Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

"All wrong ought to be rectified. If Mr. Wilkes is deprived of a lawful seat, both he and his electors have reason to complain, but it will not be easily found why, among the innumerable wrongs of which a great part of mankind are hourly complaining, the whole care of the publick should be transferred to Mr. Wilkes and the freeholders of Middlesex, who might all sink into non-existence without any other effect than that there would be room made for a new rabble and a new retailer of sedition and obscenity."

This is the old power of invective indulged now with the reckless indifference of a man who is talking among friends, knows his power and enjoys using it. But the ease of his later manner more commonly takes the form of a redoubled directness in his old appeal to universal experience, or that of these natural indulgences of old age, anecdote and autobiography. Take, for instance, the first volume of his Lives. It is not only full {189} of such admirable generalizations as that in which he sums up the case for a literary as against a mathematical or scientific education: "The truth is that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. . . . We are perpetually moralists: we are geometricians only by chance"; or that in which he expresses his contempt for Dryden exchanging Billingsgate with Settle: "Minds are not levelled in their powers, but when they are first levelled in their desires"; or the pregnant commonplace with which he prefaces his derision of the artificial love-poems which Cowley thought it necessary to address to an imaginary mistress: "It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of a college or in the bustle of the world, to find useful studies and serious employment." This is the Johnson his readers had known from the beginning. What is newer are the personal touches sprinkled all over the book. Here he will bring in a fact about his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds; there he will give a piece of information derived from "my father, an old bookseller." He who studied life and manners before all things loves to record the personal habits of his poets and to try their writings rather by the tests of life than {190} of criticism. He was, perhaps, the first great critic to take the seeming trifles of daily life out of the hands of gossips and anecdote-mongers, and give them their due place in the study of a great man. All this necessarily gave him something of the colloquial ease of the writer of recollections. Nothing could be simpler than his style when he tells us of Milton that "when he first rose he heard a chapter in the Hebrew Bible and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an hour; then dined; then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another sing; then studied; to six; then entertained his visitors till eight; then supped, and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to bed." On which his comment is characteristic and plainly autobiographical. "So is his life described; but this even tenour appears attainable only in colleges. He that lives in the world will sometimes have the succession of his practice broken and confused. Visitors, of whom Milton is represented to have had great numbers, will come and stay unseasonably: business, of which every man has some, must be done when others will do it." This may still have about it something of the style of a school-master, but of a school-master who teaches the art of living, not without having learnt by experience the difficulty of practising it.

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So we may trace the gradual diminution, but never the entire disappearance, of the excessive "deportment" which is the best known feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense, few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good writers, Scott, for instance, and the authors of the Book of Common Prayer, in whom a hurried reader might frequently omit half a phrase without depriving his hearers of an ounce of meaning. But you cannot do that with Johnson. Words that add neither information nor argument to what has gone before are exceptionally rare in him. Take his style at its worst. "It is therefore to me a severe aggravation of a calamity, when it is such as in the common opinion will not justify the acerbity of exclamation, or support the solemnity of vocal grief." Heavier writing there could scarcely be. But every word has its duty to do. The supposed speaker has been saying that he is, like Sancho Panza, quite unable to suffer in silence; and he adds {192} that this makes many a misfortune harder for him to bear than it need be: for it may arise from an injury which other people think too trifling to justify any open expression of anger, or from an accident that may seem to them so petty that they will not endure any serious lamentation about it. Johnson's way of saying this is pompous and rather absurd; but it is not verbose. So when he says that he knows nothing of Mallet except "what is supplied by the unauthorized loquacity of common fame," it is possible to dislike the phrase; it is not possible to deny that the words are as full of meaning as words can be.

The fact is that Johnson's style has the merits and defects of scholarship. He knows, as a scholar will, how every word came upon the paper, consequently he seldom uses language which is either empty or inexact; but with the scholar's accuracy he has also the scholar's pride. The dignity of literature was constantly in his mind as he wrote; and he did not always write the better for it. Books in his day and in his eyes were still rather solemn things to be kept above the linguistic level of conversation. Dryden and Addison had already begun to make the great discovery that the best prose style has no conscious air of literature about it; but the new doctrine had not reached the {193} mass either of writers or readers. And it never completely reached Johnson. He himself once accidentally gave one of the best definitions of the new style when he said of Shakespeare's comic dialogue that it was gathered from that kind of conversation which is "above grossness and below refinement." And at the end of his life he even occasionally produced some good specimens of it. But, taking his work as a whole, it must be admitted that he could rarely bring himself to be "below refinement," the refinement not of the drawing-room but of the library. In what he says he is always a man; in the way he says it he is nearly always too visibly an author. Those who have eyes to see and the will to look never fail of finding the man; but the author stares them in the face.

