Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

Johnson had now become a comparatively prosperous man, and the lives of the prosperous have a way of producing little to record. He received many honours and compliments of different sorts. Dublin University made him LL.D. in 1765, he had his well-known interview with George III in 1767, the Royal Academy appointed him their Professor in Ancient Literature in 1769, and in 1775 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. But the only events {107} of any special importance in the last twenty years of his life were the publication of his Shakespeare in 1765, his journey in Scotland with Boswell in 1773, and the writing of his last and most popular book, The Lives of the Poets. This he undertook in 1777 and completed in 1781. Its easier style, pleasant digressions, and occasional bits of autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson's life. He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the earlier works it substitutes an old man's kindliness of retrospect. Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of his Journey to the Western Islands, of the Prologue to Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man and of his political pamphlets, The False Alarm, Falkland's Islands, The Patriot, and Taxation no Tyranny. But none of these things except the Lives of the Poets occupied much of his time, and his principal occupation in his old age was talking to his friends. He travelled a good deal, often visiting Oxford, his old home at Lichfield, and his friend Taylor's house in Derbyshire. In 1775 he went to France with the Thrales, and even in his last year was planning a tour to Italy. But by that time the motive was rather health than pleasure. He had a {108} paralytic stroke in 1783 and lost his powers of speech for some days. One of the doctors who attended him was Dr. Heberden, who had cured Cowper of a still graver illness twenty years earlier. His strong constitution enabled him to recover rapidly, and within a month he was paying visits in Kent and Wiltshire. But he had other complaints, and never again knew even that modest measure of health which he had once enjoyed.

The inevitable loss of friends, that saddest and most universal sorrow of old age, joined with illness to depress his last years. Beauclerk died in 1780, Thrale in 1781, Levett and Mrs. Williams, two of the humble friends to whom his charity had given a home in his house, in 1782 and 1788. He was left almost alone. Yet the old courage and love of society asserted itself to the last, and he founded a new dining club the year before he died. But it was too late. The year 1784 opened with a prolonged illness lasting for months, and though in the summer he was well enough to get away to Oxford with Boswell once more, all could see that the end could not be far off. It came on the 18th of December 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20th. Burke and Windham, with Colman the dramatist and Sir Joseph Bankes the President of the Royal Society, were among the {109} pall-bearers, and the mourners included Reynolds and Paoli. Seldom has the death of a man of letters created such a sense of loss either in the public at large or among his friends. Murphy, the editor of Fielding, and biographer of Garrick, says in his well-known essay that Johnson's death "kept the public mind in agitation beyond all previous example." Those great men, then, who attended his funeral represented not merely themselves and his other friends but the intelligence of the whole nation, which saw in the death of Johnson the fall of one of the mighty in the moral and intellectual Israel.

CHAPTER IV

JOHNSON'S CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTICS

Something has already been said in the first chapter of this book about the character of Johnson. The argument of that chapter was that the singular position of Johnson as, in a way, the most national of our men of letters, was due not so much to anything he wrote, or even to anything written about him, as to the quality of his own mind and character, to a sort of central sanity that there was about him which Englishmen like {110} to think of as a thing peculiarly English. We may now pass on to look at this character in a little more detail.

Visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round the space under the dome to come upon a statue which (but for the roll with a Greek inscription upon it) would appear to be that of a retired gladiator meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it represents Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but is not one of his best works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture, clothed only in a loose robe which leaves legs, arms, and one shoulder bare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous, and probably valetudinarian sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right. And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant. The body and the mind are inextricably interwoven in all of us, and certainly in Johnson's case the influence of the body was obvious and {111} conspicuous. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his entire indifference to pain, were partly due to his great bodily strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St. Vitus's Dance. He never knew, Boswell says, "the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters." All accounts agree that his strange gesticulations and contortions were painful for his friends to witness and attracted crowds of starers in the streets. But Reynolds says that he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength. He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a valetudinarian, and was determined not to be one {112} himself. He had known what it was to live on fourpence halfpenny a day and scorned the life of sofa cushions and beef-tea into which well-attended old gentlemen so easily slip. Once, when Mrs. Thrale asked him how he was, his reply was "Ready to become a scoundrel, Madam" (his word for a self-indulgent invalid); "with a little more spoiling you will make me a complete rascal." But in that she never succeeded. Rather he carried the war into her camp, and when they were driving together would never allow her to complain of rain, dust, or any such inconveniences. "How do other people bear them?" he would ask, and would treat those who talked of such topics as evidently having nothing intelligent to say. "A mill that goes without grist is as good a companion as such creatures," he once broke out. He required no valeting, or nursing; bathed at Brighton in October when he was nearing sixty, refused to be carried to land by the boatmen at Iona, as Boswell and Sir Allan Maclean were, but sprang into the sea and waded ashore; would not change his clothes when he got wet at Inverary; was a hundred years before his time in his love of open windows, and rode fifty miles with fox-hounds, only to declare that hunting was a dull business and that its popularity merely showed the paucity of human pleasures. {113} Mrs. Thrale says that no praise ever pleased him more than when some one said of him on Brighton Downs, "Why, Johnson rides as well as the most illiterate fellow in England." He was always eager to show that his legs and arms could do as much as other people's. When he was past sixty-six he ran a race in the rain at Paris with his friend Baretti. He insisted on rolling down a hill like a schoolboy when staying with Langton in Lincolnshire: once at Lichfield when he was over seventy he slipped away from his friends to find a railing he used to jump when he was a boy, threw away his coat, hat, and wig, and, as he reported with pride, leapt over it twice; and on another occasion at Oxford was bold enough to challenge a Fellow, "eminent for learning and worth," and "of an ancient and respectable family in Berkshire," to climb over a wall with him. Apparently, however, the climbing did not actually take place, for the dignified person very properly refused to compromise his dignity.

