It is worth while to look a little more closely at the composition of this society in which Johnson reigned as unquestioned king. The most remarkable thing of all about it is that its inner and most intimate circle included four men of genius. Johnson had few or no closer friends than Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and Boswell. Of these the first two were acknowledged as the greatest painter and the greatest orator then living in England or perhaps in Europe; the third, when he died, had some claim to be the truest poet; and, what is more remarkable, the lapse of over a hundred years has found little or nothing to detract from the fame each won from his contemporaries. Of Boswell it is enough to repeat that, while he could not compare with these men in life or action or general powers of mind, and therefore enjoyed no contemporary fame, he left a book behind him at his death which every succeeding generation has increasingly recognized as possessing that uniqueness of achievement which is another phrase for genius. Four such men alone would make a society such as few men have lived in. But Johnson’s society is as remarkable for the variety and quantity, as for the quality, of its distinction. No one can look through the invaluable index of Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell without being struck by this. If one were to make a list of all the people whom Johnson saw frequently or occasionally in the course of his life it would include an astonishing number of interesting names. Part of the fascination of Boswell’s book lies in that. It is first and foremost the portrait of a man, and everything is kept in subordination to that. But it is also the picture of a whole age and country. Sir Leslie Stephen remarked that nearly every distinguished man of letters of that time came into contact with Johnson. He mentions Hume and Gray as the only exceptions. There may be others, as for instance Sterne, to be added. But it remains true that Johnson was in exceptionally close personal touch with the whole literary world of his day. And Boswell has known how to make use of all that to give interest and variety to his book. Nor was Johnson ever, as we have seen, a mere narrow man of letters. He had a universal curiosity about life and men. He could talk to every one, and every one found his talk interesting, consequently Boswell’s record of his acquaintance is by no means a mere series of literary portraits. The society is of all the sorts of men and women that intelligent men can care to meet, the talk on almost all the subjects which such people can care to discuss.
Let us glance at some of the names that would find places in that list. We may begin with the statesmen. There is first of all Shelburne, who was Prime Minister the year before Johnson died; the most mysterious figure in the politics of that day, George III’s Jesuit of Berkeley Square, the “Malagrida” of the pamphleteers, to whom Goldsmith made his well-known unfortunate remark, “I never could conceive the reason why they call you Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man.” But for all this sinister reputation he was certainly an able and interesting man. He was a great patron of the arts, a princely collector of manuscripts, and an unusually enlightened student of politics if not a great statesman. How intimately Johnson knew him is, like almost everything about Shelburne, uncertain; but it is known that they used to meet in London and that Johnson once at least was Shelburne’s guest at Bowood. A greater man who was never Prime Minister was a much more intimate friend. Fox talked little before Johnson; and the two men were as different in many ways as men could be. Of the two it was certainly not the professed man of letters who was the greater lover of literature. But Fox was a member of “The Club,” and an intimate friend of Burke and Reynolds, and in these ways he and Johnson often met. In spite of all differences each made a great impression on the other. Fox indignantly defended Johnson’s pension in the House of Commons so early as 1774, and the last book read to him, except the Church Service, was Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Johnson was like the rest of the world dazzled by the daring parliamentary genius of Fox, and said that he had “divided the kingdom with Caesar so that there was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the sceptre of George III or the tongue of Fox.” He was for the King against Fox, because the King was his “master,” but for Fox against Pitt because “Fox is my friend.”
Another contemporary statesman who was intimate with Johnson was the cultivated and high-minded William Windham. No one had a greater reverence for Johnson. The most scrupulous of men, he was probably attracted to Johnson most of all by his character, and sought in him a kind of director for his conscience. Johnson, however, disapproved of scruples, and when Windham expressed, as Boswell says, “some modest and virtuous doubts” whether he ought to accept the post of Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland because of the dubious practices supposed to be necessary to the holding of that office, all the answer he got was “a pleasant smile” and “Don’t be afraid, sir, you will soon make a very pretty rascal.” But Windham took no discouragements and was to the end one of Johnson’s most devoted disciples. He put such a value on Johnson’s society that he once rode forty miles out of his way on a journey in order to get a day and a half with him at Ashbourne: and he was one of the little band of friends who constantly visited the dying man in the last days of his life. One day when he had placed a pillow to support the old man’s head, Johnson thanked him and said, “That will do — all that a pillow can do.” He was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral.
