Complete Works of Samuel Johnson

by Samuel Johnson

  A much more important matter than this hack-work was the publication of his London, a poem in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. This appeared in May 1738. He got ten guineas for it, which he was in no position to despise; but he also got something much more important, an established name in the world of letters. Every one talked of him, and Pope, who published his “1738” in the same year, was not only generous enough to inquire about him, and to say when told that the author of London was some obscure man, “He will soon be déterré,” but also to try to get him an Irish degree of M.A. This was in view of some attempts Johnson made to escape from dependence on journalism for his daily bread: but they were all unsuccessful, and till he received his pension his only source of income was what his various writings produced. In such circumstances he naturally wrote many things of quite ephemeral interest which call for no mention now. Perhaps the only prose work of permanent value he produced in these years was the life of his mysterious friend, Richard Savage. This curious volume appeared in 1744. The subject of it died in 1743. He and Johnson had been companions both in extreme poverty and in the intellectual pleasures which in such men poverty is unable to annihilate. Mrs. Johnson seems to have been out of London at this time, and the two struggling men of letters often passed nights together, walking and talking in the streets and squares without the price of a night’s lodging between them. Johnson’s account of his friend did not fill his pocket, but must have contributed something to his fame as it was very favourably criticized. It was the occasion of Reynolds first becoming acquainted with his name. He was so interested by the book that, having taken it up while standing with his arm leaning upon a chimney-piece, he read the whole without sitting down and found his arm quite benumbed when he got to the end.

  “Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.” Johnson had now been seven years in London, but had not yet found the way to do anything worthy of his powers. If he had died then, only the curious and the learned would have known his name to-day. A single satire in verse would never, by itself, have had the force to push its way through the ever-increasing crowd of applicants that besiege the attention of posterity. But the next year, 1745, is the literary turning-point of his life. Before it was over he had begun to deal with two subjects with which much of his remaining life was occupied, and on which much of his fame depends. He had published a pamphlet upon Shakespeare’s Macbeth which won the praise of Warburton, for which Johnson always felt and showed his gratitude (“He praised me at a time when praise was of value to me”); and, if Boswell is right, he had begun to occupy himself with the idea of making an English Dictionary. Thus, poor and obscure as he was in those years, sick with deferred hope as he must have been, he had in fact laid the foundation-stones of the authority and fame he was soon to enjoy as the Editor of Shakespeare and above all as “Dictionary Johnson.” Now at last he began to do work worthier of his powers. The “Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1747 and in the same year he wrote the admirable Prologue for the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, of which his pupil, David Garrick, more fortunate than the master with whom he had come to London, was now become manager.

  Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy of Irene. It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later years. There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot called it “the finest tragedy of modern times,” to which his only reply was, “If Pot says so, Pot lies.” But this hardly has the genuine ring about it. Even Garrick’s talent and friendship could not make Irene a success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds. In the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was given by the appearance of The Vanity of Human Wishes, another Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first. From 1750 to 1752 he was writing The Rambler, a sort of newspaper essay which appeared every Tuesday and Friday. He wrote it almost entirely himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was calling for it. No one will now wonder that it never had a large circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from sermons. But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to intellectual frivolity. We have seen that the idlest sort of reading Johnson could think of for a boy was “voyages and travels”; novels he does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by them, he of course could not so much as conceive. The Rambler had no sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for its two years of life. The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was the praise of his wife, who said to him, “I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.” That was just the discovery a good many people beside his wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that when The Rambler appeared as a book, it sold well and had gone through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author’s life.

  Three years after the cessation of The Rambler and, unhappily, also three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary appeared. It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever accomplished a literary task of such vast extent. The mere labour, one might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the materials of such a work is enormous. Nor could any literary labour bring with it greater temptations. Johnson’s success is not more due to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never failed him and the strong will which he could generally exert when he chose. He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface, “with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature”; but that, of course, was where the danger lay. A man of an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw that these visions of intellectual pleasure were “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer”; and that, if he was to do the thing he had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable perfection, which is the constant parent of futility. He realized, as so many men of letters have failed to realize, that “to deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much improvement”; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he attempted.

  The praise he deserved was somewhat slow in coming, as is commonly the case with the greatest literary achievements. But though, as he sadly says in the last words of his great Preface, most of those whom he wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had therefore little to hope or fear from praise or censure, yet he was always and before all things a human being, and only a creature above or below humanity could have been insensible to the pleasure of the new fame, the new authority and the new friends which his Dictionary gradually brought him. Before many years had passed the “harmless drudge,” as he himself had defined a lexicographer, had become the acknowledged law-giver and dictator of English letters; he had gathered round him a society of the finest minds of that generation, he had received a public pension which secured his independence, he had begun the long friendship which gave him a second home for more than fifteen years. These things did not all come at once — he did not know the Thrales till 1764 or 1765 — but the true turning-point in his career is the publication of his Dictionary. He was still poor for some years after that, and still much occupied in the production of hack-work: but he was never again obscure and was soon to be famous. Within a year after the appearance of the Dictionar
y he had issued his Proposals for an Edition of Shakespeare, the second in time and perhaps in importance of his three great works. His new position secured him a good number of subscribers and he intended to publish it the next year, 1757; but the interruptions of indolence, business and pleasure, as he himself says of Pope, usually disappoint the sanguine expectations of authors, and the book did not in fact appear till 1765.

