DR. JOHNSON'S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE.
Mrs. Darling claimed acquaintance with the Doctor by virtue of an old copy of the Dictionary which she told me she found lying on the kerb near a bookstall in Farringdon Road. I suggested that she should have made enquiries of the owner of the stall as to whether the book was his. But she said that seeing she had at different times lost a watch which didn't go, a purse containing two and sevenpence three farthings, a flat iron, and a set of artificial teeth belonging to an old friend who died, she thought it was time she found something.
There was a poetic sort of justice about this reasoning which I was loth to question, and I evaded the issue by directing the old lady's attention to the tablet on the wall of the house, which informs passers-by that Dr. Johnson lived there from 1748 to 1758.
She answered, "Well, I never," and in her turn drew my attention to the fact that someone had opened the door and was waiting for us to enter.
Mrs. Darling followed at my heels with an apologetic clearing of her throat. I think she anticipated being introduced to some alarming social function. This was not a museum nor a church. This was a house with curtains at the windows, pictures on the walls, and even flowers in vases, and Mrs. Darling had never heard of the idea of turning a house into a shrine. I pointed out to her the portrait of the author of the Dictionary, and she gave it as her opinion that he was trustworthy but of a bilious disposition.
There were no other visitors, at the moment, and we wandered unmolested from room to room, finding everywhere a strange silence set in the monotonous hum and clack of the printing presses outside—a sound which fills the neighbouring courts and alleys with a ceaseless thump, thump, as of the labouring heart of this backwater of Fleet Street.
Mrs. Darling stared out of the windows and took an occasional rest in one of the stiff rush-bottomed chairs, whilst I peered into the glass cases containing yellow letters inscribed with faded brown characters, thinking how surprised the writers would have been could they have foreseen this day, nearly two hundred years ahead, when some chance note, scribbled on the spur of the moment, was read by the curious eyes of strangers, eager to put an eye to any hole in the curtain of the past.
The portraits, too, were eloquent. Boswell of the long ears, who did for Johnson what Pepys did for himself. "Bozzy," who saw with the terrible eyes of a child, and who, without any apparent realisation that each word was a stroke of the chisel, patiently hewed his living portrait of Dr. Johnson for posterity. I do not agree with the implications of toadyism against "Bozzy". There was real humility in his attitude towards the great man, and real love for the object of his hero worship.
To myself, the history of "Bozzy's" patience under rebuff, his elation at small victories, his hopes and fears, and the minuteness with which he chronicles every detail of his intercourse with the object of his adoration, is more thrilling than many a romance of the love of man for woman.
There was Garrick, too, of whom Goldsmith wrote, "He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, for he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back". Johnson, speaking of the actor's great wealth and popularity, said, "If all this had happened to me I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way.... Yet Garrick speaks to us.... A liberal man. He has given away more money than any man in England." To which Boswell replies, "Yet Foote used to say of him that he walked out with an intention to do a generous action, but, turning the corner of a street, he met the ghost of a halfpenny, which frightened him". I've been reading "Bozzy," you will see, and having my faith in the colossal inconsistency of human nature strongly confirmed.