The overriding impression here is of pain. In Rambler 32, Sam refers to ‘the armies of pain’ that ‘send their arrows against us on every side’; he comments that ‘the strongest armour . . . will only blunt their points’. His choice of language emphasizes that pain is an event. We might usefully think of that event as the output of a biological alarm system; it causes us to pay attention to some part of ourselves where sensory receptors – nociceptors – are detecting harm. The sensation of pain is not merely something we register, but something we evaluate and communicate: if it’s not immediately obvious, we consider what may have caused it, how we can ease it, what makes it worse, and we also think about how we should comport ourselves, remembering what we have heard about the virtues of endurance yet worrying that too stoical a manner may cause people to think our suffering is only trivial. As we enlist others’ assistance we fight against their incomprehension, their failure to appreciate our pain’s particularity or indeed its diffuseness. We may even reflect on how, when the pain is gone, we will embark on a fresh scheme of physical and spiritual self-improvement. Awful physical pain causes us existential pain, since it seems to belong to death; we will do almost anything to relieve it, and part of this is the need to drive away the idea of our certain mortality. In the Idler, Sam observed that ‘The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain’; he wrote these words in August 1758, when not yet fifty, and we can already sense his experience of agony. In his declining years, its intensity and frequency grew. At the same time his attentiveness to himself increased, and it was in seeking to be a reliable witness to his many afflictions that he became so adept at parsing life’s discontents.
Others could admire this aptitude and still be glad that they lacked it. A remarkable instance of this occurred when Sam was in his late sixties; it was a social encounter of a kind that we’ve all had, in which someone we’ve forgotten turns out never to have forgotten us, and their generous assessment of what we have accomplished is touching – but also ruffles us, because it allows us to recognize how people see us, to perceive for a moment what they think we have left undone and how we may be remembered. It came in April 1778, when Sam was accosted in the street, after the Good Friday service at St Clement Danes, by Oliver Edwards, who had been at university with him nearly half a century earlier and had not clapped eyes on him since. The two men talked eagerly, and Edwards mentioned that he had made a lot of money as a lawyer, but had given a large part of it to needy relatives. ‘It is better to live rich than to die rich,’ responded Sam, echoing a line in Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals. A few moments later Edwards came back with the deathless comment ‘You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.’
37
Some thoughts upon the business of Cultural Legislation, whichs is less atrocious than it sounds
By the time Sam had his chance meeting with Oliver Edwards, he was busy with his last great work. Now known as the Lives of the Poets, it began as a series of prefaces and its origins lay in commercial rivalry. In 1776, a young Scot called John Bell started to issue cheap reprints of the works of the major English poets (eventually 109 volumes). Piqued, a consortium of forty-two London booksellers and six printers swiftly planned a response. They approached Sam to lend his authority to an edition that they promised would be ‘elegantly printed . . . on a fine writing paper’ – a classier undertaking than Bell’s, with more scholarly weight behind it. The idea was that he would contribute a sketch of each poet.
Sam, who felt that to date there had been scarcely any good accounts of the lives of English writers, played only a small part in deciding which ones to include. The four he managed to add to the booksellers’ list are now obscure: some of Isaac Watts’s hymns are still sung (‘When I survey the wondrous cross’, ‘Jesus shall reign where’er the sun’), but who reads Luton-born love poet John Pomfret, or innocuous clergyman Thomas Yalden, or pious Sir Richard Blackmore? Of these, it’s the last whose inclusion tells us most. To a modern eye, Blackmore’s achievements don’t look all that wondrous: epics about King Arthur, a poem about the effects on the brain of exposure to the sun, opposition to a scheme to provide free medicine for London’s poor. In his lifetime he was relentlessly attacked. But Sam is sympathetic to him, noting his abilities as a physician. ‘Contempt,’ he writes, ‘is a kind of gangrene, which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees.’ Besides, the sheer volume of vitriol that his critics had rained down on him made the details of his existence worth recording. Failing all else, Blackmore had been canny enough to invent a character called Mr Johnson, who was the hero of a club that from time to time retreated to a country house ‘to enjoy philosophical leisure’. Sam quotes Blackmore’s reference to this Mr Johnson as ‘a critic of the first rank’ whose taste is ‘distinguishing, just, and delicate’ and whose judgements ‘result from the nature and reason of things’. Understandably, he is rather taken with this figure and is clear that ‘his character shall not be suppressed’.
