It is asserted by Horace, that, “if matter be once got together, words will be found with very little difficulty;” a position which, though sufficiently plausible to be inserted in poetical precepts, is by no means strictly and philosophically true. If words were naturally and necessarily consequential to sentiments, it would always follow, that he who has most knowledge must have most eloquence, and that every man would clearly express what he fully understood: yet we find, that to think, and discourse, are often the qualities of different persons: and many books might surely be produced, where just and noble sentiments are degraded and obscured by unsuitable diction.
Words, therefore, as well as things, claim the care of an author. Indeed of many authors, and those not useless or contemptible, words are almost the only care: many make it their study, not so much to strike out new sentiments, as to recommend those which are already known to more favourable notice by fairer decorations; but every man, whether he copies or invents, whether he delivers his own thoughts or those of another, has often found himself deficient in the power of expression, big with ideas which he could not utter, obliged to ransack his memory for terms adequate to his conceptions, and at last unable to impress upon his reader the image existing in his own mind.
It is one of the common distresses of a writer, to be within a word of a happy period, to want only a single epithet to give amplification its full force, to require only a correspondent term in order to finish a paragraph with elegance, and make one of its members answer to the other; but these deficiencies cannot always be supplied: and after a long study and vexation, the passage is turned anew, and the web unwoven that was so nearly finished.
But when thoughts and words are collected and adjusted, and the whole composition at last concluded, it seldom gratifies the author, when he comes coolly and deliberately to review it, with the hopes which had been excited in the fury of the performance: novelty always captivates the mind; as our thoughts rise fresh upon us, we readily believe them just and original, which, when the pleasure of production is over, we find to be mean and common, or borrowed from the works of others, and supplied by memory rather than invention.
But though it should happen that the writer finds no such faults in his performance, he is still to remember, that he looks upon it with partial eyes: and when he considers, how much men, who could judge of others with great exactness, have often failed of judging of themselves, he will be afraid of deciding too hastily in his own favour, or of allowing himself to contemplate with too much complacence, treasure that has not yet been brought to the test, nor passed the only trial that can stamp its value.
From the publick, and only from the publick, is he to await a confirmation of his claim, and a final justification of self-esteem; but the publick is not easily persuaded to favour an author. If mankind were left to judge for themselves, it is reasonable to imagine, that of such writings, at least, as describe the movements of the human passions, and of which every man carries the archetype within him, a just opinion would be formed; but whoever has remarked the fate of books, must have found it governed by other causes than general consent arising from general conviction. If a new performance happens not to fall into the hands of some who have courage to tell, and authority to propagate their opinion, it often remains long in obscurity, and perishes unknown and unexamined. A few, a very few, commonly constitute the taste of the time; the judgment which they have once pronounced, some are too lazy to discuss, and some too timorous to contradict; it may however be, I think, observed, that their power is greater to depress than exalt, as mankind are more credulous of censure than of praise.
This perversion of the publick judgment is not to be rashly numbered amongst the miseries of an author; since it commonly serves, after miscarriage, to reconcile him to himself. Because the world has sometimes passed an unjust sentence, he readily concludes the sentence unjust by which his performance is condemned; because some have been exalted above their merits by partiality, he is sure to ascribe the success of a rival, not to the merit of his work, but the zeal of his patrons. Upon the whole, as the author seems to share all the common miseries of life, he appears to partake likewise of its lenitives and abatements.
See a pamphlet entitled “The Case of Authors by Profession,” 8vo. 1758. It is the production of Mr. James Ralph, who knew from painful experience the bitter evils incident to an employment which yielded a bare maintenance to Johnson himself. For anecdotes of Ralph, and the work alluded to, see Dr. Drake’s Essays on Rambler, &c. vol. i. p. 96.
THE IDLER
This is a series of 103 essays, with all but twelve of them by Johnson, which were published in the London weekly the Universal Chronicle between 1758 and 1760. The periodical was most likely printed for the sole purpose of including The Idler, since it had produced only one issue before the series began and ceased publication when it finished. Johnson explains that he chose the pen name ‘Idler’ as, “Every man is or hopes to be, an Idler.” The authors besides Johnson were Thomas Warton, Bennet Langton and the artist Joshua Reynolds. Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, later recalled that Johnson wrote some of the essays in The Idler “as hastily as an ordinary letter”. Boswell also remarked that once while visiting Oxford, Johnson composed an essay due for publication the next day in the half-hour before the last post was collected.
The essays were so popular that other publications began reprinting them without permission, prompting Johnson to insert a notice in the Universal Chronicle threatening to do the same to his competitors’ material and give the profits to London’s prostitutes. When The Idler appeared in book form, one of Johnson’s essays, “The Vulture”, was omitted, apparently because its anti-war satire was felt to be seditious. Johnson replaced it with an essay on the imprisonment of debtors.
