Dr. Johnson and His Circle

by John Cann Bailey

What good sense, what resolute grip on the realities of life, what a love of truth and seriousness, shines through the long sentences! The form and language of the essay may perhaps be too suggestive of the professional author; but how much the opposite, how very human and real, is the stuff and substance of what he says! Professor Raleigh once proposed as a test of great literature, that it should be found applicable and useful in circumstances very different from those that were in the author's mind when he wrote. By that test these words of Johnson are certainly great literature. The degrees of wealth and poverty have varied infinitely in the history of the world. They were very different under the Roman Empire from what they became in the Middle Age; by Johnson's day they had become quite unlike what they had been in {25} the days of Dante and Chaucer; and they have again changed almost or quite as much in the hundred and thirty years that have passed since he died. Yet was there ever a time, will there ever be, when the self-deception of the human heart or the loose thinking of the human mind, will not allow men who never knew poverty to boast of their cheerful endurance of it? Have we not to-day reached a time when men with an assured income of ten, twenty, or even thirty pounds a week, affect to consider themselves too poor to be able to afford to marry? And where will such people better find the needed recall to fact, than in Johnson's trenchant and unanswerable appeal to the obvious truth as all can see it, if they will, for themselves, in the visible conditions of the world about them: "No man can, with any propriety, be termed poor who does not see the greater part of mankind richer than himself?"

This hold on the realities of life is the most essential element in Johnson's greatness. Ordinary people felt it from the first, however unconsciously, and looked to Johnson as something more than an author. Pope might do himself honour by acclaiming the verses of the unknown poet: Warburton might hasten to pay his tribute to the unknown critic: but they could not give Johnson, what neither {26} of them could have gained for himself, the confidence, soon to be felt by the whole reading part of the population of England, that here was a man uniquely rich in the wisdom of every day, learned but no victim of learning, sincerely religious but with a religion that never tried to ignore the facts of human life, a scholar, a philosopher and a Christian, but also pre-eminently a man.

A grave man, no doubt, apt to deal in grave subjects, especially when he had his pen in his hand. But that helped rather than hindered his influence. He would not have liked to think that he owed part of his own authority to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritans, but no doubt he did. Still the Puritan movement only deepened a vein of seriousness which had been in the English from Saxon days. One may see it everywhere. The Puritans would not have been the power they were if they had not found congenial soil in the English character. The Reformation itself, a Protestant may be excused for thinking, owes its ultimate triumph in England partly to the fact that Englishmen saw in it a movement towards a more serious and ethical religion than the Catholicism either of the Middle Age or of the Jesuits. The same thing may be seen in the narrower fields of literature. The Renaissance {27} on the whole takes a much more ethical note in England than, for instance, in France. A little later indeed, in the France of Pascal and Bossuet, books of devotion and theology were very widely read, as may be seen in the letters of Madame de Sévigné; but they can never have had anything like the circulation which they had in England, both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every one who looks at an English country-house library is struck by the abundant provision of sermons, mainly collected, like everything else indeed, in the eighteenth century. And every reader of Boswell's Johnson has been impressed by the frequent recurrence of devotional and religious books in the literary talk of the day, and, what is perhaps more remarkable, by the fact that wherever Boswell and Johnson go they constantly find volumes of sermons lying about, not only in the private houses, but also in the inns where they stay. There never was a period when "conduct," as Matthew Arnold used to call it, was so admitted to be the three-fourths of life he claimed for it, as it was between the Restoration and the French Revolution. It was conduct, not faith, ethics not religion, the "whole duty of man" in this life, not his supernatural destiny in another, that mainly occupied the minds of serious people {28} in that unecclesiastical age. And Johnson, definite Christian, definite Churchman as he was, full even of ecclesiastical prejudices, was just the man to appeal to a generation with such interests as these.

No questions occupied him so much as moral questions. He was all his life considering how he ought to live, and trying to live better. People who are in earnest about these things have always found not only his published prayers or his moral essays, but his life as told by Boswell full of fortifying and stimulating ethical food. All alike exhibit a mind that recognized the problem of the conduct of life as the one thing of supreme interest to a rational man, and recognized it as above all things a moral problem. His treatment of it is usually based on reason, not on mere authority or orthodoxy, or even on Christianity at all. Rasselas, for instance, his most popular ethical work, which was translated into most of the European languages, does not contain a single allusion to Christianity. Its atmosphere is neither Mahomedan nor Christian, but that of pure reason. And when elsewhere he does discuss definitely Christian problems it is usually in the light of free and unfettered reason. Reason by itself has probably never made any one a Christian, and certainly Johnson's {29} Christianity was not an affair of the reason alone, but he was seldom afraid to test it by the touchstone of reason. That was not merely a thing done in accordance with the fashion of his age; it was the inevitable activity of an acute and powerful mind. But the fact that he had in him this absorbing ethical interest, and that throughout his life he was applying to it a rare intellectual energy, and what was rarer still in those fields, a close and unfailing grip on life and reality, gave him that peculiar position to which he came in his last years; one of an authority which was probably not equalled by that of any professed philosopher or divine.