Despite his modest editorial contribution, when the first volumes came out in 1779, the public referred to ‘Dr Johnson’s edition of the English poets’ or simply ‘Johnson’s Poets’. The latter was the wording that appeared on the spines of bound sets. Sam objected, declaring in a letter to an unidentified correspondent that ‘This is indecent.’ Had the edition truly been his, its contents would have been different. But his name was crucial to the venture, ensuring publicity, and it has been hard to shake the idea that the Lives of the Poets is his map of what matters. In hindsight, it takes a place alongside several other large projects begun in the 1760s and 1770s that presented an overview of an art form and its practitioners. Chief among these were Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art and Charles Burney’s General History of Music. These were surveys, designed to fulfil more than one purpose; in his study of the genre, Lawrence Lipking writes that they ‘woo connoisseurs and antiquarians and common readers’ and at the same time ‘serve patriotism and taste and scholarship and tradition and romance’, but ‘stretched and buckled with the fatigue of responding to too many demands’.1 Most of the significant endeavours in this vein were by members of Sam’s circle: besides the efforts of Burney and Reynolds, there were Sir John Hawkins’s History of Music and Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry.
Sam’s particular contribution was a panoramic work that drew on sixty years of reading. In the end much more substantial than the concise prefaces the booksellers had in mind, the Lives of the Poets was simultaneously a work of literary history, a collection of closely focused critical studies and an important component of an immense literary anthology. It was also, like the Dictionary, designed to promote a sense of cultural heritage. ‘This,’ it appeared to say, ‘is English poetry.’ It made a substantial body of work accessible. For some, that body of work wasn’t broad enough; it didn’t include Chaucer or even Shakespeare, beginning instead with Abraham Cowley (1618–1667). Hence Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s complaint that ‘Johnson . . . wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets.’2 That wasn’t quite the truth of the matter, and it’s in any case interesting that he starts with Cowley, who was a professional poet rather than a polite amateur, set out a theory of what it meant to be an author (especially in time of war), and worried that our failure to name things condemned much that was of value to be forgotten.
In the light of the last of these details, it is striking that when Sam wrote about Cowley he referred – as no one had quite done before, though Dryden and Pope came close – to the ‘metaphysical poets’. This ‘race of writers’ practised a form of freakish, precious ‘wit’: ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.’ In other words, these poets make strange comparisons in order to surprise us and project an air of ingenuity, as well as to explore afresh the contours of experience. Thus John Donne likens his soul and his love
r’s to a pair of compasses – hers is the fixed foot, and ‘when the other far doth roam, / It leans and hearkens after it’. Or he points out to his mistress, who’s reluctant to have sex with him, that they are already conjoined: a flea has bitten them both, and in its body their bloods are mingled. ‘Metaphysical poetry’ has stuck as a way of labelling the works of Donne and Cowley, along with Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw and George Herbert. The term draws attention to the potential for poetry to make us feel thoughts and think feelings; Sam believes these poets’ particular ways of doing this are likely to alienate most readers, and it is of course this very quality, an audacious cleverness verging sometimes on ecstasy and sometimes on inscrutability, that later generations have prized.
