This is not, and never was, the language of Toryism. It is a much more intellectual ‘ism.’ It is indifferentism. So, too, in his able pamphlet, The False Alarm, which had reference to Wilkes and the Middlesex election, though he no doubt attempts to deal with the constitutional aspect of the question, the real strength of his case is to be found in passages like the following:
‘The grievance which has produced all this tempest of outrage, the oppression in which all other oppressions are included, the invasion which has left us no property, the alarm that suffers no patriot to sleep in quiet, is comprised in a vote of the House of Commons, by which the freeholders of Middlesex are deprived of a Briton’s birthright—representation in Parliament. They have, indeed, received the usual writ of election; but that writ, alas! was malicious mockery; they were insulted with the form, but denied the reality, for there was one man excepted from their choice. The character of the man, thus fatally excepted, I have no purpose to delineate. Lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man speaks well. Every lover of liberty stands doubtful of the fate of posterity, because the chief county in England cannot take its representative from a gaol.’
Temperament was of course at the bottom of this indifference. Johnson was of melancholy humour and profoundly sceptical. Cynical he was not—he loved his fellow-men; his days were full of
‘Little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.’
But he was as difficult to rouse to enthusiasm about humanity as is Mr. Justice Stephen. He pitied the poor devils, but he did not believe in them. They were neither happy nor wise, and he saw no reason to believe they would ever become either. ‘Leave me alone,’ he cried to the sultry mob, bawling ‘Wilkes and Liberty.’ ‘I at least am not ashamed to own that I care for neither the one nor the other.’
No man, however, resented more fiercely than Johnson any unnecessary interference with men who were simply going their own way. The Highlanders only knew Gaelic, yet political
wiseacres were to be found objecting to their having the Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to arms: he wrote one of his monumental letters; the opposition was quelled, and the Gael got his Bible. So too the wicked interference with Irish enterprise, so much in vogue during the last century, infuriated him. ‘Sir,’ he said to Sir Thomas Robinson, ‘you talk the language of a savage. What, sir! would you prevent any people from feeding themselves, if by any honest means they can do so?’
Were Johnson to come to life again, total abstainer as he often was, he would, I expect, denounce the principle involved in ‘Local Option.’ I am not at all sure he would not borrow a guinea from a bystander and become a subscriber to the ‘Property Defence League;’ and though it is notorious that he never read any book all through, and never could be got to believe that anybody else ever did, he would, I think, read a larger fraction of Mr. Spencer’s pamphlet, ‘Man versus the State,’ than of any other ‘recent work in circulation.’ The state of the Strand, when two vestries are at work upon it, would, I am sure, drive him into open rebellion.
As a letter-writer Johnson has great merits.
Let no man despise the epistolary art. It is said to be extinct. I doubt it. Good letters were always scarce. It does not follow that, because our grandmothers wrote long letters, they all wrote good ones, or that nobody nowadays writes good letters because most people write bad ones. Johnson wrote letters in two styles. One was monumental—more suggestive of the chisel than the pen. In the other there are traces of the same style, but, like the old Gothic architecture, it has grown domesticated, and become the fit vehicle of plain tidings of joy and sorrow—of affection, wit, and fancy. The letter to Lord Chesterfield is the most celebrated example of the monumental style. From the letters to Mrs. Thrale many good examples of the domesticated style might be selected One must suffice: