to make a public holiday. It is small wonder that the public, who were denied so much, felt the torment of curiosity, and at last submitted themselves absolutely to the dictator of the age. They came in all humility, not as patrons, but as pupils. Johnson was constitutionally incapable of gratifying a patron by writing or by speech; his conversation was a long series of surprises; it was not his wont to fulfil the expectations of those who talked with him. To enjoy his company a man was compelled to qualify either as a combatant or as a disciple. It is a part of the virtue of Boswell that he did well in both characters.
Johnson was a famous moralist, but it would be wrong to attribute his deepest influence to this cause, unless morality be understood in the widest of all possible senses. A man who is praised for his morality is praised not so much for himself as for his conformity to certain recognized standards. Johnson, it is true, was a conformist by principle, but the most winning part of his character was all his own. He is the humorous Englishman, who, if he cannot please by being himself, is content not to please, and gives the matter no further thought. The other peoples of Great Britain, the Scotch and the Welsh, seldom attain to this natural and regal simplicity. They are uneasily aware of a civilization stronger than their own, pressing on them at all points; so that they often run to the extremes of defiance and servility. The adaptability of the Scot has been a great instrument of empire, but the key to the imperial position is to be found in English custom and English character, as it is exemplified in Samuel Johnson. He was as self-contained and simple as a child—often, too, as wayward as a child. A kind of luminous sincerity and individuality is what makes him so irresistible. Report, even the report of Boswell, probably does too little justice to the incalculable part of Johnson’s character—to the sayings that he uttered when he was thinking aloud. A reporter remembers what he understands, and sets down what his readers will appreciate. The genius of Boswell appears not least in this, that he was willing, on occasion, to record Johnson’s most whimsical and irresponsible remarks. But he must have omitted or neglected by far the greater number. Those that he has preserved are perhaps the most delightful and convincing things in his book. ‘I find,’ said Johnson, after his interview with King George, ‘that it does a man good to be talked to by his Sovereign. In the first place, a man cannot be in a passion’ Here he was interrupted, and his account of other lesser advantages is lost to the world. ‘A man who rides out for an appetite,’ he once said, ‘consults but little the dignity of human nature.’ Or take Boswell’s half-apologetic record of an evening spent at Mr. Robert Chambers’s in the Temple, in the company of a gentleman who had just employed Mr. Chambers to draft his will, devising his estate to his three sisters, in preference to a remote heir male. Johnson called the sisters ' ‘three dowdies,’ and maintained that an ancient estate should always go to males.
In this playful manner did he run on, exulting in his own pleasantry, which certainly was not such as might be expected from the author of The Rambler, but which is here preserved that my readers may be acquainted even with the slightest occasional characteristics of so eminent a man.
Something of Boswell’s genius is revealed in a passage like this. The genius of Johnson is harder to capture and define. Perhaps it might be said to consist in an unfailing instinct for the realities of life. When he utters what sounds like a commonplace, it will be found on examination to be something far different from a commonplace, something that calls attention back to the forgotten essential, which, when once it is remembered, puts an end to the idle play of theory. ‘A man is loath to be angry at himself.’ ‘Babies do not want to hear about babies.’ ‘The great end of comedy is to make an audience merry.’ ‘When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.’ ‘A cow is a very good animal in a field, but we turn her out of a garden.’ ‘No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.’ ‘It is a sad thing for a man to lie down and die.’ These are not wit in the usual sense of that word; but if they be understood in their context, as they were suggested by the discussion in hand, they are rarer and more potent than any wit. Nothing that Johnson ever said could conceivably be coveted by George Selwyn, or Theodore Hook, or Douglas Jerrold. He retailed no anecdotes. To Lord Shelburne, who once asked him to repeat a story for the benefit of some who had not heard it, he replied, ‘Indeed, my lord, I will not. I told the circumstance first for my own amusement, but I will not be dragged in as story-teller to a company.’ Life was for him too short and serious (and, it might be added, too full of real delight) to be wasted in the recital of irrelevant jests. ‘A story,’ he said once, ‘is a specimen of human manners, and derives its sole value from its truth.’ Even its truth would not justify the recital unless it were a useful truth, apposite to the discourse, or fit for the need of the moment. He never cheapened life, nor depreciated company, by embellishing it with imported wit and wisdom, as musicians are called in to entertain those who have neither the will nor the power to entertain one another. He was a lover of company, and a lover does not value these aids to social pleasure. He was a moralist, a great expounder of general truths, yet it was he who said, ‘I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical pictures they can show me in the world.’
Because all Johnson’s wisdom is vital, springing from the occasion, he is the first of all our great men dead whom we would choose to revive for the sake of his commentary on the events of our own age. Boswell loved to test his great man by devising new situations and multiplying occasions for judgement. Who would not wish to be the first to travel with Johnson in a motor-car? What would have been his criticism if he had been told that the pulpit of the cathedral church of Lichfield was to be used for a sermon eulogizing his virtues? We cannot tell; no one ever succeeded in anticipating his verdicts. But we may be sure that he would have felt a pleasure as deep as life in the thought that two hundred years after the day of his birth he would be loved by his countrymen and honoured by a national celebration.