Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

It has sometimes been asserted to be the function of the man of letters to say what others can feel or think but only he can express. Whatever may be thought of such a definition of literature, it is certain that Johnson discharged this particular function with almost unique success. And he continues to do so still, especially in certain fields. Whenever we feel strongly the point of view of common sense we almost expect to be able to find some trenchant phrase of Johnson's with which to express it. If it cannot be found it is often invented. A few years ago, a lover of Johnson walking along a London street passed by the side of a cabmen's shelter. Two cabmen were getting their dinner ready, and the Johnsonian was amused and pleased to hear one say to the other: "After all, as Doctor Johnson says, a man may travel all over the world without seeing anything better than his dinner." The saying was new to him and probably apocryphal, though the sentiment is one which can well be imagined {11} as coming from the great man's mouth. But whether apocryphal or authentic, the remark well illustrates both the extent and the particular nature of Johnson's fame. You would not find a cabman ascribing to Milton or Pope a shrewd saying that he had heard and liked. Is there any man but Johnson in all our literary history whom he would be likely to call in on such an occasion? That is the measure of Johnson's universality of appeal. And the secret of it lies, to use his own phrase, not used of himself of course, in the "bottom of sense," which is the primary quality in all he wrote and said, and is not altogether absent from his ingrained prejudices, or even from the perversities of opinion which his love of argument and opposition so constantly led him to adopt. Whether right or wrong there is always something broadly and fundamentally human about him which appeals to all and especially to the plain man. Every one feels at home at once with a man who replies to doubts about the freedom of the will with the plain man's answer: "Sir, we know our will's free, and there's an end on't," and if he adds to it an argument which the plain man would not have thought of, it is still one which the plain man and everyone else can understand. "You are surer that you can lift up your finger or not as you please, than you are of any {12} conclusion from a deduction of reasoning." Moreover we all think we are more honest than our neighbours and are at once drawn to the man who was less of a humbug than any man who ever lived. "Clear your mind of cant" is perhaps the central text of Johnson, on which he enlarged a hundred times. "When a butcher tells you his heart bleeds for his country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling." No one who has ever attended an election meeting fails to welcome that saying, or the answer to Boswell's fears that if he were in Parliament he would be unhappy if things went wrong, "That's cant, sir. . . . Public affairs vex no man." "Have they not vexed yourself a little, sir? Have you not been vexed at all by the turbulence of this reign and by that absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?" "Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not vexed."

Here we all know where we are. This is what we wish we could have said ourselves, and can fancy ourselves saying under more favourable circumstances; and we like the man who says it for us. Certainly no man, not even Swift, ever put the plain man's view with {13} such exactness, felicity, and force as Johnson does a thousand times in the pages of Boswell. And not only in the pages of Boswell. One of the objects of this introductory chapter is to try to give a preliminary answer to the very natural question which confronts every one who thinks about Johnson, how it has come about that a man whose works are so little read to-day should still be so great a name in English life. How is it that in this HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY he is the second author to have a volume to himself, only Shakespeare preceding him? The primary answer is, of course, that we know him, as we know no other man whose face we never saw, whose voice we never heard. Boswell boasted that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact. But after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation. On the contrary, it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book. No man owes so much to his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget that Johnson was the most famous man of letters in England before he ever saw Boswell. Boswell's earnest desire to make his acquaintance and to sit humbly at his feet was only an extreme {14} instance of an attitude of respect and admiration, often even of reverence, commonly felt towards him among the more intelligent and serious portion of the community. He had not then attained to the position of something like Dictatorship which he filled in the world of English letters at the time he wrote the Lives of the Poets, but, except the Shakespeare and the Lives, all the work that gave him that position was already done. In this case, as in others, fame increased in old age without any corresponding increase in achievement, and it was the easy years at Streatham, not the laborious years at Gough Square, that saw him honoured and courted by bishops and judges, peers and commoners, by the greatest of English statesmen and the greatest of English painters. But his kingship was in him from the first. He had been anax andron even among his schoolfellows. His bigness, in more ways than one, made them call him "the great boy," and the father of one of them was astute enough even then to perceive that he would be more than that: "you call him the great boy, but take my word for it, he will one day prove a great man." The boys looked upon him so much as a superior being to themselves that three of them, of whom one was his friend Hector, whom he often saw in later life, "used to come in the morning as his humble {15} attendants and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported him, and thus he was borne triumphant." Such a tribute by boys to intellectual superiority was less rare in those days than it has become since: but it would not be easy to find a parallel to it at any time. What began at school continued through life. Even when he was poorest and most obscure, there was something about him that secured respect. It is too little to say that no one ever imagined he could with impunity behave disrespectfully to Johnson. No one ever dared to do so. As he flung the well-meant boots from his door at Oxford, so throughout life he knew how to make all men afraid to insult, slight, or patronize him.

