What is really needed is a complete index to the sayings of Johnson—his dicta, spoken or written. It would be an heroic task, but heroic tasks are constantly being undertaken. My friend Osgood, of Princeton, a ripe scholar and an ardent Johnsonian, has been devoting the scanty leisure of years to a concordance of Spenser. No one less competent than he should undertake to supervise such a labor of love.
It will be remembered that the Bible is not lacking in quotations, nor is Shakespeare; but these sources of wisdom aside, Boswell, quoting Johnson, supplies us more frequently with quotations than any other author whatever. Could the irascible old Doctor come to earth again, and with that wonderful memory of his call to mind the purely casual remarks which he chanced to make to Boswell, he would surely be amazed to hear himself quoted, and to learn that his obiter dicta had become fixed in the minds of countless thousands who perhaps have never heard his name.
I chanced the other day to stop at my broker’s office to see how much I had lost in an unexpected drop in the market, and to beguile the time, picked up a market letter in which this sentence met my eye: “The unexpected and perpendicular decline in the stock of Golden Rod mining shares has left many investors sadder if not wiser. When will the public learn that investors in securities of this class are only indulging themselves in proving the correctness of Franklin’s [sic] adage, that the expectation of making a profit in such securities is simply the triumph of hope over experience?” Good Boswellians will hardly need to be reminded that this is Dr. Johnson on marriage. He had something equally wise to say, too, on the subject of “shares”; but in this instance he was speaking of a man’s second venture into matrimony, his first having proved very unhappy.
Most men, when they write a book of memoirs in which hundreds of living people are mentioned, discreetly postpone publication until after they and the chief personages of the narrative are dead. Johnson refers to Bolingbroke as a “cowardly scoundrel” for writing a book (charging a blunderbuss, he called it) and leaving half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to pull the trigger after his death. Boswell spent some years in charging his blunderbuss; he filled it with shot, great and small, and then, taking careful aim, pulled the trigger.
Cries of rage, anguish, and delight instantly arose from all over the kingdom. A vast number of living people were mentioned, and their merits or failings discussed with an abandon which is one of the great charms of the book to-day, but which, when it appeared, stirred up a veritable hornets’ nest. As some one very cleverly said, “Boswell has invented a new kind of libel.” “A man who is dead once told me so and so”—what redress have you in law? None! The only thing to do is to punch his head.
Fortunately Boswell escaped personal chastisement, but he made many enemies and alienated some friends. Mrs. Thrale, by this time Mrs. Piozzi, quite naturally felt enraged at Boswell’s contemptuous remarks about her, and at his references to what Johnson said of her while he was enjoying the hospitality of Streatham. The best of us like to criticize our friends behind their backs; and Johnson could be frank, and indeed brutal, on occasion. Mrs. Boscawen, the wife of the admiral, on the other hand, had no reason to be displeased when she read: “If it is not presumptuous in me to praise her, I would say that her manners are the best of any lady with whom I ever had the happiness to be acquainted.”
Bishop Percy, shrewdly suspecting that Boswell’s judgment was not to be trusted, when he complied with his request for some material for the Life, desired that his name might not be mentioned in the work; to which Boswell replied that it was his intention to introduce as many names of eminent persons as he could, adding, “Believe me, my Lord, you are not the only Bishop to grace my pages.” We may suspect that he, like many another, took up the book with fear and trembling, and put it down in a rage.