Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

Such lines almost challenge Pope on his own {183} ground, meeting his rapier-like dexterity of neatness with heavy sword-strokes of sincerity and strength. But here, as in the prose, the true Johnsonian excellence is best seen when he is in the confessional.

"Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee—
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."

There, and in such lines as the stanza on Levett—

"His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed,"

one hears the authentic unique voice of Johnson; not that of a great poet but of a real man to whom it is always worth while to listen, and not least when he puts his thoughts into the pointed shape of verse.

Still, of course, prose and not verse is his natural medium. And here a word should be said about that prose style of his which had an immense vogue for a time and plainly {184} influenced most of the writers of his own and the following generation, even men so great as Gibbon and the young Ruskin, and women so brilliant as Fanny Burney. Then a reaction came and it was generally denounced as pompous, empty and verbose. After the Revolution people gave up wearing wigs, and with the passing of wigs and buckle-shoes there came a dislike of the dignified deportment of the eighteenth century in weightier matters than costume. Now Johnson, whatever he did at other times, was commonly inclined to put on his wig before he took up his pen. His elaborate and antithetical phrases are apt to go into pairs like people in a Court procession, and seem at first sight to belong altogether to what we should call an artificial as well as a ceremonious age. His style is the exact opposite of Dryden's, of which he said that, having "no prominent or discriminative characters," it "could not easily be imitated either seriously or ludicrously." Johnson's could be, and often was, imitated in both spirits. Even in his lifetime, when it was most admired, it was already parodied. Goldsmith was talking once of the art of writing fables, and of the necessity, if your fable be about "little fishes," of making them talk like "little fishes"; Johnson laughed: upon which Goldsmith said, "Why, Dr. Johnson, {185} this is not so easy as you seem to think: for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales." That was the weak spot in Johnson on which the wits and critics seized at once: there is a good deal of misplaced magniloquence in his writings. When the sage in Rasselas says, "I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness," we now feel at once that the simple and natural thought gains nothing and loses much by this heavy pomp of abstract eloquence. So when Johnson wants to say in the eleventh Idler that it is wrong and absurd to let our spirits depend on the weather, he makes his reader laugh or yawn, rather than listen, by the ill-timed elaboration of his phrases: "to call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly." So much must be admitted. Johnson is often turgid and pompous, often grandiose with an artificial and undesired grandiloquence. No one, however, who has read his prose works will pretend that this is a fair account of his ordinary style. You may read many Ramblers in succession and scarcely find a marked instance of it; and, as every one knows, his last, longest and pleasantest work, the Lives of the Poets, is almost free from it. All through {186} his life one can trace a kind of progress as he gradually shakes off these mannerisms, and writes as easily as he talked. They are most conspicuous in The Rambler and Rasselas. But even there, through all the heaviness, born perhaps of the too obvious desire to instruct and improve, we get more than occasional suggestions of the trenchant force which we most associate with the pages of Boswell.

"My curiosity," said Rasselas, "does not very strongly lead me to survey piles of stone, or mounds of earth; my business is with man. I came hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choaked aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present world. . . . To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known."

There is nothing here of the intimacy and charm which, as Dryden and Cowley had already shown, and Johnson himself was occasionally to show in his last years, a plain prose may possess; but of the lucidity and force which are its most necessary characteristics never prose exhibited more. Those who know their Boswell will catch in the passage a pleasant foretaste of the outburst to Thrale when he wanted Johnson to contrast {187} French and English scenery: "Never heed such nonsense, sir; a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another; let us, if we do talk, talk about something; men and women are my subjects of inquiry: let us see how these differ from those we have left behind."

This natural trenchancy gets freer play, of course, in the talk than in the writings. But it is in them all from the first, even in Rasselas, even in The Rambler. "The same actions performed by different hands produce different effects, and, instead of rating the man by his performances we rate too frequently the performances by the man. . . . Benefits which are received as gifts from wealth are exacted as debts from indigence; and he that in a high station is celebrated for superfluous goodness would in a meaner condition have barely been confessed to have done his duty."

It is not necessary to multiply citations. What is found even in The Rambler, which he himself in later years found "too wordy," is found much more abundantly in the Dictionary and the Shakespeare; and as he grows old, and, with age and authority, increasingly indifferent to criticism and increasingly confident in his own judgment, there gradually comes an ease and familiarity which without {188} diminishing the perfect lucidity of the phrases adds sometimes to the old contemptuous force, and occasionally brings a new intimacy and indulgence. The writing becomes gradually more like the talk. Nobody in his earlier work was ever quite so unceremoniously kicked downstairs as Wilkes was in The False Alarm.