The periodical essay was a well-established form before Johnson wrote The Rambler, and towards the end of his life, when writing on Addison, he explained what he saw as its particular strengths. In his view, the periodical essay derived from conduct books such as Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galatheo, Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano and La Bruyère’s Les caractères, ou les moeurs de ce siècle. These works, according to Johnson, had set themselves to ‘teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation’.19 But, in Johnson’s opinion, before the publication of The Tatler and The Spectator in 1709–11 and 1711–12 respectively, ‘England had no masters of common life’:
No writers had yet undertaken to reform either the savageness of neglect or the impertinence of civility; to shew when to speak, or to be silent; how to refuse, or how to comply. We had many books to teach us our more important duties, and to settle opinions in philosophy or politicks; but an Arbiter elegantiarum, a judge of propriety, was yet wanting, who should survey the track of daily conversation and free it from thorns and prickles, which teaze the passer, though they do not wound him.20
Yet this important function is discharged by nothing so well as ‘the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amusement. If the subject be slight, the treatise is short. The busy may find time, and the idle may find patience.’21 Johnson was, in fact, wrong when he suggested that The Tatler and The Spectator had been first in the field. The periodical format went back as far as the 1660s and Henry Muddiman’s Oxford Gazette, while (as Angus Ross has pointed out) ‘it is no exaggeration to say that every form of writing, every topic of discussion or method of circulation (save the issue of collected papers by subscription) characteristic of The Tatler and The Spectator had been seen in some periodical or other before they appeared’.22 Moreover, when Johnson came to write The Rambler, he aspired to a much graver character than that of an arbiter elegantiarum’. Instead, he chose to move the periodical form back towards those ‘more important duties’ which in the ‘Life of Addison’ he considered were already adequately covered. Johnson wished ‘to reach the same audience the Spectator had so successfully entertained, but to encourage in it a more rigorously critical kind of thinking’.23 What nudged him in this direction?
It was perhaps the work on the Dictionary of the English Language, on which Johnson had embarked during the later 1740s, which both made the periodical essay an attractive form, and impelled him to give that form a graver moral turn. At one level, the composition of brief essays must have seemed a relief after the unremitting reading required by the Dictionary. At the same time, that very reading may have suggested to Johnson both the perennial moral topics which form the heart of The Rambler, and how to treat them. In part, that was because work on the Dictionary was gradually equipping Johnson with a philosophical vocabulary in which he could give weighty expression to his judgements on the topics of common life.24 The programme of reading which Johnson had set himself in order to assemble his illustrative quotations was in itself an education, involving as it did ‘incessant reading’ of ‘the best authors in our language’.25 Johnson fortified himself for his labours by drinking deeply from what in the Preface to the Dictionary he called ‘the wells of English undefiled… the pure sources of genuine diction’: namely, the best English writers between the last years of Elizabeth I and the Restoration, when the language had purged itself of barbarity, but before it had succumbed to the French influence which had entered the kingdom with Charles II.26 Even if those draughts were drained for lexicographical ends, it is inconceivable that Johnson’s mind would not have received from them a wider irrigation.
But there was perhaps another way in which the effort of compiling the Dictionary fertilized Johnson’s other writings. The broad consideration which compiling the Dictionary obliged Johnson to give to questions of language and grammar also alerted him to the possibility that the affective strengths of the English language might be found in what at a first and formal glance might look like its deficiencies. If we consider some of Johnson’s pronouncements on language, and then compare them with a poem he wrote towards the end of his life – the verses ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ – we will be in a better position to appreciate how his grapplings with language in the making of the Dictionary may have influenced his ideas about the possibilities and pitfalls involved in what he was undertaking in The Rambler: that is, imbuing language with moral content.
