In fact one could go on for weeks on this subject, and the conclusion that any fair-minded person must reach is that birth-control, even of the apparently unfit, is too risky an experiment for the human race to try if it wishes to keep its geniuses. You never can tell what the infant may turn out that you are preventing from being born. But I am aware that this is a highly contentious subject, and that awful thing, “the sex-war,” is involved in it. People are sure to have differences of opinion about it; since woman has risen to her new estate these opinions will assuredly be held with more vigour than ever.
“Treat ’em rough” is a known and tried aphorism, which has been elevated to a pitch of almost epic grandeur by Schopenhauer’s “Pitch ’em downstairs”; and probably some such aphorism was in Johnson’s mind when he rode with old Mrs. Porter to the church that they might be married, and, you remember, reduced her to tears before they got there. Up till then he probably had only the poet’s knowledge of woman; but that after such an ill beginning the marriage turned out so happily, seems to argue that Mrs. Porter, though she might paint her face, was nevertheless a woman with the heart of a lion to tame his aggressively masculine soul. And it is quite possible that before she died—she was twice his age, you know—he began to have for her a love similar to that one has for a mother. Of course it may be that Boswell, in his uncomplimentary description of Johnson’s wife, was misled by jealousy of her who sat too near the throne of his hero-worship. But in any case she must have been a remarkable woman to tame Ursa Major as she did.
If one were to translate psychasthenic into “poor in spirit”—which is not very far from its Greek meaning—probably we should come very near to its real inner meaning; and we have the best possible authority for knowing the post-mortem future of the poor in spirit. If the Kingdom of Heaven is to be composed of such men as Johnson and Beethoven it would not be a bad place to inhabit, though the shade of Johnson would certainly insist on carrying home some fallen angel, while Beethoven would probably throw something at a monotonous orchestra of harps, if he could hear it.
In support of the contention that towards the end of her life he had begun to consider Mrs. Porter as less a wife in the ordinary sense of the term than a mother-surrogate whom he could trust as a faithful friend who would never desert him whatever the circumstances, here is a letter that he wrote to the Rev. Dr. Taylor on the day she died:
“Sir,
“Pray desire Mrs. Taylor to inform me what mourning I should buy for my mother and Miss Porter, and bring a note of writing with you.”
His dear wife dead he could not trust himself even to buy mourning without her aid.
He appears not to have been able even to take care of himself without some woman to act the mother towards him. Years later he found another mother-surrogate in Mrs. Thrale, who saw to it that he wore respectable clothing with brass buttons, and silver buckles—not too big—on his shoes. It was evidently a severe blow to him when the naughty thing went and married Signor Piozzi, for it left him without a single woman to show him how to take care of himself.
That nervous malady which Boswell diagnosed as a sort of St. Vitus’s dance probably merely represented the violent impulsive and involuntary movements occasionally seen in psychasthenia; had the defect affected the nerves of speech Johnson would probably have stammered; but one can never imagine a man so aggressive stammering.