Sam knew the importance of giving a phenomenon a name. Doing so helps us care for it – in the sense that we are able to discuss it, conveniently and with conviction, and also, of course, in the sense that we can make our relationship with it purposeful. Often that purposefulness takes the form of curation; we are the advocates or gallerists of what we have named. But in this case, the act of naming made it easier for Sam to disparage a style of poetry he found self-indulgent. The name marked a boundary, keeping a certain kind of unhealthy conceitedness in quarantine. When people today refer to metaphysical poetry, it is rarely with this intention. Yet we see here that labelling a problem is a way of turning it into a discussion point. An aversion to labels, and especially to being labelled, is an aversion to the schematic and reductive, to the obsession with brands and transactions, to the notion that the menu is the meal, but it is because labels are schematic and reductive that we find them so useful.
Besides functioning as criticism and history, the fifty-two parts of the Lives of the Poets are also, of course, works of biography – Sam’s favourite thing to read, and certainly one of his favourite genres in which to write. He thinks of it as both morally and psychologically interesting. In Rambler 60 he articulates a theory of the form, which can instruct us about ‘every diversity of condition’. The business of the biographer is ‘to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life’. Not for him the high strains of panegyric; he looks at his subjects and imagines being in their shoes. How do their works relate to their circumstances? What choices have shaped their careers? How do they think? What disturbs or excites them? What are their motives, and are there ways of reading these besides the merely obvious?
This is what we now expect of biography, but it wasn’t what his contemporaries expected. For them, the business of the biographer was to select and arrange incidents from a person’s life; for him, it was essential to add both authorial energy and philosophical inquisitiveness, to assess the value of sources and enlist readers’ powers of sympathy and judgement. He is interested in locating his poets’ early moments of frustration, naming the places they were educated and the people who did most to shape their minds, and understanding their professional relationships (especially those with their publishers). He wants to draw attention to literature’s means of production and reproduction. All of this promises to be illuminating – and if it’s grubby, so be it. Before the Lives of the Poets, it was usual for biographers to omit details of their subjects’ drinking, but Sam sees a weakness for drink as revealing and chooses to be candid about it.3 To write a biography was to access another person’s psyche, the truth of their private self, and this meant having to unearth truths about one’s own self. And to read a biography was, he saw, to compare our lives to the lives of others and learn from them, to make better sense of our existence. The attraction of the form lay in its ‘giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use’. ‘We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.’
‘We know somewhat, and we imagine the rest,’ he writes in his life of Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, who had written about the need for a ‘sympathetic bond’ between authors and their translators. This was in An Essay on Translated Verse, a poem published in 1684, which Sam admired more than anything else Roscommon wrote. It’s easy to see why. For Roscommon, the goal in translating another person’s work was to be ‘No longer his interpreter, but he’: a translator should choose a project where it was possible to identify strongly with the original author. Yet Sam, precisely because he recognizes the imaginative element of biography, is a sceptical life-writer. He is careful not to exaggerate the connections between life and art. Where there is uncertainty about a detail of a writer’s life, he usually evaluates the possibilities rather than plumping for the one he likes the most and sweeping all others aside. He’s dubious about popular anecdotes, about attempts to attribute a single clear-cut meaning to a person’s experiences, and about the claims of previous biographers, especially the authors of those fawning acts of hagiography he called ‘honeysuckle lives’. This last category sickened him: when we write a life, we ‘must represent it as it really was’ and should not ‘hide the man’ in order to ‘produce a hero’.
He sees how much a well-chosen detail can achieve. It opens a shaft of light on the truth of a person’s character. Thus he tells us that Alexander Pope wore three pairs of stockings in order to bulk up his slender legs, and that they had to be drawn on and off by a maid. From this we get the impression of Pope as a refined and vulnerable man who must perform an awkward ritual of robustness to keep the chilly world at bay. His other physical deficiencies confirm this – whether it’s his needing a stiff canvas bodice to hold himself upright, or his use of a fur doublet under his shirt to shut out the cold. When we read that his death ‘was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys’, the tragic relationship between performance and frailty is underscored. In reality, Pope died as a result of his lungs slowly weakening, which was the effect of kyphoscoliosis. But the silver saucepan and the medieval delicacy he cooked in it are the stuff of bathos; although Pope had written about heroes, felled by the sword or the javelin, his own death had been wholly unheroic. As Sam comments, ‘The death of great men is not always proportioned to their lives’, and lurking inside this statement is a suspicion that the deaths of the great are in fact never proportionate to their lives.