A less famous political friend was William Gerard Hamilton, with whom he at one time engaged in political work of some sort serious enough to induce him to write a special prayer about it. “Single speech Hamilton,” as he was called, behaved badly to Burke and was, it seems, widely distrusted; but Johnson maintained a life-long friendship with him, and had a high opinion of his conversational powers. Hamilton in return thought that he found in Johnson, when not talking for victory, a “wisdom not only convincing but overpowering”; and showed his gratitude by placing his purse at Johnson’s disposal when he supposed him to be in want of money. It was he — a man of public business and affairs all his life — who said of Johnson’s death that it had “made a chasm which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.” So also thought another member of Parliament, George Dempster, whom Burns honoured with his praise. He once told Boswell not to think of his health, but to sit up all night listening to Johnson; for “one had better be palsied at eighteen than not keep company with such a man.” Another politician in his circle was Fitzherbert, a man of whom Burke had the highest opinion, and of whom Johnson made the curious remark that he was the most “acceptable of men because his good qualities were negative and he offended no one.” Fitzherbert spoke of Johnson in the House of Commons as his friend and called him “a pattern of morality.”
Two other well-known political figures may be mentioned as acquaintances of Johnson; both men of more ability than character. Lord Chancellor Thurlow was a type of the lawyer who fights his way to success and cares for little else. But he was a true and generous friend to Johnson, for whose proposed journey to Italy he offered to provide the means. And if his career allowed any one to think meanly of his abilities, Johnson’s opinion of them would be a sufficient answer. He always maintained that “to make a speech in a public assembly is a knack”; it was the question and answer of conversation, he thought, that showed what a man’s real abilities were. And out of that test Thurlow came so triumphantly that Johnson said of him, “I would prepare myself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow. When I am to meet with him I should wish to know a day before.” He paid him the same compliment more than once; and the man to whom he paid it cannot have been the least interesting element in that interesting circle. A very different figure was the infidel and demagogue Wilkes, of whom Johnson had used the most violent language in public and private, but with whom, under the dexterous management of Boswell, he came to be on terms of friendly acquaintance. The story of how Boswell brought them together, of which Burke said that there was “nothing to equal it in the whole history of
the Corps Diplomatique,” is one of the very best things in the Life. Of course they never became friendly, but they met occasionally and Johnson sent Wilkes a presentation copy of his Lives. The acquaintance is one of the most striking instances of the real tolerance which lay behind Johnson’s outbursts of prejudice. He and Wilkes had nothing in common but quick brains, witty tongues, social gifts and dislike of the Scotch; but that was enough. Johnson would have sympathized with the respectable freeholder of Middlesex who, when canvassed for his vote by Wilkes replied, “Vote for you, sir! I would rather vote for the devil!” But he would have sympathized even more with the candidate’s reply: “But — in case your friend does not stand?”
No one will say that a set of acquaintances which stretched from Burke at one end to Wilkes at the other did not provide strong and varied political meat for the society to which they belonged. It is just the same when we look beyond politics. If all Johnson’s acquaintances could have been gathered into one room, the unlikeliest people would have found themselves together. The saintly John Wesley, for instance, and the very far from saintly Topham Beauclerk, make a curious pair. Yet both of them loved and honoured Johnson all their lives and both were always loved, at any rate, by him; and the one who got the less honour got the more love. No one could take such liberties with Johnson as this man who had been the cause of a divorce and was behaving badly to the wife whom he had stolen. Johnson did not spare Beauclerk the rebukes he deserved: but he could not resist the intellectual gifts and social charm of that true descendant of Charles II. When Beauclerk lay dying Johnson said, “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk”; and when he was dead, Johnson wrote to Boswell, “Poor dear Beauclerk — nec, ut soles, dabis joca.” That he could win the warm affection of such a man as Beauclerk is one more proof of the breadth of his sympathies. The most surprising people felt his fascination. Wraxall says that he had seen the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, “then in the first bloom of youth, hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson’s lips, and contending for the nearest place to his chair”; and it is recorded of Kitty Clive the actress, whom he used to go and see in the green-room, that she said of him, “I love to sit by Dr. Johnson: he always entertains me.”
