As to the Honorable Topham Beauclerk, more volatile than Langton, he had as steady a “sunshine of cheerfulness” for his heritage. We find him complaining to a friend in the July of 1773: “Every hour adds to my misanthropy; and I have had a pretty considerable share of it for some years past.” This incursion of low spirits was not normal with him. Johnson, bewailing his own morbid habits of mind, once said: “Some men, and very thinking men, too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round; Beauclerk, when not ill and in pain, is the same.” Boswell attests that Beauclerk took more liberties with Johnson than durst any man alive, and that Johnson was more disposed to envy Beauclerk’s talents than those of any one he had ever known. Born into the freedom of London, Beauclerk was familiar with Fox, Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. James men who did not ache to consort with Johnson; and he was quite their match in ease and astuteness. He walked the modish world, where Langton could not and would not follow; he alternated the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table with the court levees; Davies’s shop with the golden insipidities of the drawing-room; la comédie, la danse, l’amour même, with the intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. It shows something of his spirit that whereas no member of the Club save himself was a frequenter of White’s and Betty’s,[50] or a chosen guest at Strawberry Hill, yet there was no person of fashion whom he was not proud to make known to Doctor Johnson whenever he judged the candidate for so genuine an honor worthy of it. Some of these encounters must have been queer and memorable!
Beauclerk’s unresting sarcasm often flattened out Boswell and irritated the Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his abandonments of enthusiastic optimism, was never more than grazed. It is not to be denied that this spoiled child of the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the maladroit great man who might have quoted often on such occasions the sad gibe of Hamlet:
“I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance
Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night,
Stick fiery off indeed.”
What a pity that Goldsmith’s Retaliation was never finished, so as to include his portrait of Beau! He was “a pestilent wit,” as Anthony à Wood calls Marvell. Johnson, shy creature! deplored Beauclerk’s “predominance over his company.” The tyranny, however, was gracefully and decorously exercised, if we are to believe the unique eulogy that “no man was ever freer, when he was about to say a good thing, from a look which expressed that it was coming; nor, when he had said it, from a look which expressed that it had come.” Few human beings have had a finer sense of fun than Topham Beauclerk. He had an infallible eye for the values of blunders, and an incongruity came home to him like a blessing from above. Life with him was a night-watch for diverting objects and ideas. When he was not studying, he was disporting himself, like the wits of the Restoration; and he was equal to all emergencies, as they succeeded one another. Every specimen preserved of his talk is perfect of its kind, and makes us long for a full index. Pointed his speech was, always, and reminds one indeed of a foil, but without the button; a dangerous little weapon, somewhat unfair, but carried with such consummate flourish that those whom it pricks could almost cheer it. “O Lord! how I did hate that horrid Beauclerk!” Mrs. Piozzi scribbled once on the margin of Wraxall’s Memoirs, in an exquisite feminine vindication of poor Beau’s accomplished tongue.
He was no disguiser of his own likes and dislikes. Politics he avoided as much as possible; but he affected less concern in public matters than he really felt. “Consecrate that time to your friends,” he writes with mock severity to the ideal Irishman, Lord Charlemont, “which you spend in endeavoring to promote the interests of a half-million of scoundrels.” For his private business he had least zeal of all; and cites “my own confounded affairs” as the cause of his going into Lancashire. Beauclerk had great tact, boldness, and independence; his natural scorn of an oppressor was his modern and democratic quality. His idleness (for he was as idle by habit as Langton was by nature) he recognized, and lightly deprecated. Fastidious in everything, he made “one hour of conversation at Elmsley’s”[51] his standard of enjoyment, and his imagined extreme of annoyance was “to be clapped on the back by Tom Davies.” What he chose to call his leisure (again the ancestral Stuart trait!) he dedicated to the natural sciences in his beloved laboratory. “I see Mr. Beauclerk often, both in town and country,” wrote Goldsmith to Bennet Langton; “he is now going directly forward to become a second Boyle, deep in chemistry and physics.” When there was some fanciful talk of setting up the Club as a college, “to draw a wonderful concourse of students,” Beauclerk, by unanimous vote, was elected to the professorship of Natural Philosophy.
Johnson’s influence on him, potent though it was, seems to have been negative enough. It kept him from a few questionable things, and preserved in him an outward decorum towards customs and established institutions; but it failed to incite him to make of his manifold talents the “illustrious figure” which Langton’s eyes discerned in a vain anticipation. Beauclerk and the great High Churchman went about much together, and had amusing experiences. On such occasions, as in all their familiar intercourse, the disciple had the true salt of the Doctor’s talk, which, as Hazlitt remarks, was often something quite unlike “the cumbrous cargo of words” he kept for professional use. In the late winter of 1765 the two visited Cambridge, Beauclerk having a mind to call upon a friend at Trinity.
These, as we know, had their many differences, “like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-o’-war”; the one smooth, sharp, and civil, the other indignantly dealing with the butt-end of personality. Boswell gives a long account of a charming dispute concerning the murderer of Miss Reay, and the evidence of his having carried two pistols. Beauclerk was right; but Johnson, with quite as solid a sense of virtue, was angry; and he was soothed at the end only by an adroit and affectionate reply. “Sir,” the Doctor began, sternly, at another time, after listening to some mischievous waggery, “you never open your mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain, not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention.” And again, he said to him whom he had compared to Alexander, marching in triumph into Babylon: “You have, sir! a love of folly, and a scorn of fools; everything you do attests the one, and everything you say the other.”[52] Beauclerk could also lecture his mentor. It was his steadfast counsel that the Doctor should devote himself to poetry, and draw in his horns of dogma and didactics.
He had, ever ready, some quaint simile or odd application from the classics; in the habit of “talking from books,” as the Doctor called it, he was, however, distanced by Langton. Referring to that friend’s habit of sitting or standing against the fireplace, with one long leg twisted about the other, “as if fearing to occupy too much space,” Beauclerk likened him, for all the world, to the stork in Raphael’s cartoon of The Miraculous Draught.[53] One of Beauclerk’s happiest hits, and certainly his boldest, was made while Johnson was being congratulated upon his pension. “How much now it was to be hoped,” whispered the young blood, in reference to Falstaff’s celebrated vow, “that he would purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do!” Johnson seems to have taken the hint in good-humor, and actually to have profited by it.