Just as Johnson was politically an internal exile (a stubborn Tory obliged to live under Hanoverian monarchs and in a world of which the politics, irrespective of which particular party happened to be in or out, were fundamentally shaped by the Revolution Principles of 1688) so, too, he was estranged from the most fashionable ethical theories of his time, the spokesman for a conscious ethics of the will at a time when a contrary theory of morals was dominant. The two positions were elegantly formulated by David Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751):
There has been a controversy started of late… concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.27
Johnson, of course, was, in the terms of this opposition, an opponent of affective theories of ethics; that is to say, theories which located the origin of moral discriminations in involuntary sentiments, rather than conscious and reasoned judgements. The very holders of such views were probably enough to blacken them irredeemably in Johnson’s eyes: Shaftesbury, the arch-Whig and free-thinker; Hume, the religious sceptic against whom Johnson repeatedly ranged and defined himself; Adam Smith, leading figure of that Scottish Enlightenment which Johnson emphatically slighted in his Journey to the Western Islands.
In conversation with Boswell, however, Johnson expanded on his opposition to the ethical theories of Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith, and made clear that his suspicion of those theories was not simply transferred suspicion of the men who disseminated them:
We can have no dependence upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts, I can conceive him doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there there is always temptation.28
This conviction, that a morality based upon the affections might not serve to support us in those hard cases which are the test of any morality, led Johnson also to oppose speculative theories which tended to diminish man’s responsibility for his moral health – for example, fashionable theories which related morals to climate, or which located the cause of moral degeneration in broad social phenomena such as luxury. A good example of Johnson’s resistance to anything which suggested that moral judgements were not peculiarly human, and rooted in the conscious will, is his refusal even to entertain one of Boswell’s experiences while on the Grand Tour:
I told him that I had several times, when in Italy, seen the experiment of placing a scorpion within a circle of burning coals; that it ran round and round in extreme pain; and finding no way to escape, retired to the centre, and like a true Stoick philosopher, darted its sting into its head, and thus at once freed itself from its woes…. I said, this was a curious fact, as it shewed de
liberate suicide in a reptile.29
Johnson refused point blank to accept the possibility of a reptile’s committing suicide, because he could admit neither that animals possess a moral sense, nor that an authentically ethical act could be a reflex, without sacrificing the essence of his moral position; namely, that our moral sense is the product of our waking judgement.
Given that Johnson was such an advocate for an ethics of conscious principle, one would expect his ethical language to be overt and declaratory; that is to say, conscious, stated and argued for. But the experience of reading Johnson is, I think, not like that. Sir John Hawkins caught well how the impact of Johnson’s writing is not one of propositional clarity:
In all Johnson’s disquisitions, whether argumentative or critical, there is a certain even-handed justice that leaves the mind in a strange perplexity.
‘A strange perplexity’: it is precisely that sense of being moved at a level beyond or beneath the level of language which, I think, characterizes the experience of reading Johnson’s best moral writing. To understand why this should be so, we need to consider the theory of language which exerted the greatest influence over Johnson, that elaborated by John Locke in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
The importance of language for Locke was that, since words represent ideas, not objects, they can form the conduit of knowledge:
… it was further necessary that he [man] should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions, and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.30
The ideas that language could convey are of two kinds, simple and complex. An example of a simple idea would be ‘goat’. Simple ideas, Locke insisted, cannot be defined. However, in practice this is not a great problem since they can be demonstrated or pointed out. An example of a complex idea (or ‘mixed mode’, as Locke more often calls it) would be ‘ingratitude’ (and indeed the ideas represented by all ethical language fall into this category of mixed modes). For mixed modes, the reverse holds true. They cannot be demonstrated, because, in Locke’s words, ‘they are the creatures of the understanding rather than the works of nature’.31 However, the compensation for this is that they can be defined with perfect precision:
… the signification of their names [those of mixed modes] cannot be made known, as those of simple ideas, by any showing, but, in recompense thereof, may be perfectly and exactly defined. For they being combinations of several ideas that the mind of man has arbitrarily put together, without reference to any archetypes [i.e. things existing in nature which form the original patterns of those ideas], men may, if they please, exactly know the ideas that go to each composition, and so both use these words in a certain and undoubted signification, and perfectly declare, when there is occasion, what they stand for.32
For Locke, this is a source of great comfort, because from it he deduces that moral language can be made more precise than any other kind of language:
This, if well considered, would lay great blame on those who make not their discourses about moral things very clear and distinct. For since the precise signification of the names of mixed modes… is to be known, they being not of nature’s but man’s making, it is a great negligence and perverseness to discourse of moral things with uncertainty and obscurity… Upon this ground it is that I am bold to think that morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics: since the precise real essence of the things moral words stand for may be perfectly known, and so the congruity or incongruity of the things themselves be certainly discovered, in which consists perfect knowledge.33
Johnson’s famous comment – ‘words are the daughters of earth, and… things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science and words are but the signs of ideas’ – shows his affinity with Locke’s theory of language.34 But on this point of the demonstrability of morality, he is at the opposite pole from his philosophical predecessor. What Locke saw as a source of encouragement – that moral terms are susceptible of exact definition – Johnson, as a practical rather than a speculative moralist, found a cause of disquiet. It may be that such moral terms can be precisely defined. But those precise definitions may not help in the practical business of grasping the substantive essence of moral ideas.
The point can be clarified if we compare definitions from the Dictionary of what Locke would have called simple ideas with mixed modes. First, two definitions of simple ideas:
Horse: A neighing quadruped, used in war, in draught, and in carriage.
Ink: The black liquor with which men write.
These definitions follow on from Locke’s insistence on the demonstrability of a simple idea, in that they take the form of a set of instructions as to where to look. If you want to know what ink is, you find a man who is writing, and look at the black liquor he is using. Johnson’s definitions of mixed modes are quite different:
Virtue: Moral goodness: opposed to vice.
Vice: The course of action opposite to virtue.
Good: Not bad; not ill.
Ill: Not well.
It is quite clear that, considered purely as definitions, these have a precision which the definitions of ‘horse’ and ‘ink’ lack; but it is hard to see what use they are to someone who wishes to lead a moral life, and therefore needs to know the content of the ideas these terms represent. Locke had assumed that, because these words could be precisely defined, we could have exact knowledge of the essence of the idea. But for Johnson, it is possible to have a precision of moral language, but nothing else, as he shows in the character of the philosopher in chapter twenty-two of Rasselas:
To live according to nature, is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to co-operate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things.35
For Johnson, to live a moral life was less a question of possessing a vocabulary than of performing actions. In Rambler No. 14 he acknowledged the power of moral theory: ‘in moral discussions it is to be remembered that many impediments obstruct our practice, which very easily give way to theory’.36 But that power will be only a snare and a delusion unless it be also remembered that ‘human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth’.37 How can language lay hold on the substance of morality, instead of shadowing the world of moral action with a self-regarding and futile precision?38
It is here that Johnson’s notion of the special virtue of poetic language is important. In Idler No. 60 Johnson amusingly mocked Dick Minim’s enactment theory of poetic language. He was obliged to do so in order to distinguish that crassness from a notion of poetic language which he took very seriously: namely, that ‘the force of poetry’ ‘calls new powers into being’, which powers are capable of ‘embod[ying] sentiment’, including moral sentiment.39 If we turn now to his poem on Robert Levet, we can see an example of that force and of those powers at work.
Boswell gave a disdainful sketch of Levet: ‘he was of a strange grotesque appearance, stiff and formal in his manner, and seldom said a word while any company was present.’40 From this unpromising material, Johnson made a moral poem of extraordinary force. In his ‘Essay on Epitaphs’, he wrote:
The best Subject for EPITAPHS is private Virtue; Virtue exerted in the same Circumstances in which the Bulk of Mankind are placed, and which, therefore, may admit of many Imitators… he that has repelled the Temptations of Poverty, and disdained to free himself from Distress, at the Expence of his Virtue, may animate Multitudes, by his Example, to the same Firmness of Heart and Steadiness of Resolution.41
It takes no very profound reading of ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ to see that its surface meaning is very much concerned with rectifying the neglect of society, and of paying due accord to the virtues of the obscure and th
e petty.
But, beneath that, there is also a more profound moral level to the poem, where it engages with the consideration that Johnson felt should always inform a person’s moral conduct; that is to say, the certainty of death. Rambler No. 78 states the principle:
Selected Essays (Penguin Classics) Page 2