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was to become an influential eighteenth-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the “Grand Style” in painting which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. Reynolds was a close friend of Johnson and contributed numbers 76, 79 and 82 to ‘The Idler’.
CONTENTS
PREFATORY NOTICE TO THE IDLER.
ADVERTISEMENT.
No. 1. SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1758.
No. 2. SATURDAY, APRIL 22, 1758.
No. 3. SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 1758.
No. 4. SATURDAY, MAY 6, 1758.
No. 5. SATURDAY, MAY 13, 1758.
No. 6. SATURDAY, MAY 20, 1758.
No. 7. SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1758.
No. 8. SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 1758.
No. 9. SATURDAY, JUNE 10, 1758.
No. 10. SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1758.
No. 11. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1758.
No. 12. SATURDAY, JULY 1, 1758.
No. 13. SATURDAY, JULY 8, 1758.
No. 15. SATURDAY, JULY 22, 1758.
No. 16. SATURDAY, JULY 29, 1758.
No. 17. SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 1758.
No. 18. SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1758.
No. 19. SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 1758.
No. 20. SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 1758.
No. 21. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1758.
No. 22. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1758.
No. 23. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1758.
No. 24. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1758.
No. 25. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1758.
No. 26 SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1758.
No. 27. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1758.
No. 28. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1758.
No. 29. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1758.
No. 30. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1758.
No. 31. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1758.
No. 32. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1758.
No. 33. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1758.
No. 34. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1758.
No. 35. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1758.
No. 30. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1758.
No. 37. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1758.
No. 38. SATURDAY, JANUARY 6, 1759.
No. 39. SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1759.
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No. 40. SATURDAY, JANUARY 20, 1759.
No. 41. SATURDAY, JANUARY 27, 1759.
No. 42. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1759.
No. 43. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1759.
No. 44. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1759.
No. 45. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1759.
No. 40. SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 1759.
No. 47. SATURDAY, MARCH 10, 1759.
No. 48. SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 1759.
No. 49. SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 1759.
No. 50. SATURDAY, MARCH 31, 1759.
No. 51. SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 1759.
No. 53. SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 1759.
No. 54. SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1759.
No. 55. SATURDAY, MAY 5, 1759.
No. 56. SATURDAY, MAY 12, 1759.
No. 57. SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1759.
No. 58. SATURDAY, MAY 26, 1759.
No. 59. SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1759.
No. 60. SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 1759.
No. 61. SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1759.
No. 62. SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 1759.
No. 63. SATURDAY, JUNE 30, 1759.
No. 64. SATURDAY, JULY 1, 1759.
No. 65. SATURDAY, JULY 14, 1759.
No. 66. SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1759.
No. 67. SATURDAY, JULY 28, 1759.
No. 68. SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 1759.
No. 69. SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 1759.
No. 70. SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 1759.
No. 71. SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 1759.
No. 72. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1759.
No. 73. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1759.
No. 74. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1759.
No. 75. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1759.
No. 76. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1759.
No. 77. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1759.
No. 78. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1759.
No. 79. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1759.
No. 80. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1759.
No. 81. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1759.
No. 82. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1759.
No. 83. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1759.
No. 84. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1759.
No. 85. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1759.
No. 86. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1759.
No. 87. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1759.
No. 88. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1759.
No. 89. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1759.
No. 90. SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 1760.
No. 91. SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 1760.
No. 92. SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1760.
No. 93. SATURDAY, JANUARY 26, 1760.
No. 94. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1760.
No. 95. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1760.
No. 96. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1760.
No. 97. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1760.
No. 98. SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 1760.
No. 99. SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1760.
No. 100. SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 1760,
No. 101. SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 1760.
No. 102. SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1760.
No. 103. SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 1760.
PREFATORY NOTICE TO THE IDLER.
The Idler may be ranked among the best attempts which have been made to render our common newspapers the medium of rational amusement; and it maintained its ground in this character longer than any of the papers which have been brought forward by Colman and others on the same plan. Dr. Johnson first inserted this production in the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette, April 15, 1758, four years after he had desisted from his labours as an essayist. It would seem probable, that Newbery, the publisher of the Chronicle, projected it as a vehicle for Johnson’s essays, since it ceased to appear when its pages were no longer enlivened by the humour of the Idler.
It is well known, that Johnson was not “built of the press and pen” when he composed the Rambler; but his sphere of observation had been much enlarged since its publication, and his more ample means no longer suffered his genius to be “limited by the narrow conversation, to which men in want are inevitably condemned.” “The sublime philosophy of the Rambler cannot properly be said to have portrayed the manners of the times; it has seldom touched on subjects so transient and fugitive, but has displayed the more fixed and invariable operations of the human heart.” But the Idler breathes more of a worldly spirit, and savours less of the closet than Johnson’s earlier essays; and, accordingly, we find delineated in its diversified pages the manners and characters of the day in amusing variety and contrast.