But these, after all, were qualities that would only affect the few who came into personal contact with him. What was it that affected the larger world and gave him the fame and authority of his later years? Broadly speaking of course it was what he had written, the work he had done, his poems, his Rambler and Idler, his Rasselas, his Shakespeare, above all that colossal and triumphant piece of single-handed labour, the Dictionary of the English Language. But there was more than that. Another man might have written {16} books quite as valuable, and attained to nothing like Johnson's position. A thousand people to-day read what Gray was writing in those years for one who reads what Johnson wrote, and they are quite right. Yet Gray in his lifetime had little fame and no authority except among his friends. Pope, again, had of course immense celebrity, more no doubt than Johnson ever had among men of letters; but he never became, as Johnson did, something almost like a national institution. What was it that gave Johnson what great poets never attained? It could not yet be his reputation as a great talker, which was only beginning to spread. We think of him as the greatest talker the world has ever seen: but that is chiefly due to Boswell, of course, and we are speaking at present of the years before the memorable meeting in the back parlour of Mr. Davies's shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden. Besides, good talk, except in Boswell's pages, is like good acting, a vain thing to those who only know it by hearsay. We are therefore thrown back on Johnson's public work for an explanation of the position he held. What was it in his work, with so little of Pope's amazing wit and brilliancy, with so little of Gray's fine imaginative quality and distinction, prose too, in the main, and not poetry, with none of the prestige of poetry, {17} that gave him what neither Pope nor Gray ever received, what it is scarcely too much to call, the homage of a nation?

The answer is that, especially in England, it is not brilliance or distinction of mind that win the respect of a nation. George III had many faults, but all through his reign he was an admirable representative of the general feelings of his people. And he never did a more representative act than when he gave Johnson a pension, or when he received him in the library of Buckingham House. No doubt many, though not all, of Johnson's political and ecclesiastical prejudices were very congenial to the king, but plenty of people shared George Ill's views without gaining from him an ounce of respect. What he and the nation dimly felt about Johnson was a quality belonging less to the author than to the man. The English, as we were saying just now, think of themselves as a plain people, more honest and direct in word and deed than the rest of the world. George III never affected to be anything but a plain man, was very honest according to his lights, and never for an instant failed to have the courage of his convictions. Such a king and such a people would inevitably be attracted to a man of Johnson's fearless sincerity and invincible common sense. The ideal of the nation is {18} still the same. Johnson once praised the third Duke of Devonshire for his "dogged veracity." We have lately seen one of that duke's descendants and successors, a man of no obvious or shining talents, attain to a position of almost unique authority among his fellow countrymen mainly by his signal possession of this hereditary gift of veracity, honesty and good sense. So it was with Johnson himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned language could conceal. "On s'attend à voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical, namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities, indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody could feel that about Johnson.

