Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)

by George Birkbeck Norman Hill

ATTACKS ON JOHNSON.

The “patriotic Knox,” as Boswell calls him, the author of A Tour through the Highlands and Hebride Isles in 1786, a man freer from prejudices than the common run, and one who readily acknowledged the merits of Johnson’s book, bears equal witness to the wrath of his countrymen.

“Dr. Johnson (he writes) set out under incurable impressions of a national prejudice, a religious prejudice, and a literary jealousy. From a writer of such abilities and such prejudices the natives of Scotland had reason to expect a shower of arrows without mercy, and it was possibly from this prepossession that they were ready to fall upon him as one man the moment that his book appeared. Their minds were charged with sentiments of indignity, resentment and revenge, which they did not fail to discharge upon his head in whole platoons from every quarter.”[27]

To us, who know Johnson better than we know any other author who has ever lived, the charge of literary jealousy seems ridiculous. But Knox lived before Boswell’s Life was published. Scotland, in which learning and even literature had slumbered for nearly a century, had started up from her long sleep, and was bent on turning the Auld Reekie into the Modern Athens. All her geese were swans, though of swans she had at this season a fair flock. “Edinburgh is a hotbed of genius,” wrote Smollett, shortly before Johnson’s visit, and as a proof of it he instanced among “authors of the first distinction,” Wallace, Blair, Wilkie, and Ferguson. Hume still earlier had proclaimed that at last there was “a hope of seeing good tragedies in the English language,” for Johnny Home had written his Douglas. Wilkie of the Epigoniad, the great historian held, was to be the Homer, and Blacklock the Pindar, of Scotland.[28] But it was in Ossian Macpherson that the hopes of the country had at one time soared highest. By Dr. Blair, the Edinburgh Professor of Rhetoric, he had been ranked with Homer and Virgil.[29] The national pride, the honour of Scotland, was concerned, and the meanest motive was attributed to the man who had ventured to pronounce his poems an impudent forgery. Macpherson was a dangerous enemy. Against “the menaces of a ruffian” a thick cudgel might avail; but the secret arts of a literary forger were not so easily baffled. His position was one of great power, for from the Court he received a pension at first of £600 a year, and afterwards of £800, “to supervise the newspapers. He inserted what lies he pleased, and prevented whatever he disapproved of being printed.”[30] It was from this tainted source that no doubt sprang many of “the miserable cavillings against the Journey in newspapers, magazines, and other fugitive pieces.”[31] These, as Boswell tells us, “only furnished Johnson with sport.” Nevertheless, though they did not trouble his mind, they marred the fame of his book, and prejudiced not only the immediate, but even the traditional judgment of Scotland. Enough dirt was thrown, and some of it did stick and sticks still. Lies were sent wandering through the land, and some of them have not even yet found their everlasting rest. One disgusting story, not unworthy of the inventive genius of Ossian himself, is still a solace to Scots of the baser sort. That it is a lie can be plainly proved, for it rests on a supposed constant suspicion in Johnson of the food provided for him. Now we know from his own writings that only twice in his tour had he “found any reason to complain of a Scottish table.”[32] Moreover, in his letters to Mrs. Thrale and in Boswell’s Journal, we can follow his course with great accuracy and minuteness. Had there been any foundation for this lie it must be found on the road between Inverness and the seashore. Now we know what meals he had at each station. Even in the miserable inn at Glenelg, where his accommodation was at its worst, if he had chosen he could have had mutton chops and freshly-killed poultry. Finding both too tough, he supped on a lemon and a piece of bread.

M’NICOL’S SCURRILOUS VOLUME.