Written professedly for a paper of miscellaneous intelligence, the Idler dwells on the passing incidents of the day, whether serious or light, and abounds with party and political allusion. Johnson ever surveyed mankind with the eye of a philosopher; but his own easier circumstances would now present the world’s aspect to him in brighter, fairer colours. Besides, he could, with more propriety and less risk of misapprehension, venture to trifle now, than when first he addressed the public.
The World had diffused its precepts, and corrected the fluctuating manners of fashion, in the tone of fashionable raillery; and the Connoisseur, by its gay and sparkling effusions, had forwarded the advance of the public mind to that last stage of intellectual refinement, in which alone a relish exists for delicate and half latent irony. The plain and literal citizens of an earlier period, who conned over what was “so nominated in the bend,” would have misapprehended that graceful playfulness of satire, elegant and fanciful as ever charmed the leisure of the literary loungers of Athens. For, in the writings of Bonnel Thornton and Colman, the philosophy of Aristippus may indeed be said to be revived. We would not, however, be supposed, by these allusions, to imply that all the papers of the Idler are light and sportive; or that Johnson for a moment lost sight of a grand moral end in all his discussions. His mind only accommodated itself to the circumstances in which it was placed, and diligently sought to avail itself of each varying opportunity to admonish and to benefit, whether from the chair of philosophic reproof or in the cheerful, social circle. Whatever faults have been charged upon the Idler may be traced, we conceive, to this source. Nobody at times, said Johnson, talks more laxly than I do. And this acknowledged propensity may well be presumed to have affected the humorous and almost conversational tone of the work before us. In the conscious pride of mental might and in the easier moments of conversations, that illuminated the minds of Reynolds and of Burke, Johnson delighted to indulge in a lively sophistry which might sometimes deceive himself, when at first he merely wished to sport in elegant raillery or ludicrous paradox. When these sallies were recorded and brought to bear against him on future occasions, irritated at their misconstruction and conscious to himself of an upright intention, or at most of only a wish to promote innocent cheerfulness, he was too stubborn in retracting what he had thus advanced. Hence, when menaced with a prosecution for his definition of Excise in his Dictionary, so far from offering apology or promising alteration, he called, in his Idler, a Commissioner of Excise the lowest of human beings, and classes him with the scribbler for a party. So strange a definition and still less pardonable adherence to it can only be justified on the ground of Johnson’s warm feelings for the comfort of the middle class of society. He knew that the execution of the excise laws involved an intrusion into the privacies of domestic life, and often violated the fireside of the unoffending and quiet tradesman. He, therefore, disliked those laws altogether, and his warm-hearted disposition would not allow him to calculate on their abstract advantages with modern political economists, who, in their generalizing doctrines, too frequently overlook individual comfort and interests. His remarks, in the same paper, on the edition of the Pleas of the Crown cannot be thus vindicated, and we must here lament an error in an otherwise honest and well-intentioned mind. Every impartial reader of his works may thus easily trace to their origin Johnson’s chief political errors, and his research must terminate in admiration of a writer, who never prostituted his pen to fear or favour; and who, though erroneous often in his estimate of men and measures, still, in his support of a party, firmly believed himself t
o be the advocate of morality and right. His tenderness of spirit, his firm principles and his deep sense of the emptiness of human pursuits are visible amidst the lighter papers of the Idler, and his serious reflections are, perhaps, more strikingly affecting as contrasted with mirthfulness and pleasantry.
His concluding paper and the one on the death of his mother have, perhaps, never been surpassed. Here is no affectation of sentimentality, no morbid and puling complaints, but the dignified and chastened expression of sorrow, which a mind, constituted as Johnson’s, must have experienced on the departure of a mother. A heart, tender and susceptible of pathetic emotion, as his was, must have deeply felt, how dreary it is to walk downward to the grave unregarded by her “who has looked on our childhood.” Occasions for more violent and perturbed grief may occur to us in our passage through life, but the gentle, quiet death of a mother speaks to us with “still small voice” of our wasting years, and breaks completely and, at once, our earliest and most cherished associations. This tenderness of spirit seems ever to have actuated Johnson, and he is surely greatest when he breathes it forth over the sorrows and miseries of man. Even in his humorous papers, he never wounds feeling for the sake of raising a laugh, nor sports with folly, but in the hope of reclaiming the vicious and with the design of warning the young of the delusion and danger of an example, which can only be imitated by the forfeiture of virtue and the practice of vice. “In whatever he undertook, it was his determined purpose to rectify the heart, to purify the passions, to give ardour to virtue and confidence to truth.”
ADVERTISEMENT.
The IDLER having omitted to distinguish the essays of his correspondents by any particular signature, thinks it necessary to inform his readers, that from the ninth, the fifteenth, thirty-third, forty-second, fifty-fourth, sixty-seventh, seventy-sixth, seventy-ninth, eighty-second, ninety-third, ninety-sixth, and ninety-eighth papers, he claims no other praise than that of having given them to the publick.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 136