But neither Duchesses, nor actresses, nor even young men of fashion, whose conjugal affairs had been the talk of the town, were more than occasional or single splendours in the Johnsonian heaven: its fixed stars of ordinary nights were less dazzling persons. Many were scholars, of course, as befitted a man of books. The greatest, but one of the least frequent or intimate, was Gibbon. He was a member of “The Club” and a friend of Reynolds and Fox: but his feeling for Johnson was apparently one of fear unmingled with love. Though he met them both fairly often, he never mentions Boswell, and Johnson only once or twice. The historian who could not talk was not likely to appreciate the great talker who cared nothing for history: so one is not surprised to find Johnson dismissed in the famous Memoirs as merely the “oracle” of Reynolds. A much greater friend was another member of “The Club,” Percy, of the Reliques of Poetry, afterwards a Bishop, with whom he often quarrelled but was always reconciled. Boswell managed the most important of their reconciliations by obtaining a letter from Johnson testifying to Percy’s merit which so pleased Percy that he said, “I would rather have this than degrees from all the Universities in Europe.” The whole story is a curious proof of the respect in which Johnson was held: for Percy’s grievance was that Johnson had snubbed him in the presence of a distinguished member of his own family, “to whom he hoped to have appeared more respectable by showing how intimate he was with Dr. Johnson.” Johnson laughed at Percy’s ballads and would have been the last person to guess the immense influence the publication of the Reliques was to have on the development of English literature in the next century: but he knew his value, and said he never met him without learning something from him.
Among other men of interest with whom he may be said to have been intimate at one time or another in his life may be mentioned his old pupil David Garrick, the most famous and perhaps the greatest of English actors, whom he loved and abused and would allow no one else to abuse: Richardson, the author of Clarissa, who once came to his rescue when he was arrested for debt, and of whose powers he had such a high opinion that he declared that there was “more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s than in all Tom Jones”; the two Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly anticipated the poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, who wrote against Hume and edited Clarendon; Savage, the poet of mysterious birth whose homeless life he sometimes shared and finally recorded: George Psalmanazar, the converted impostor, an even more mysterious person, whom Johnson reverenced and said he “sought after” more than any man: booksellers like Cave and Davies and the brothers Dilly: scholarly lawyers like Sir William Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell, whom he made executor to his will, and Sir Robert Chambers whom he reproved for tossing snails over a wall into his neighbour’s garden till he heard the neighbour was a Dissenter, on which he said, “Oh, if so, toss away, Chambers, toss away”; and physicians like Heberden, beloved of Cowper, whom Johnson called ultimus Romanorum, and Laurence, President of the College of Physicians, to whom he addressed a Latin Ode. All these were men of interest either in themselves or in their experience of life; all brought something worth having to the society in which they lived; and with all of them Johnson may be said to have been on intimate terms. Nor did he confine his friendship to men. He had a higher opinion of the intellectual capacities of women than most men of his time, and many of the most remarkable women of the time enjoyed his intimacy. Among them may be mentioned Elizabeth Carter, the translator of Epictetus, whom he thought the best Greek scholar he had known, and praised for being also a good maker of puddings; Fanny Burney, of whose novels he was an enthusiastic admirer; Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Macaulay, and Hannah More, the chief learned ladies of the day, all three women of real ability; and his own brilliant and witty Mrs. Thrale, who without being a professed “blue stocking” has for Johnson’s sake and her own quite eclipsed the “blue stockings” in the interest of posterity. Altogether it is an astonishing list. Johnson never thought of himself as a man to be envied; but if man is a social being, and no man was so more than Johnson, there can be few things more enviable, in possession or in retrospect, than the society, the friendship, or, as it often was, the love, of such men and women as these.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 629