The attacks of the angry critics, published as they were in fugitive pieces, might have been forgotten had they not been revived three or four years later in “a scurrilous volume,” as Boswell justly describes it, “larger than Johnson’s own, filled with malignant abuse under a name real or fictitious of some low man in an obscure corner of Scotland, though supposed to be the work of another Scotchman, who has found means to make himself well known both in Scotland and England.”[33] The “low man” was the Rev. Donald M’Nicol, and the “obscure corner” that long and pleasant island of Lismore which the steamers skirt every summer day as they pass with their load of tourists between Oban and the entrance of the Caledonian Canal. M’Nicol’s predecessor in the manse was the Rev. John Macaulay, whose famous grandson, Lord Macaulay, was to rebuke those “foolish and ignorant Scotchmen, who moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy in the Journey to the Western Islands, assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more dishonourable to their country than anything that he had ever said or written.”[34] When Johnson was shown M’Nicol’s book he said: “This fellow must be a blockhead. They don’t know how to go about their abuse. Who will read a five shilling book against me? No, Sir, if they had wit, they should have kept pelting me with pamphlets.” The book, however, seems to have been widely read, and in the year 1817 was reprinted at Glasgow in a fine large type. A Scotch gentleman recently told me that he fears that to many of his countrymen Johnson’s tour is only known through M’Nicol’s attack.

OSSIAN MACPHERSON.

It was Macpherson at whom Boswell aimed a blow when he wrote of the “other Scotchman whose work it was supposed to be.” If Ossian had no hand in it himself, it was certainly written by someone fired with all his hatred of the man who had branded him as a forger. Johnson is described as “a man of some reputation for letters, whose master-passion was hatred of Scotland. When the Poems of Ossian were published, and became the delight and admiration of the learned over all Europe, his cynical disposition instantly took the alarm.”[35] It was from this time that “we may date the origin of his intended tour to Scotland.” It was from malice that he started so late in the year—a malice, by the way, which nearly brought him to a watery grave. “It was not beauties he went to find out in Scotland, but defects; and for the northern situation of the Hebrides the advanced time of the year suited his purpose best.”[36] Johnson, with a discretion which other travellers in like circumstances would do well to imitate, had passed over Edinburgh with the remark that it is “a city too well known to admit description.” This wise reticence is twisted into a proof of malevolence. So, too, is the brevity with which he mentions Dundee. “We stopped awhile at Dundee,” he recorded, “where I remember nothing remarkable.”[37] Surely this is a very innocent sentence. Even Boswell, whose record was generally far fuller, dismisses this place with three words. “We saw Dundee,” he says.[38] But M’Nicol at once discovered the miserable jealousy of the Englishman. “He passes very rapidly through the town of Dundee, for fear, I suppose, of being obliged to take notice of its increasing trade.”[39] How delicately Johnson treated this town in his published narrative is shown by his description of it in his private letter to Mrs. Thrale. To her he had written: “We came to Dundee, a dirty despicable town.”[40] Much as M’Nicol belaboured Johnson, he could not refrain from claiming him as of Scotch origin. “We are much deceived by fame,” he wrote, “if a very near ancestor of his, who was a native of that country, did not find to his cost that a tree was not quite such a rarity in his days.”[41] This mysterious hero of the gallows was no doubt no Johnson at all, but a Johnston—of Ardnamurchan, probably, or of Glencroe.[42]

M’Nicol is ingenious in his treatment of the great Ossian controversy. “The poems,” he says, “must be the production either of Ossian or Mr. Macpherson. Dr. Johnson does not vouchsafe to tell us who else was the author, and consequently the national claim remains perfectly entire. The moment Mr. Macpherson ceases to be admitted as a translator, he instantly acquires a title to the original.”[43] Granted that he was a ruffian who had tried by menaces to hinder the detection of a cheat. What of that? He was a great original ruffian, and his cheat was a work of great original genius. So that Caledonia, if she had one forger the more, had not one poet the less. She made up in genius what she lost in character. But this Dr. Johnson failed to see, being, poor man, “naturally pompous and vain, and ridiculously ambitious of an exclusive reputation in letters.” It must have been this same pomposity, vanity, and ambition which led him to say of these poems: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”[44]