The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

Samuel Johnson
From a photograph, preserved in the British Museum, of an undescribed painting, formerly attributed to Gainsborough

CHAPTER XII
Johnson and the Art of Conversation

Chapters like this usually begin with a lament. The age of conversation, it is proper to begin, is gone, gone with the harpsichord and the minuet and the long, leisurely evenings when the bluestockings discussed literature and the theory of equality. The rush of modern life, one continues, has killed conversation, even as the penny post has killed the art of letter-writing. In all this there is much false sentiment and false implication. It is foolish to assume the existence of a time when talk was universally clever and wise. There were dullards even in 1780. Cards and dancing, then as now, were sought as a relief from thinking, and serious talkers were not seldom voted a nuisance. No doubt they often were. The bluestockings, as we have seen, sometimes bored even themselves. The reputation of the age for conversation depended upon a few.

It is difficult to recover a sufficient body of this conversation upon which to base an opinion. It is a much easier thing to read about than to get at. Plenty of essays on conversation have been preserved—no manual for young ladies was without one—but the talk itself is not so easy to find. We have Chesterfield’s advice to his son on how to shine in conversation, but the record of Chesterfield’s own discourse is little better than a collection of puns and bits of repartee, mere flotsam and jetsam. Cowper wrote a long and rather dreary poem on colloquial happiness, but where is Cowper’s conversation? Fielding, too, wrote an essay on the subject, but it is a rather priggish affair (for Fielding), and the perusal of it only fills us with regret that we must take this poor substitute for the brilliant chatter that went on about the punch-bowl. The scraps of talk casually embedded in works on other subjects, the anecdotes, jests, and bons mots have lost with time much of their flavour and significance, and give us no adequate notion of the distinctive opinions held by their authors, no grounds for large general conclusions about them, and no conception of the general strain of their talk. There is no steady light from these flashes of eloquence and wit. At most they make us regret what we have lost. Thus there is every reason to suppose that the conversation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a model of brilliance; but the collection of his sayings recorded by Moore is quite lacking in the grace of reality. These good things are without a foil; they need arrangement; they are mere ornaments adorning nothing, a little heap of unset gems.

To all this there is but one exception, the grand exception of Boswell’s record of Johnson. Perhaps the chief distinction of that record is that it gives us not only the high lights in the conversation, not only its exciting moments, but its very longueurs (as Horace Walpole objected), its ineptitude, its occasional inconclusiveness. There is, therefore, something by which the wit of it all is set off. It has the ring of vitality. It is to the everlasting credit of Boswell that he let us see the worst of Johnson’s talk, that, in the words of Hannah More, he ‘mitigated none of his asperities,’ but gave us the heaviness as well as the wit and the rudeness as well as the depth. We hear the voice of Johnson, not a mere quotation of his words.

But in spite of the obvious faults of Johnson’s talk, it is difficult to speak of it without a continuous and perhaps offensive use of superlatives. Age could not wither Johnson. Instead of impairing his memory, time enriched it. The pomposity of his written work never impedes his quickness of wit in conversation. He was, to be sure, fond of parading that pomposity of style for the amazement and amusement of his hearers, and it is scarcely true to say that he used one style in writing and another in talking. It would be nearer the truth to say that, as he grew older, he tended to introduce more of the ease of his talk into his written work. Sentence after sentence from the Lives of the Poets might be cited to show the almost colloquial ease of his later manner, and significant parallels might be drawn. Yet it is certain that conversation gave more scope to that aptness of homely illustration which was his most entertaining gift. Posterity is right in preferring Johnson’s conversation to his writings, for while it lacks nothing in the stream of thought and finish of style that distinguish his writings, it is distinctly superior in mother wit.

In the heat of conversation Johnson had a stimulus which he never felt in writing, the joy of personal contention. He admittedly regarded conversation as a contest, and was frankly contemptuous of the type of man who, like Addison or Goldsmith, was always at his best when he was arguing alone. Of two men talking, Johnson asserted, one must always rise superior to the other. For himself he had too much pride to be contentedly submerged by the conversation of others. Rather than be worsted, he would strike below the belt, or, in the words of Boswell, ‘toss and gore several persons.’ He had a rough and ready way of escaping from difficulties. When Mrs. Frances Brooke requested him to look over her new tragedy, complaining that she herself had no time to revise it, since she had ‘so many irons in the fire,’ the sage replied, ‘Why, then, Madam, the best thing I can advise you to do is to put your tragedy along with your irons.’ ‘If your company does not drive a man out of his house, nothing will,’ he said to Boswell because the Scotsman had ventured to defend the Americans. When he got the floor—and by the use of such methods he got it very often—he was not inclined to abandon it, and the conversation became a monologue. Goldsmith, who so often had the right in dispute and was, indeed, one of the wittiest opponents Johnson ever had, complained that he was ‘for making a monarchy of what should be a republic.’ Even Boswell admitted that in Johnson’s company men did not so much interchange conversation as listen to what was said. But, whatever lofty notions of conversation we may cherish, it may be questioned whether it can ever be a republic. If the flow of talk is to get anywhere, if it is to reach a conclusion, it must be confined within a rather narrow channel or it is certain to dissipate itself. Johnson hated spattering talk. He censured Goldsmith because he was always ‘coming on without knowing how he was to get off,’ and asserted that he could not talk well because he had made up his mind about nothing. ‘Goldsmith,’ said he, ‘had no settled notions upon any subject; so he talked always at random.’ It was not so with Johnson. He saw his conclusions and drove straight towards them, scattering his opponents or knocking them on the head if they impeded him.

But it would be a mistake to infer that Johnson was a sort of conversational head-hunter, or the ourang-outang of the drawing-room whom Macaulay depicts, alternately howling and growling and rending his associates in pieces before our eyes. If we have any respect for the consistent testimony of his contemporaries, we shall come to realize that he talked somewhat unwillingly. He had to be drawn out. ‘He was like the ghosts,’ said Tyers. Nothing annoyed him more than to be shown off. At the famous Wilkes dinner, to which he had been taken simply that he might contend with a worthy opponent, he was so angry when he realized what had happened that he took up a book, ‘sat down upon a window seat and read, or at least kept his eye upon it intently for some time,’ exactly as upon the very different occasion of his first meeting with Fanny Burney.