His prose works may be divided into two classes, those in which he is primarily a moralist, and those in which he is primarily a critic. Life and manners are never out of his mind; but while they are the direct and avowed subject of The Rambler, The Idler and Rasselas, they only come, as it were, indirectly into the Dictionary, the Shakespeare and the Lives of the Poets, where the ostensible business is the criticism of literature. Outside these categories are the political pamphlets, the interesting Journey to the Western Islands, {194} and a great quantity of miscellaneous literary hack-work. All of these have mind and character in them, or they would not be Johnson's; but they call for no special discussion. Nor do the Prayers and Meditations, which of course he did not publish himself. It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them, all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to the battle in which he seemed to himself to be always defeated.

The Rambler, The Idler and Rasselas fill four volumes out of the twelve in the 1823 library edition of Johnson. When Johnson decided to bring out a periodical paper he, of course, had the model of the Spectator and Tatler before him. But he had in him less of the graces of life than Addison and Steele, and a far deeper sense of the gravity of its issues; with the result that The Rambler and The Idler are much heavier than their predecessors, not only in style but in substance. They deal much more avowedly with instruction. As we read them we wonder, not at the slow sale of the original papers, but at the editions which the author lived to see. We stand amazed to-day at the audacity of a journalist {195} who dares to offer, and at the patience or wisdom of a public which is content twice a week to read, not exciting events or entertaining personalities, but sober essays on the most ancient and apparently threadbare of topics. Here are Johnson's subjects for the ten Ramblers which appeared between November 20 and December 22, 1750: the shortness of life, the value of good-humour, the folly of heirs who live on their expectations, peevishness, the impossibility of knowing mankind till one has experienced misfortune, the self-deceptions of conscience, the moral responsibilities of men of genius, the power of novelty, the justice of suspecting the suspicious, the pleasures of change and in particular that of winter following upon summer. None of these can be called exciting topics. Yet when there is a man of real power to discuss them, and men of sense to listen to him, they can make up a book which goes through many editions, is translated into foreign languages, and is called by a great critic a hundred and fifty years after its appearance, a "splendid repository of wisdom and truth." With the exception of the first word, Sir Walter Raleigh's daring praise may be accepted as strictly true. There is nothing splendid about The Rambler or The Idler. The more shining qualities {196} of literature, except occasional eloquence, are conspicuously wanting in them. There is no imagination, little of the fancy, wit and readiness of illustration so omnipresent in Johnson's talk, little power of drawing character, very little humour. He often puts his essay into the form of a story, but it remains an essay still. His strength is always in the reflections, never in the facts related or the persons described. The club of Essex gentlemen who fancied themselves to be satirized in The Rambler were only an extreme instance of the common vanity which loves to fancy itself the subject of other people's thoughts. Johnson's portraits have not life enough to be caricatures; still less can posterity find in them the finer truth of human beings. His was a profounder mind than Addison's; but he could not have drawn Sir Roger de Coverley. He had not "run about the world," as he said, for nothing, and he knew a great deal about men and women; but he could not create. Rasselas, his only professed story, is a total failure as a story. It is a series of moral essays, and whoever reads it must read it for the same reasons as he reads The Rambler. The remark Johnson absurdly made of Richardson's masterpiece is exactly true of his own Rasselas: "If you were to read it for the story {197} your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself."

In all these things, as elsewhere, his strength lies in shrewdness, in a common sense that has been through the fire of experience, in a real love of wisdom and truth. There is a story that Charlotte Brontë, when a girl of sixteen, broke out very angrily at some one who said she was always talking about clever men such as Johnson and Sheridan. "Now you don't know the meaning of clever," she said; "Sheridan might be clever—scamps often are, but Johnson hadn't a spark of 'cleverality' in him." That remark gives the essence of The Rambler. Whoever wants "cleverality," whoever wants what Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton supply so brilliantly and abundantly to the present generation, had best leave Johnson alone. The signal merit of his writings is the exact opposite of "cleverality"; it is that he always means exactly what he says. He often talked for victory, but except, perhaps, in the political pamphlets he always wrote for truth.

Books like The Rambler and Rasselas do not easily lend themselves to illustration; the effect they produce is a cumulative effect. Slowly, as we read paper after paper, the mind and character of Johnson take hold of us; what we began with impatience or {198} perhaps with contempt, we put down with respect and admiration. At the end we feel that we would gladly put our lives into the hands of this rough, wise, human, limited, lovable man. To get to that impression the books must be read; but one or two illustrations may be given. There is nothing new to say about death, but the human heart will itself be dead when it is willing to give up saying again the old things that have been said on that subject from the beginning of the world. Who puts more of it into saying them than Johnson?

"When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favours unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish, for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."