  Neither Shakespeare nor idleness had occupied the whole of the intervening years. From 1758 to 1760 he produced a weekly paper called The Idler, of the same character as The Rambler. In 1759 he wrote his once famous story Rasselas to pay the expenses of his mother’s funeral. It was written in the evenings of a single week. Good judges thought that, if he had known how to make a bargain, he ought to have received as much as four hundred pounds for this book, which was translated into most of the European languages; but he did not in fact receive more than a hundred pounds for the first and twenty-five for the second edition. By this time he could visit Oxford, from which University he had received the degree of M.A. when his Dictionary was on the eve of publication: and another sign of the position he was beginning to occupy is that we find Smollet writing of him in 1759 as the “great Cham of literature.” More substantial evidences followed in 1762 when George III was advised by Bute to grant him a pension of 300 pounds a year, an income which must have seemed boundless affluence to a man who had never known a time when five pounds was not an important sum to him.

  Next year came the event which was even more important to his fame than the receipt of the pension was to his comfort. In 1763 he met Boswell for the first time. Fortune now began to smile upon him in good earnest and evidences of his established position and prosperity follow each other in rapid succession. “The Club” (its proper and still existing name, though Boswell occasionally calls it The Literary Club) was founded in 1764 and provided him for the rest of his life with an ideal theatre for the display of his amazing powers of talk, though it appears that he was not in his later years a very regular attendant. The next year, 1765, was probably the year in which he first met Thrale, the great brewer, and his clever and ambitious wife. No event contributed so much to the happiness of his after years. Thrale was a man of character and understanding, and was not without scholarly tastes. He at once saw the value of such a friend as Johnson, lived in the closest intimacy with him for the rest of his days, and named him executor in his will, which gave Johnson an opportunity such as he always liked, of mixing in business, and incidentally also, of saying the best thing that ever was said at the sale of a brewery. He appeared at the auction, according to the story told by Lord Lucan, “bustling about with an inkhorn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and, on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property, answered, ‘We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.’” The brewery was sold for 135,000 pounds to Mr. Barclay, the founder of the present firm of Barclay & Perkins, who now put Johnson’s head on the labels of their beer bottles. But it was not so much on the silent and busy Thrale himself as on his wife, a quick and clever woman fond of literary society, that the visible burden, honour and pleasure of the long friendship with Johnson fell. Till the breach caused by her second marriage just before he died no one had so much of his society as Mrs. Thrale. She soon became “my mistress” to him, an adaptation of his from the “my master” which was her phrase for her husband. And for him, too, Thrale was “my master.” A somewhat masterful servant, no doubt, to them both, but he loved them sincerely and was deeply grateful for their kindness. He lived at their house at Streatham as much as he liked, and had his own room reserved for him both there and at their London house. At Streatham he sometimes remained for several months, and it is chiefly there that Boswell’s only rival, Fanny Burney, saw him. It may be said that the Thrales’ house was more of a home to him than anything else he ever knew: it was at least the only house since his childhood in which he ever lived with children. There in the garden or in the library he studied and idled and talked at his ease; there many of his friends gathered round him; there his wishes were anticipated and his words listened to, sometimes with fear, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with reverence, always with affection and almost always with admiration. Well might he write to Mrs. Thrale as he did in October 1777: “I cannot but think on your kindness and my master’s. Life has upon the whole fallen short, very short, of my early expectation; but the acquisition of such a friendship, at an age when new friendships are seldom acquired, is something better than the general course of things gives man a right to expect. I think on it with great delight. I am not very apt to be delighted.”

  Johnson had now become a comparatively prosperous man, and the lives of the prosperous have a way of producing little to record. He received many honours and compliments of different sorts. Dublin University made him LL.D. in 1765, he had his well-known interview with George III in 1767, the Royal Academy appointed him their Professor in Ancient Literature in 1769, and in 1775 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. But the only events of any special importance in the last twenty years of his life were the publication of his Shakespeare in 1765, his journey in Scotland with Boswell in 1773, and the writing of his last and most popular book, The Lives of the Poets. This he undertook in 1777 and completed in 1781. Its easier style, pleasant digressions, and occasional bits of autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson’s life. He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the earlier works it substitutes an old man’s kindliness of retrospect. Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of his Journey to the Western Islands, of the Prologue to Goldsmith’s Good-Natured Man and of his political pamphlets, The False Alarm, Falkland’s Islands, The Patriot, and Taxation no Tyranny. But none of these things except the Lives of the Poets occupied much of his time, and his principal occupation in his old age was talking to his friends. He travelled a good deal, often visiting Oxford, his old home at Lichfield, and his friend Taylor’s house in Derbyshire. In 1775 he went to France with the Thrales, and even in his last year was planning a tour to Italy. But by that time the motive was rather health than pleasure. He had a paralytic stroke in 1783 and lost his powers of speech for some days. One of the doctors who attended him was Dr. Heberden, who had cured Cowper of a still graver illness twenty years earlier. His strong constitution enabled him to recover rapidly, and within a month he was paying visits in Kent and Wiltshire. But he had other complaints, and never again knew even that modest measure of health which he had once enjoyed.

