previous to his demise. When will mankind learn that literature is one thing, and sworn testimony another?
Johnson’s relations with Burke were of a more crucial character. The author of Rasselas and The English Dictionary can never have been really jealous of Garrick, or in the very least desirous of ‘bringing down the house;’ but Burke had done nobler things than that. He had made politics philosophical, and had at least tried to cleanse them from the dust and cobwebs of party. Johnson, though he had never sat in the House of Commons, had yet, in his capacity of an unauthorized reporter, put into the mouths of honourable members much better speeches than ever came out of them, and it is no secret that he would have liked to make a speech or two on his own account. Burke had made many. Harder still to bear, there were not wanting good judges to say that, in their opinion, Burke was a better talker than the great Samuel himself. To cap it all, was not Burke a ‘vile Whig’? The ordeal was an unusually trying one. Johnson emerges triumphant.
Though by no means disposed to hear men made much of, he always listened to praise of
Burke with a boyish delight. He never wearied of it. When any new proof of Burke’s intellectual prowess was brought to his notice, he would exclaim exultingly, ‘Did we not always say he was a great man?’ And yet how admirably did this ‘poor scholar’ preserve his independence and equanimity of mind! It was not easy to dazzle the Doctor. What a satisfactory story that is of Burke showing Johnson over his fine estate at Beaconsfield, and expatiating in his exuberant style on its ‘liberties, privileges, easements, rights, and advantages,’ and of the old Doctor, the tenant of ‘a two-pair back’ somewhere off Fleet Street, peering cautiously about, criticising everything, and observing with much coolness—
‘Non equidem invideo, miror magis.’
A friendship like this could be disturbed but by death, and accordingly we read:
‘Mr. Langton one day during Johnson’s last illness found Mr. Burke and four or five more friends sitting with Johnson. Mr. Burke said to him, “I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be oppressive to you.” “No, sir,” said Johnson, “it is not so; and I must be in a wretched state indeed when your company would not be a delight to me.” Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very tenderly affected, replied: “My dear sir, you have always been too good to me.” Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the last circumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent men.’
But this is a well-worn theme, though, like some other well-worn themes, still profitable for edification or rebuke. A hundred years can make no difference to a character like Johnson’s, or to a biography like Boswell’s. We are not to be robbed of our conviction that this man, at all events, was both great and good.
Johnson the author is not always fairly treated. Phrases are convenient things to hand about, and it is as little the custom to inquire into their truth as it is to read the letterpress on banknotes. We are content to count banknotes, and to repeat phrases. One of these phrases is, that whilst everybody reads Boswell, nobody reads Johnson. The facts are otherwise. Everybody does not read Boswell, and a great many people do read Johnson. If it be asked, What do the general public know of Johnson’s nine volumes octavo? I reply, Beshrew the general public! What in the name of the
Bodleian has the general public got to do with literature? The general public subscribes to Mudie, and has its intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, sent round to it in carts. On Saturdays these carts, laden with ‘recent works in circulation,’ traverse the Uxbridge Road; on Wednesdays they toil up Highgate Hill, and if we may believe the reports of travellers, are occasionally seen rushing through the wilds of Camberwell and bumping over Blackheath. It is not a question of the general public, but of the lover of letters. Do Mr. Browning, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Stephen, Mr. Morley, know their Johnson? ‘To doubt would be disloyalty.’ And what these big men know in their big way hundreds of little men know in their little way. We have no writer with a more genuine literary flavour about him than the great Cham of literature. No man of letters loved letters better than he. He knew literature in all its branches—he had read books, he had written books, he had sold books, he had bought books, and he had borrowed them. Sluggish and inert in all other directions, he pranced through libraries. He loved a catalogue; he delighted in an index. He was, to employ a happy phrase of Dr. Holmes, at home