In other lives, there’s the same evocative succinctness. We learn that James Thomson, author of The Seasons, was late to a dinner with friends after the premiere of a play he had written because he’d sweated so much in his anxiety that his wig had become messy and required an emergency trip to the barber. Perennially skint, Thomson at last found a degree of financial security when appointed surveyor general of customs for the Leeward Islands. Yet soon afterwards he caught a chill while travelling on the Thames from Hammersmith to Kew, underestimated its seriousness, went out again too soon, developed a fever and expired. The playwright Thomas Otway was even more hapless. Reduced by debt to starvation, he stumbled naked and delirious into a coffee house, where a gentleman generously gave him a guinea; Otway used some of this to buy a roll and choked to death on his first mouthful.
In these snippets, there is a suggestion of the character of the project as a whole. Sam wrote the Lives as his health was failing, and their colour is autumnal. But there are glints of comedy in his portraits of writers’ frailties. Chief among these is self-delusion. Even the greatest can’t escape vanity, petty rivalry and small-mindedness. Sometimes writers are crippled by the sense that their every act is under surveillance. A case in point is Jonathan Swift, who had a rule that he would give only one coin to a beggar – ‘and therefore always stored his pocket with coins of different value’, to make sure he had the right piece of change for each supplicant. Sometimes the problem is the inattention of the world, or of that section of the world whose attention the writer most desires. Sam understands that writers are disposed to crave the approval of the very people who are least likely to give it. In this vein he repeats the story of how Samuel Butl
er, acclaimed for his satire Hudibras, failed in a bid to attract the patronage of the rakish Duke of Buckingham, because, just as they were about to meet, the Duke spotted ‘a pimp of his acquaintance . . . trip by with a brace of ladies’ and ‘immediately quitted his engagement to follow another kind of business’.
The poets he depicts expend their energy and talent on trifling business. The competitiveness of authors is especially costly, as the efforts they channel into keeping ahead of their rivals (or keeping them down) convert ardour into malice and tend to have only a brief effect. Yet he understands the psychology of this. An author is ‘a kind of general challenger’, who invites judgement, hopes for applause, risks rebuke, and inevitably feels beleaguered. Every challenge the author mounts is a call for comparison with others and their achievements, and authors can’t avoid picturing how they measure up against their peers.
‘Let no man dream of influence beyond his life,’ he writes, in the context of Alexander Pope’s ambitions of lasting fame, and Pope emerges as a textbook case of the writer’s self-excruciation. He delights in his own importance, but can’t stop looking for evidence to the contrary. Publicly claiming to be laid-back about attacks on his work and his person (‘these things are my diversion’), he in fact writhes in agony as he reads ever crueller barbs about his ‘warped carcass’, ‘harmless quill’, ‘little-tiny manhood’ and ‘poor thingless body’. Again and again the poets are masochists, ravenous for celebrity and deeply anxious about its effects. Few seem to have enough money; most are aware of the transience of reputation. It is no accident that, when the Lives became available as four free-standing volumes in 1781, Sam arranged them not by their subjects’ date of birth, but by the dates of their deaths. Theirs are to a large degree stories of doubt and stymied ambition. Doomed to be disappointed, they are weak and capricious, or they pickle in the juices of resentment. He can discuss these failings with painful candour, for he has either experienced them or seen them close up. But they are not the ingredients of congenial personality. As he wrote in the Rambler, a writer’s fans, ‘tempted to a nearer knowledge’ of the person behind the works they cherish, ‘have indeed had frequent reason to repent their curiosity’.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 29