He never pretended to be superior to the pains or pleasures of the body and never concealed his interest in the physical basis of life. He might with truth have spoken, as Pope did, of "that long disease, my life," for he declares in one of his letters that after he was past twenty his health was such that he seldom enjoyed a single day of ease; and he was so scrupulously truthful when he had a pen in his hand that that must be taken as at the least a literal record of the truth as it appeared {19} to him at that moment. But though he never enjoyed health he never submitted to the tyranny of disease. The manliness that rings through all he wrote made itself felt also in his life, and we are not surprised to hear from Mrs. Thrale, in whose house he lived so long, that he "required less attendance sick or well than ever I saw any human creature." He could conquer disease and pain, but he never affected stoic "braveries," about not finding them very actual and disagreeable realities. In the same way, he never pretended not to enjoy the universal pleasures, such as food and sleep. Boswell records him as saying: "Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully, for I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else." This is not particularly refined language, and Johnson's manners at the dinner-table, where, until he had satisfied his appetite, he was "totally absorbed in the business of the moment," were not always of a nature to please refined people. But our present point is that they were only an exaggeration of that sense of bodily realities which is one of the things that has always helped to secure for him the plain man's confidence. Throughout his life he kept his {20} feet firmly based on the solid ground of fact. Human life, as it is actually and visibly lived, was the subject of his study and conversation from first to last. He always put fine-spun theories to mercilessly positive tests such as the ordinary man understands and trusts at once, though ordinary men have not the quickness or clearness of mind to apply them. When people preached a theory to him he was apt to confute them simply by applying it to practice. He supposed them to act upon it, and its absurdity was demonstrated. One of his friends was Mrs. Macaulay, who was a republican and affected doctrines of the equality of all men. When Johnson was at her house one day he put on, as he says, "a very grave countenance," and said to her: "Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman: I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us." No wonder that, as he adds, "she has never liked me since." To the political thinker, perhaps, such an argument rather proves the insincerity of Mrs. Macaulay than what he claimed for it, "the absurdity of the levelling doctrine." But it exhibits, {21} with a force that no theoretical reasoning could match, the difficulty which doctrines of equality will always have to meet in the resistance of human nature as it is and as it is likely to remain for a long time to come. And it illustrates the habit of Johnson's mind which has always made the unlearned hear him so gladly, the habit of forcing theory to the test of fact. For quick as he was, perhaps quicker than any recorded man, at the tierce and quart of theoretical argument, he commonly used the bludgeon stroke of practice to give his opponent the final blow. We are vaguely distrustful of our reasoning powers, but every man thinks he can understand facts and figures. The quickness of Johnson in applying arithmetical tests to careless statements must have been another of the elements in the fear, respect and confidence he inspired. A gentleman once told him that in France, as soon as a man of fashion marries, he takes an opera girl into keeping, and he declared this to be the general custom. "Pray, sir," said Johnson, "how many opera girls may there be?" He answered, "About four score." "Well then, sir," replied Johnson, "you see there can be no more than fourscore men of fashion who can do this."

There is no art of persuasion, as all orators know, so overwhelming in effect as this appeal, {22} or even appearance of appeal, to a court in which every man feels as much at home as the speaker himself. And though Johnson's use of it is, of course, seen at its most telling in his conversation, it was in him from the first, is a conspicuous feature of all he wrote, and was undoubtedly a powerful factor in winning for him the reputation of manliness and honesty he enjoyed. Take, for instance, a few paragraphs from his analysis of the rhetoric of authors on the subject of poverty. It is No. 202 of The Rambler. There is no better evidence of his perfect freedom from that slavery to words which is the besetting sin of authors.

"There are few words of which the reader believes himself better to know the import than of poverty; yet whoever studies either the poets or philosophers will find such an account of the condition expressed by that term as his experience or observation will not easily discover to be true. Instead of the meanness, distress, complaint, anxiety and dependence, which have hitherto been combined in his ideas of poverty, he will read of content, innocence and cheerfulness, of health and safety, tranquillity and freedom; of pleasures not known but to men unencumbered with possessions; and of sleep that sheds his balsamick anodynes only on the {23} cottage. Such are the blessings to be obtained by the resignation of riches, that kings might descend from their thrones and generals retire from a triumph, only to slumber undisturbed in the elysium of poverty."

* * * * * *

"But it will be found upon a nearer view that they who extol the happiness of poverty do not mean the same state with those who deplore its miseries. Poets have their imaginations filled with ideas of magnificence; and being accustomed to contemplate the downfall of empires, or to contrive forms of lamentation for monarchs in distress, rank all the classes of mankind in a state of poverty who make no approaches to the dignity of crowns. To be poor, in the epick language, is only not to command the wealth of nations, nor to have fleets and armies in pay.

"Vanity has perhaps contributed to this impropriety of style. He that wishes to become a philosopher at a cheap rate easily gratifies his ambition by submitting to poverty when he does not feel it, and by boasting his contempt of riches when he has already more than he enjoys. He who would show the extent of his views and grandeur of his conceptions, or discover his acquaintance with splendour and magnificence, may talk, like Cowley, of an humble station and quiet {24} obscurity, of the paucity of nature's wants, and the inconveniences of superfluity, and at last, like him, limit his desires to five hundred pounds a year; a fortune indeed, not exuberant, when we compare it with the expenses of pride and luxury, but to which it little becomes a philosopher to affix the name of poverty, since no man can with any propriety be termed poor who does not see the greater part of mankind richer than himself."