  The inevitable loss of friends, that saddest and most universal sorrow of old age, joined with illness to depress his last years. Beauclerk died in 1780, Thrale in 1781, Levett and Mrs. Williams, two of the humble friends to whom his charity had given a home in his house, in 1782 and 1788. He was left almost alone. Yet the old courage and love of society asserted itself to the last, and he founded a new dining club the year before he died. But it was too late. The year 1784 opened with a prolonged illness lasting for months, and though in the summer he was well enough to get away to Oxford with Boswell once more, all could see that the end could not be far off. It came on the 18th of December 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20th. Burke and Windham, with Colman the dramatist and Sir Joseph Bankes the President of the Royal Society, were among the pall-bearers, and the mourners included Reynolds and Paoli. Seldom has the death of a man of letters created such a sense of loss either in the public at large or among his friends. Murphy, the editor of Fielding, and biographer of Garrick, says in his well-known essay that Johnson’s death “kept the public mind in agitation beyond all previous example.” Those great men, then, who attended his funeral represented not merely themselves and his other friends but the intelligence of the whole nation, which saw in the death of Johnson the fall of one of the mighty
in the moral and intellectual Israel.

  CHAPTER IV. JOHNSON’S CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTICS

  Something has already been said in the first chapter of this book about the character of Johnson. The argument of that chapter was that the singular position of Johnson as, in a way, the most national of our men of letters, was due not so much to anything he wrote, or even to anything written about him, as to the quality of his own mind and character, to a sort of central sanity that there was about him which Englishmen like to think of as a thing peculiarly English. We may now pass on to look at this character in a little more detail.

  Visitors to St. Paul’s Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round the space under the dome to come upon a statue which (but for the roll with a Greek inscription upon it) would appear to be that of a retired gladiator meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it represents Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but is not one of his best works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture, clothed only in a loose robe which leaves legs, arms, and one shoulder bare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all through his life; and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous, and probably valetudinarian sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right. And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant. The body and the mind are inextricably interwoven in all of us, and certainly in Johnson’s case the influence of the body was obvious and conspicuous. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his entire indifference to pain, were partly due to his great bodily strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St. Vitus’s Dance. He never knew, Boswell says, “the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs; when he walked it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters.” All accounts agree that his strange gesticulations and contortions were painful for his friends to witness and attracted crowds of starers in the streets. But Reynolds says that he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength. He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a valetudinarian, and was determined not to be one himself. He had known what it was to live on fourpence halfpenny a day and scorned the life of sofa cushions and beef-tea into which well-attended old gentlemen so easily slip. Once, when Mrs. Thrale asked him how he was, his reply was “Ready to become a scoundrel, Madam” (his word for a self-indulgent invalid); “with a little more spoiling you will make me a complete rascal.” But in that she never succeeded. Rather he carried the war into her camp, and when they were driving together would never allow her to complain of rain, dust, or any such inconveniences. “How do other people bear them?” he would ask, and would treat those who talked of such topics as evidently having nothing intelligent to say. “A mill that goes without grist is as good a companion as such creatures,” he once broke out. He required no valeting, or nursing; bathed at Brighton in October when he was nearing sixty, refused to be carried to land by the boatmen at Iona, as Boswell and Sir Allan Maclean were, but sprang into the sea and waded ashore; would not change his clothes when he got wet at Inverary; was a hundred years before his time in his love of open windows, and rode fifty miles with fox-hounds, only to declare that hunting was a dull business and that its popularity merely showed the paucity of human pleasures. Mrs. Thrale says that no praise ever pleased him more than when some one said of him on Brighton Downs, “Why, Johnson rides as well as the most illiterate fellow in England.” He was always eager to show that his legs and arms could do as much as other people’s. When he was past sixty-six he ran a race in the rain at Paris with his friend Baretti. He insisted on rolling down a hill like a schoolboy when staying with Langton in Lincolnshire: once at Lichfield when he was over seventy he slipped away from his friends to find a railing he used to jump when he was a boy, threw away his coat, hat, and wig, and, as he reported with pride, leapt over it twice; and on another occasion at Oxford was bold enough to challenge a Fellow, “eminent for learning and worth,” and “of an ancient and respectable family in Berkshire,” to climb over a wall with him. Apparently, however, the climbing did not actually take place, for the dignified person very properly refused to compromise his dignity.