Still, his seriousness could not by itself have given him this position. The English people like their public men to be serious, but they do not like them to be nothing else. The philosopher and the saint, the merely intellectual man or the merely spiritual man, have never been popular characters or become leaders of men, here any more than elsewhere. The essential element in the confidence Johnson inspired was not his seriousness: it was his sovereign sanity, the unfailing common sense, to which allusion has already been made. He was pre-eminently a bookish man, but he was conspicuously free from the unreality that is so often felt {30} in the characters of such men. He knew from the first how to strike a note which showed that he was well aware of the difference between literature and life and their relative importance.

"Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise."

So he said, as a young man, in his finest poem, and so he acted all through the years. Scholar as he was, and very conscious of the dignity of scholarship, he never forgot that scholarship faded into insignificance in presence of the greater issues of life. In his most scholarly moment, in the Preface to the Dictionary, he will throw out such remark as "this recommendation of steadiness and uniformity (in spelling) does not proceed from an opinion that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness." Such a sentence could not but give plain people a feeling of unusual confidence in the writer. How different they would at once feel it to be, how different, indeed, we still feel it, from the too frequent pedantry of critics, insisting with solemn importance or querulous ill-temper upon trifling points of grammar or style. We know that this man has a scale of things in his mind {31} he will not vilify his opponent's character for the sake of a difference about a Greek construction, or make a lifelong quarrel over the question of the maiden name and birthplace of Shelley's great-grandmother. From first to last he was emphatically a human being, with a feeling for human life as a whole, and in all its parts. He said once: "A mere antiquarian is a rugged being," and he was never himself a mere grammarian or a mere scholar, but a man with an eager interest in all the business and pleasure of life. His high sense of the dignity of literature looked to its large and human side, not to any parade of curious information. Everywhere in his writings plain people are conciliated by his frank attitude as to his own calling, by his perfect freedom from any pontifical airs of the mystery of authorship. "I could have written longer notes," he says in the great Preface to his Shakespeare, "for the art of writing notes is not of difficult attainment." "It is impossible for an expositor not to write too little for some, and too much for others." "I have indeed disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude. Not a single passage in the whole work has appeared to me corrupt which I have not attempted to restore; or {32} obscure which I have not endeavoured to illustrate. In many I have failed, like others, and from many, after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse. I have not passed over with affected superiority what is equally difficult to the reader and to myself, but where I could not instruct him have owned my ignorance. I might easily have accumulated a mass of seeming learning upon easy scenes; but it ought not to be imputed to negligence that, where nothing was necessary, nothing has been done, or that, where others have said enough, I have said no more."

A man who writes like this is sure of his public at once. He is instantly seen to be too proud, as well as too sincere, too great a man, in fact, altogether, to stoop to the dishonest little artifices by which vanity tries to steal applause. In his writings as in his talk, he was not afraid to be seen for what he actually was; and just as, when asked how he came to explain the word Pastern as meaning the knee of a horse, he replied at once, "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," so in his books he made no attempt to be thought wiser or more learned than he was. And this modesty which he showed for himself he showed for his author too. The common notion that he depreciated {33} Shakespeare is, indeed, an entire mistake. There were certainly things in Shakespeare which were out of his reach, but that does not alter the fact that Shakespeare has never been better praised than in Johnson's Preface. But he will not say what he does not mean about Shakespeare any more than about himself. There is in him nothing at all of the subtle trickery of the common critic who thinks to magnify his own importance by extravagant and insincere laudation of his author. He is not afraid to speak of the poet with the same simplicity as he speaks of the editor. "Yet it must be at last confessed that, as we owe everything to him, he owes something to us; that, if much of his praise is paid by perception and judgment, much is likewise given by custom and veneration." He even adds that Shakespeare has "perhaps not one play which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary writer, would be heard to the conclusion." Whether that is true or not of Johnson's day or of our own—and let us not be too hastily sure of its untruth—at least the man who wrote it in the preface to an edition of Shakespeare lacked neither honesty nor courage. And he had then, as he has still, the reward which the most popular of the virtues will always bring.

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With courage and honesty usually go simplicity and directness. That is not the first praise that Johnson would win from people familiar with caricatures of his style. But it is a complete mistake to suppose that he always wore that heavy armour of magniloquence. He could be as free from pedantry of phrase as he always was from pedantry of thought. He is not only a supreme master of common sense; he is a supreme master of the language of common sense. He has the gift of saying things which no one can misunderstand and no one can forget. His common sense is what its name implies, no private possession thrust upon the minds of others, but their own thoughts expressed for them. That was one of the secrets of the unique confidence he inspired. The jury gave him their verdict because he always put the issue on a basis they could understand. His answer to the specious arguments of the learned is always an appeal to what it needs no learning to know. The critics of Pope's Homer are met by the unanswerable retort: "To a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient. The purpose of a writer is to be read." To Pope himself affecting scorn of the great, the same merciless measure of common knowledge is dealt. "His scorn of the great is too often repeated to be real: no man thinks {35} much of that which he despises." And so once more to Pope's victims. If they would have kept quiet, he says, the Dunciad would have been little read: "For whom did it concern to know that one or another scribbler was a dunce?" But this is what the dunces are the last people to realize: indeed, "every man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his own opinion, to others"; so the victim is the first to "publish injuries or misfortunes which had never been known unless related by himself, and at which those that hear them will only laugh; for no man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity."