The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

But no man of the eighteenth century could hold his hearers simply by the display of a wealth of information. Brilliancy of manner was as indispensable as breadth of mind. ‘Weight without lustre is lead,’ wrote Lord Chesterfield. No good talker was without a superficial attraction. Garrick was noted for the histrionic quality, Beauclerk for acidity, and Goldsmith for Irish humour. Johnson’s conversation, from the inner fire of it, was for ever sparkling into wit and epigram. Yet he never made the mistake of serving his friends with nothing but epigrams, which is very like serving one’s guests with nothing but hors d’œuvres. Epigram stimulates the appetite, but does not satisfy it, and will not do for a steady diet. It is with Johnson, however, something more than a mannerism. It was the form that lent itself best to the expression of his critical faculty. An examination of Johnson’s literary criticism will reveal the fact that his method is prevailingly sententious and summary. He was impatient of a long and slow development of thought, nor did he ‘wind into’ a subject, like Burke. In reading the Lives of the Poets, we do not feel that matters are gradually illuminated, but that they are revealed by sudden flashes. If his criticism offends, it is usually because it is a final pronouncement and is too summary to be adequate. When he attempts an orderly criticism of details, the method, though more elaborate, is usually less satisfying. He is at his best when he is most crisp and dogmatic: ‘If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ ‘Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.’ ‘His page,’ he says of Addison, ‘is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour.’ The value of Johnson’s criticism consists in such sentences as these, not in longer passages of sustained comment like the analysis of Gray’s Bard.

Now whatever charm or power there is in such a method is found also in Johnson’s conversation. There is the same pointed style, the same finality of tone, and often the same irritating quality: ‘No man,’ said he of Goldsmith, ‘was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.’ ‘That man [Lyttelton] sat down to write a book to tell the world what the world had all his life been telling him.’ ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.’ ‘In republics there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.’ Many profess to dislike such an epigrammatic style as this; but I incline to think that those who protest most loudly against such dicta are those who are least capable of thinking them out. At any rate, if they accomplished no more, such statements gave something to attack, and the desire to demolish is of the very soul of conversation.

Those who are offended by such a conversational method might attack it more effectively by pointing out that it was often employed to startle rather than to instruct. Johnson felt the normal human desire to shock people, and indulged to the full his transitory moods. ‘Rousseau,’ he would exclaim, ‘is a very bad man. I should like to have him work in the plantations!’ ‘I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.’ In a fit of petulance he even quoted with approval the ridiculous remark, ‘For anything I can see, foreigners are fools.’ There is no deliberation in such words; it is, in truth, hardly fair to quote them. At any rate, they are entirely misleading when taken out of their setting; for it is the charm of conversation that it is not deliberate, and that a talker may dare to have a prejudice as well as an opinion. A good talker will ‘paint a man highly’ for the mere love of painting. Voltaire and all free talkers with him are guilty of the same excesses. Madame Necker tells us that in listening to Voltaire it was necessary to distinguish the statements that were truly characteristic of the man from those which were dictated by the passing mood and were no more than the vérité du moment. It is the peculiar office of conversation thus to give the whole man, with all his faults upon his head, all his lapses from sense and self-consciousness, all his irrationalities and inconsistencies: it is these things that show that he is human. It was Johnson himself who remarked that in conversation ‘you never get a system.’ Let us be grateful that it is so. A ‘unified’ person, a man whose mind is governed by a system, cannot converse; he can only lecture. His thoughts flow like a canal, not like a river. He is really the most limited of men, for he must live within his system as he lives within his income. It is the glory of Johnson’s conversation that you cannot make a system out of it. For a system you must go to the Rambler or The Vanity of Human Wishes.

But this is not to say that Johnson had no conversational principles or that he uttered thoughts merely because they were novel. His ‘stream of mind’—to use one of his own phrases—was free, but it was not therefore without a very definite trend. Like a stream again, he drew constantly upon his sources, certain general conclusions about life, which really control his conversation. He himself declared that general principles were not to be had from a man’s talk, but from books. Certainly this dictum does not apply to his own talk, for general principles are obvious enough in it. It is quite evident that we are listening to a man who has made up his mind about life and about what is worth while. If, unlike Goldsmith, he talked well in public, it was because, like Imlac, he had thought well in private. It is his constant custom to bring the casual topic immediately into the realm of general principles, and thus the talk about a particular subject becomes a philosophy of it. Boswell realized this, and introduced topic after topic in order to get it cleared up once for all. ‘I wished to have it settled,’ he says, ‘whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.’ He always felt that Johnson could have settled the whole matter of necessity and freewill, if only he had been willing to talk about it. Of a lady talking with Johnson of the resurrection body, he naïvely remarks, ‘She seemed desirous of knowing more, but he left the question in obscurity.’ Such is his confidence in his master’s method.

It is always profitable to delve through Johnson’s talk to the philosophy that underlies it; but not unfrequently he spares us the trouble by enunciating the principle himself. Thus when the subject of gaming arose, he pronounced as follows:

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.

Whether this doctrine be economically sound I do not know; but it is plainly a doctrine. He delighted in such formulation of principles. Thus when Hume’s statement that all who are happy are equally happy was quoted to him, he replied with a definition of happiness:

Sir, that all who are happy are equally happy is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in a multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.

In like manner, he deduced principles of æsthetics from a teacup, and demolished the theory of equality by inviting the footman to sit down and dine.