Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

"What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable, and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.

"SAM. JOHNSON."

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The first thing then to get clear about Johnson is that there was a very vigorous animal at the base of the mind and soul that we know in his books and in his talk. Part of the universal interest he has inspired lies in that. The people who put off the body in this life may be divine, though that is far from certain, but they are apt to affect us little because we do not feel them to be human. There is much in Johnson—a turn for eating seven or eight peaches in the garden before breakfast, for instance—which gives unregenerate beings like schoolboys a feeling of confidence at once. And older persons, not yet altogether regenerate, are apt to have a weakness for a man who was willing to be knocked up at three in the morning by some young roysterers, and turn out with them for a "frisk" about the streets and taverns and down the river in a boat. The "follies of the wise" are never altogether follies. Johnson at midnight outside the Temple roaring with Gargantuan laughter that echoed from Temple Bar to what we now call Ludgate Circus is a picture his wisest admirers would be slowest to forget. The laugh and the frisk and the peaches are so many hall-marks to assure us that the philosopher is still a man and has not forgotten that he was once a boy: that he has always had five senses like the rest of us; and {119} that if he bids us take a grave view of life it is not because he knows nothing about it.

Another note of catholicity in Johnson is his wide experience of social conditions. The man in him never for an instant disappeared in the "gentleman." Very few of our great men of letters have ever known poverty in the real sense of the word, in the way the really poor know it. Johnson had, and he never forgot it. It is true that like most people who have known what it is to be uncertain about to-morrow's dinner he did not much care to talk about these experiences. No one does perhaps except politicians who find them useful bids for popularity at a mass meeting. Johnson at any rate when he had arrived at comparatively easy social conditions frankly admitted that he did not like "low life." His sympathy with the poor, was, as we shall see, one of the strongest things in him, and made one of the deepest marks in his actual life; but he never thought it necessary to indulge in polite or political fictions about the superior virtue or wisdom of the working class. "Poverty," he once wrote in words that come at first sight rather startlingly from the mouth of so strictly Biblical a Christian as he, "is a great enemy to human happiness . . . it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult." {120} "Of riches," he said on another occasion, "it is not necessary to write the praise." No doubt the opposition between such remarks as these, meant as Johnson meant them, and certain sayings in the Gospels, is like the opposition between many contrasted pairs of sayings in the New Testament itself, more verbal than real. But it is as strong a proof as could be given of the power and universality in the eighteenth century of the temper which Butler called "cool and reasonable," the temper which hated and despised "enthusiasm," that such a man as Johnson, a man, too, who owed his religious faith to Law's Serious Call, could use such words without the slightest consciousness of their needing explanation.

The fact is that Johnson never, even in his religion, left his open eye or his common sense behind him: and common sense told him, what a brighter light concealed from St. Francis but the history of his Order was to show too plainly within half a century of his death, that poverty is at least for ordinary men no assured school of the Christian virtues. Johnson's attitude towards the poor, in fact, included the whole of sympathy and understanding but not one tittle of sentiment. They had the benefit of the greater part of his small income; he gave constantly, both to those who {121} had claims on him and to those who had none, really loving the poor, says Mrs. Thrale, "as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy," and insisting on giving them, not merely relief, but indulgence and pleasure. He wished them to have something more than board and lodging, some "sweeteners of their existence," and he was not always frightened if the sweeteners preferred were gin and tobacco. His very home he made into a retreat, as Mrs. Thrale says with little exaggeration, for "the lame, the blind, the sad and the sorrowful"; and he gave these humble friends more than board and lodging, treating them with at least as ceremonious a civility as he would have used to so many people of fashion.

He held no theories of political or social equality; on the contrary, he looked upon such theories as mischievous nonsense: but the respect paid to him in his later years by great personages never made him take a Mayfair or "county-family" view of life. He might stay at Inverary, visit Alnwick and be invited to Chatsworth, but it took more than the civilities of three Dukes to blind him to the fact that on a map of humanity all the magnates in the world occupy but a small space. Even in the days when he lived at {122} his ease in a rich man's house and, when in his own, would dine out every day for a fortnight, he never surrendered himself, as so many who have at last reached comfort do, to the subtle unrealities of the drawing-room. He would not allow the well-do-to to call themselves "the world": and when Sir Joshua said one day that nobody wore laced coats any longer and that once everybody had worn them, "See now," said Johnson, "how absurd that is; as if the bulk of mankind consisted of fine gentlemen that came to him to sit for their pictures. If every man who wears a laced coat (that he can pay for) was extirpated, who would miss them?" So when Mrs. Thrale once complained of the smell of cooking he told her she was a fortunate woman never to have experienced the delight of smelling her dinner beforehand. "Which pleasure," she answered, "is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge Island of a morning!" Johnson's answer was the grave rebuke of a man from whose mind the darker side of a prosperous world was never long absent. "Come, come, let's have no sneering at what is serious to so many: hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear lady, turn another way that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge Island to wish for {123} gratifications they are not able to obtain: you are certainly not better than all of them: give God thanks that you are happier." It is Mrs. Thrale who herself tells the story: and it is to her credit that she calls Johnson's answer a just rebuke.

But Johnson's equality was that of the moralist, not that of the politician. He was the exact opposite of a leveller, believing in the distinction of ranks as not only a necessity of society, but an addition to its strength and to the variety and interest of its life. He himself scrupulously observed the formalities of social respect, and would no doubt, like Mr. Gladstone, have repudiated with horror the idea of being placed at dinner above the obscurest of peers. His bow to an Archbishop is described as a studied elaboration of temporal and spiritual homage, and he once went so far as to imply that nothing would induce him to contradict a Bishop. There no doubt he promised more than the presence of a stupid Bishop or a Whig Bishop would have allowed him to perform. For no considerations of rank ever prevented him from expressing his own opinions or trampling upon those of other people. Except Swift, perhaps, he was the most independent man that ever lived. Of Swift's jealous and angry arrogance he had nothing. But he was full of what he {124} himself called "defensive pride." That was his answer when he was accused of showing at least as much pride as Lord Chesterfield in the affair of the Dictionary; "but mine," he said, "was defensive pride." He was always on his guard against the very appearance of accepting the patronage of the great. Even Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of snobbery in him. At Inverary he would not let Boswell call before dinner lest it should look like fishing for an invitation; and when he dined there the next day and sat next the Duke, he did not refrain, even in that Whig holy of holies, from chaffing about one of the Campbells who "had been bred a violent Whig but afterwards kept better company and became a Tory"! So once, when he dined at Bowood with Lord Shelburne he refused to repeat a story at the request of his host, saying that he would not be dragged in as story-teller to the company. And he would never give the authority for any fact he mentioned, if the authority happened to be a lord. Indeed he carried his sturdy independence so far that in his last years he fancied that his company was no longer desired in these august circles. "I never courted the great," he said; "they sent for me, but I think they now give me up"; adding, in reply to Boswell's polite disbelief, "No, sir; great lords and great {125} ladies don't love to have their mouths stopped."

Here again Johnson represented the typical Englishman as foreigners then and since have read his character. An accepter and respecter of rank as a social fact and a political principle, he was as proud in his way as the proudest man in the land. Tory as he was, for him every freeborn Englishman was one of the "lords of human kind": a citizen of no mean city, but of one in which—

". . . e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan, And learns to venerate himself as man!"