Companionable Books

by Henry Van Dyke

In meaning this is very much the same as Sir James Barrie’s recent admirable discourse on “Courage” at the University of St. Andrew’s; but in manner there is quite a difference.

It is commonly supposed that Dr. Johnson did a great deal to overload and oppress the English language by introducing new and awkward words of monstrous length. His opportunities in that way were large, but he always claimed that he had used them with moderation and had not coined above four or five words. When we note that “peregrinity” was one of them, we are grateful that he refrained so much; but when we remember that “clubbable” was another, we are glad that he did not refrain altogether. For there is no quality more easy to recognize and difficult to define than that which makes a man acceptable in a club; and of this Dr. Johnson has given us a fine example in his life and an appropriate name in his word.

I think one reason why he got on so well with people who differed from him, and why most of the sensible ones so readily put up with his downright and often brusque way of expressing his sentiments, was because they came so evidently from his sincere and unshakeable conviction that certain things are true, that they can not be changed, and that they should not be forgotten. Not only in politics, but also and more significantly in religion, Samuel Johnson stands out as a sturdy believer.

This seems the more noteworthy when we consider the conditions of his life. There is hardly one among the great men of history who can be called so distinctively “a man of letters,” undoubtedly none who has won as high a position and as large a contemporary influence by sheer strength of pen. Now the literary life is not generally considered to be especially favourable to the cultivation of religion; and Johnson’s peculiar circumstances were not of a kind to make it more favourable in his case than usual. He was poor and neglected, struggling during a great part of his career against the heaviest odds. His natural disposition was by no means such as to predispose him to faith. He was afflicted from childhood with a hypochondriac and irritable humour; a high, domineering spirit, housed in an unwieldy and disordered body; plagued by inordinate physical appetites; inclined naturally to rely with over-confidence upon the strength and accuracy of his reasoning powers; driven by his impetuous temper into violent assertion and controversy; deeply depressed by his long years of obscurity and highly elated by his final success,—he was certainly not one whom we would select as likely to be a remarkably religious man. Carlyle had less to embitter him. Goethe had no more to excuse self-idolatry. And yet, beyond a doubt, Johnson was a sincere, humble, and, in the main, a consistent Christian.

Of course, we cannot help seeing that his peculiarities and faults affected his religion. He was intolerant in his expression of theological views to a degree which seems almost ludicrous. We may, perhaps, keep a straight face and a respectful attitude when we see him turning his back on the Abbé Raynal, and refusing to “shake hands with an infidel.” But when he exclaims in regard to a young lady who had left the Church of England to become a Quaker, “I hate the wench and shall ever hate her; I hate all impudence of a chit; apostasy I nauseate”; and when he answers the gently expressed hope of a friend that he and the girl would meet, after all, in a blessed eternity, by saying, “Madam, I am not fond of meeting fools anywhere,” we cannot help joining in the general laughter of the company to whom he speaks; and as the Doctor himself finally laughs and becomes cheerful and entertaining, we feel that it was only the bear in him that growled,—an honest beast, but sometimes very surly.

As for his remarkable strictures upon Presbyterianism, his declaration that he preferred the Roman Catholic Church, his expressed hope that John Knox was buried in the highway, and his wish that a dangerous steeple in Edinburgh might not be taken down because if it were let alone it might fall on some of the posterity of John Knox, which, he said, would be “no great matter,”—if when we read these things we remember that he was talking to his Scotch friend Boswell, we get a new idea of the audacity of the great man’s humour. I believe he even stirred up his natural high-churchism to rise rampant and roar vigourously, for the pleasure of seeing Boswell’s eyes stand out, and his neat little pigtail vibrate in dismay.

There are many other sayings of Johnson’s which disclose a deeper vein of tolerance; such as that remark about the essential agreement and trivial differences of all Christians, and his warm commendation, on his dying bed, of the sermons of Dr. Samuel Clarke, a Dissenting minister.

But even suppose we are forced to admit that Dr. Johnson was lacking in that polished liberality, that willingness to admit that every other man’s opinions are as good as his own, which we have come nowadays to regard as the chief of the theological virtues; even suppose we must call him “narrow,” we must admit at the same time that he was “deep”; he had a profundity of conviction, a sincerity of utterance which made of his religion something, as the Germans say, “to take hold of with your hands.”

He had need of a sturdy belief. With that tempestuous, unruly disposition of his boiling all the time within him, living in the age of Chesterfield and Bolingbroke, fighting his way through the world amid a thousand difficulties and temptations, he had great need to get a firm grip upon some realities of religion and hold fast to them as things that were settled. His first conviction of the truth of Christianity came to him while he was at Oxford, through a casual reading of Law’s Call to the Unconverted. There were some years after that, he tells us, when he was totally regardless of religion. But sickness and trouble brought it back, “and I hope,” says he, “that I have never lost it since.”