It is evident that this runner of races and climber of walls was very far from being the sedentary weakling, afraid to enjoy the pleasures of the body or face its pains, in whom popular imagination fancies it sees the man of letters. No man was ever more fearless of {114} pain than Johnson. The only thing he was afraid of was death. Of the extent and even violence of that fear in him till within a few days of the actual event, the evidence, in spite of what Sir Walter Raleigh has said, is conclusive and overwhelming. It comes from every one who knew him. But that was a moral and intellectual fear. Of physical fear he knew nothing. The knife of the surgeon had terrors then which our generation has happily forgotten. But it had none for Johnson. When he lay dying his only fear was that his doctors, one of whom he called "timidorum timidissimus," would spare him pain which if inflicted might have prolonged his life. He called to them to cut deeper when they were operating, and finally took the knife into his own hands and did for himself what he thought the surgeon had failed to do. "I will be conquered, I will not capitulate," were his words: and he acted on them till the very last days were come.

Nor was this courage merely desperation in the presence of the great Terror. He was as brave in health as in illness. He was perfectly quiet and unconcerned during a dangerous storm between Skye and Mull; and on being told that it was doubtful whether they would make for Mull or Col cheerfully replied, "Col for my money." Roads in {115} those days were not what they are now: but he never would admit that accidents could happen and pooh-poohed them when they did. Nor was his courage merely passive. Beauclerk did not find it so when at his country house he saw Johnson go up to two large dogs which were fighting and beat them till they stopped: nor did Langton when he warned Johnson against a dangerous pool where they were bathing, only to see Johnson swim straight into it; nor did the four ruffians who once attacked him in the street and were surprised to find him more than a match for the four of them. Whoever trifled with him was apt to learn sooner than he wished that nemo me impune lacessit was a saying which was to be taken very literally from Johnson's mouth. Garrick used to tell a story of a man who took a chair which had been placed for Johnson at the Lichfield theatre and refused to give it up when asked, upon which Johnson simply tossed man and chair together into the pit. He proposed to treat Foote, the comic actor, in much the same way. Hearing of Foote's intention to caricature him on the stage he suddenly at dinner asked Davies, a friend of Foote's, "what was the common price of an oak stick," and being answered sixpence, "Why then, sir (said he), give me leave to send your servant to purchase {116} a shilling one. I'll have a double quantity; for I am told Foote means to take me off, as he calls it, and I am determined the fellow shall not do it with impunity." The threat was sufficient; as Johnson said, "he knew I would have broken his bones." Years afterwards Foote, perhaps in half-conscious revenge, amused himself by holding Johnson up to ridicule in a private company at Edinburgh. Unluckily for him Boswell was present and naturally felt Foote's behaviour an act of rudeness to himself. So he intervened and pleaded that Johnson must be allowed to have some sterling wit, adding that he had heard him say a very good thing about Foote himself. "Ah," replied the unwary Foote, "my old friend Sam; no man says better things: do let us have it." On which Boswell related how he had once said to Johnson when they were talking of Foote, "Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?" to which Johnson had replied, "I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject." Boswell's story was as effective as his master's stick. There was no more question that night of taking off Johnson: Foote had enough to do to defend himself against the cannonade of laughter that Boswell had brought upon him. {117} A man of the mettle Johnson shows in those stories was certain to have no more fears about defending the public than about defending himself. So when he thought the so-called poems of Ossian a fabrication he said so everywhere without hesitation; and when their editor or author Macpherson, finding other methods fail, tried to silence him by bluster and threats, he received the reply which is only less famous than its author's letter to Lord Chesterfield.

"MR. JAMES MACPHERSON,

"I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me
I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law
shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what
I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.