Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)

by George Birkbeck Norman Hill

SOUND OF ULVA.

At Lochbuie two traditions, I found, had been preserved in the family of the laird, the great-grandson of that Maclean of Lochbuie whom Boswell had heard described as “a great roaring braggadocio,” but found only “a bluff, comely, noisy old gentleman. He bawled out to Johnson (as Boswell tells us), ‘Are you of the Johnstons of Glencroe or of Ardnamurchan?’ Dr. Johnson gave him a significant look, but made no answer.”[12] The report has come down in the family that Johnson replied that he was neither one nor the other. Whereupon Lochbuie cried out, “Damn it, Sir, then you must be a bastard.” There can, I fear, be no doubt that this rejoinder belongs to those excellens impromptus à loisir in which Rousseau excelled[13]—that esprit de l’escalier, as the French describe it. If the laird, like Addison, could draw for a thousand pounds, he had, I suspect, but nine pence in ready money.[14] For had this repartee been made at the time, and not been merely an after-invention, Boswell most certainly would not have let it pass unrecorded. The second tradition is scarcely more trustworthy. Johnson at the tea-table, I was told, helped himself to sugar with his fingers, whereupon Lady Lochbuie at once had the basin emptied, and fresh sugar brought in. He said nothing at the time, but when he had finished his tea he flung down the cup, exclaiming that if he had polluted one he had also polluted the other. A lady of the family of Lochbuie, whose memory goes back ninety years, in recounting this story when I was in Scotland, added, “But I do not know whether it was true.” That it was not true I have little doubt. In the first place, we have again Boswell’s silence; in the second place, to the minor decencies of life Johnson was by no means inattentive. At Paris he was on the point of refusing a cup of coffee because the footman had put in the sugar with his fingers; and at Edinburgh, in a passion, he threw a glass of lemonade out of the window because it had been sweetened in the same manner by the waiter. In one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale he expressed his displeasure in Skye at the very practice with which he is charged a few weeks later in Mull. Describing his visit to the house of Sir Alexander Macdonald, he wrote: “The lady had not the common decencies of her tea-table: we picked up our sugar with our fingers.”[15]

It is strange that while in Mull, that “most dolorous country,” that “gloom of desolation,” as Johnson described it, these stories of him are preserved, the boatman who took me across the narrow passage between it and Inch-Kenneth had no traditionary knowledge of his host, Sir Allan Maclean, and of his retirement in that little island. To the forefathers of the men of Mull the head of the Macleans would have been an object of reverence and even of fear, and Johnson only a passing wonder. “I would cut my bones for him,” said one of his clan, speaking of Sir Allan in Boswell’s hearing.[16] But of the Highland chief who lived among them no remembrance remains, while the Sassenach mohr, who spent but a few days in the island-home of the Macleans, is still almost “a household word.”

SCOTTISH SENSITIVENESS.

I was indeed surprised to find through the Highlands and the Hebrides how much he still remained in men’s thoughts. On Loch Lomond, the boatman who rowed me to the islands on which he had landed, a man of reading and intelligence, said that though he had himself read Johnson’s Journey, yet “Scotchmen still feel too sore to like reading him.” Whatever soreness still lingers is, I have little doubt, much more due to his sarcasms recorded by Boswell than to any passages in his own narrative. But it is surprising that Scotchmen cannot more generally join in a hearty laugh at his humorous sallies, though they are at their own expense. That the Scotch of a hundred years and more ago were over-sensitive is not astonishing. At that time in most respects they were still far behind England. It was England that they were striving to follow in their arts, their commerce, and their agriculture. It was the English accent that they were striving to catch, and the English style in which they laboured to write. It was to the judgment of Englishmen that their authors, no small or inglorious band, anxiously appealed. That they should be sensitive to criticism beyond even the Americans of our day was not unnatural. For in the poverty of their soil, and the rudiments of their manufactures and trade, they found none of that boastful comfort which supports the citizen of the United States, even when he is most solicitous of English approbation. But at the present day, when they are in most respects abreast of Englishmen, and in some even ahead, they should disprove the charge that is brought against them of wanting humour by showing that they can enjoy a hearty laugh, even though it goes against them. Johnson’s ill-humour did not go deep, and, no doubt, was often laughed away. Of that rancour which disgraced Hume his nature was wholly incapable. He wished no ill to Scotland as Hume wished ill to England.[17] “He returned from it,” writes Boswell, “in great good-humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated.”[18]

Not all Scotch critics were hostile towards him. The Scots Magazine, which last century was to Edinburgh what the Gentleman’s Magazine was to London, always spoke of him with great respect. Writing of him early in the year in which he visited Scotland, it says:

“Dr. Johnson has long possessed a splendid reputation in the republic of letters, and it was honestly acquired. He is said to affect a singularity in his manners and to contemn the social rules which are established in the intercourse of civil life. If this extravagance is affected, it is a fault; if it has been acquired by the habitudes of his temper and his indolence, it scarcely merits censure. We allow to the man who can soar so high above the multitude to descend sometimes beneath them.”[19]

In the two reviews of his Journey in the same magazine, there is not one word of censure; neither when Boswell, eleven years later, brought out his account of the tour, had they any fault to find. In the character which they drew of Johnson on his death they leave unnoticed his attacks on Scotland. They are even generous in their praise. Speaking of his pension they say: “It would have been a national disgrace if such talents, distinguished by such writings, had met with no other recompense than the empty consciousness of fame.”[20] There were also men of eminence in Scotland who at once acknowledged the merits of the book. “I love the benevolence of the author,” said Lord Hailes.[21] The “virtuous and candid Dempster,” the “patriotic Knox,” Tytler, the historian, “a Scot, if ever a Scot there were,” had each his word of high praise.[22] Sir Walter Scott, writing many years later, said: “I am far from being of the number of those angry Scotsmen who imputed to Johnson’s national prejudices all or a great part of the report he has given of our country. I remember the Highlands ten or twelve years later, and no one can conceive of how much that could have been easily remedied travellers had to complain.”[23]

These men, nevertheless, formed a small minority. The outcry that was raised against Johnson was at once loud and bitter. To attacks for many a long year he had been used, but yet this time he was startled. “He expressed his wonder at the extreme jealousy of the Scotch, and their resentment at having their country described as it really was.”[24] Boswell mentions “the brutal reflections thrown out against him,” and “the rancour with which he was assailed by numbers of shallow irritable North Britons.”[25] How quickly the storm gathered and burst is shown in a letter written by an Englishman from Edinburgh a few days after the book was published:

“Edinburgh, Jan. 24, 1775. Dr. Johnson’s Tour has just made its appearance here, and has put the country into a flame. Everybody finds some reason to be affronted. A thousand people who know not a single creature in the Western Isles interest themselves in their cause, and are offended at the accounts that are given of them. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, all teem with abuse of the Doctor. He was received with the most flattering marks of civility by everyone. He was looked upon as a kind of miracle, and almost carried about for a show. Those who were in his company were silent the moment he spoke, lest they should interrupt him, and lose any of the good things he was going to say. He repaid all their attention to him with ill-breeding, and when in the company of the ablest men in this country, who are certainly his superiors in point of abilities, his whole design was to show them how contemptibly he thought of them. Had the Scotch been more acquainted with Dr. Johnson’s private character they would have expected nothing better. A man of illiberal manners and surly disposition, who all his life long had been at enmity with the Scotch, takes a sudden resolution of travelling amongst them; not, according to his own account, ‘to find a people of liberal and refined education, but to see wild men and wild manners.’”[26]