The Life of Samuel Johnson
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Boswell offers further implicit comment on the self-reflexive complexity of his book at the end of his account of his first visit to Johnson’s lodgings, when he congratulates himself on ‘having now so happily established an acquaintance of which I had been so long ambitious’:
My readers will, I trust, excuse me for being thus minutely circumstantial, when it is considered that the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson was to me a most valuable acquisition, and laid the foundation of whatever instruction and entertainment they may receive from my collections concerning the great subject of the work which they are now perusing.13
In this awkwardly articulated sentence, Boswell tries to express the relationship between a number of distinct entities: his appetite for literary detail; his friendship with Johnson; the production of literary instruction and entertainment; his ‘collections’ preparatory to the writing of the book; the Life of Johnson itself, which its readers are ‘now perusing’; and its ‘great subject’. It is tempting to take that last phrase as referring simply to Johnson himself: what could be more self-evident than that the great subject of the Life of Johnson is Samuel Johnson? But so to construe the final limb of Boswell’s ungainly sentence would be to short-change the Life of Johnson. It is about Boswell; it is about Johnson; it is about the friendship between Boswell and Johnson; and finally it is also about the process whereby those individuals and that friendship gave rise to the material ‘collections’ which made possible its own creation. Nothing less than all of this is the ‘great subject’ of Boswell’s book, and it is this complex amplitude which makes the Life of Johnson the richest example of life-writing in English. As Boswell himself put it in a letter of 21 April 1786 to Hugh Blair, ‘I will venture to promise that my Life of my revered Friend will be the richest piece of Biography that has ever appeared. The Bullion will be immense, whatever defects there may be in the workmanship.’14 That final note of diffidence is rather uncharacteristic for Boswell, inclined as he was to bounce and preen.15 It was also misplaced, as the workmanship – that is to say, Boswell’s deliberate and creative manipulation of the materials he had collected over many years – was, and remains, essential to the book’s triumph, as Bruce Redford has recently demonstrated.16 It was because of the workmanship that Vicesimus Knox would in 1791 recognize in Boswell’s Life of Johnson ‘a new Species of Biography’.17
‘Hyperion to a satyr’: so Hamlet expressed the profound discrepancy between Old Hamlet and Claudius.18 The difference between Boswell and Johnson was perhaps less absolute, but it was still pronounced. In 1763 Johnson was a literary figure of substance: a poet, the author of The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, a novelist, and the heroic compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language. In 1755 he had received an honorary MA from Oxford, and in 1762 he had been given a pension of £300 per annum by George III. Boswell, by contrast, was unknown, and virtually unpublished.19 Johnson was both admired and censured as the spokesman for a severe and Christian morality in a mid-century society which was given, perhaps with a certain disabling self-consciousness, to seeing itself as gripped in moral crisis.20 Boswell was fond of drink and women. Nevertheless, the friendship between this unlikely pair struck root and thrived.
It was not the first time that Johnson had been drawn to everything which he seemed himself not to be. In the early 1750s, before he knew Boswell, he had also formed an improbable friendship with Bennet Langton’s college acquaintance Topham Beauclerk:
Johnson, soon after this acquaintance [with Bennet Langton] began, passed a considerable time at Oxford. He at first thought it strange that Langton should associate so much with one who had the character of being loose, both in his principles and practice; but, by degrees, he himself was fascinated. Mr. Beauclerk’s being of the St. Alban’s family, and having, in some particulars, a resemblance to Charles the Second, contributed, in Johnson’s imagination, to throw a lustre upon his other qualities; and, in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. ‘What a coalition! (said Garrick, when he heard of this;) I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Roundhouse.’ But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable association.21
This is not just a case of, in our well-worn phrase, opposites attracting. At the end of his life, sick, and provoked by Boswell to think about what might be the fate of one’s friendships in the afterlife, Johnson replied ‘with heat’: ‘How can a man know where his departed friends are, or whether they will be his friends in the other world? How many friendships have you known formed upon principles of virtue? Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance, mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly.’22 No doubt great allowance must be made for the extremity of the moment. Nevertheless, we are here far from any Montaignean extolling of ‘amitie’,23 and Johnson’s awareness of the complexity and possible impurity of the motives to friendship is germane to any consideration of his association with Boswell.
An incident from early in the friendship between the two men sheds light on the curious quality of what held them together. Once again, as was so often the case, Boswell launched the exchange by being provoking:
I teized him [Johnson] with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, ‘That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.’24
A tendency to self-torment was a characteristic the two men shared.25 In his journal, Boswell admonished himself to remember that he was subject to melancholy and low spirits.26 And writing to the Revd Ralph Churton in 1792 on the subject of Johnson’s view of the unhappiness of human life, Boswell linked the subject and the biographer: ‘his “morbid melancholy” may have made life appear to him more miserable than it generally is. But the truth, Sir, is as you have judiciously observed, that I myself have a large portion of melancholy in my constitution…’27 It was surely for this reason that Boswell chose the persona of ‘The Hypochondriack’ – that is to say, one afflicted by ‘melancholy, hypochondria, spleen, or vapours’ – for the series of essays he contributed to the London Magazine in the late 1770s and early 1780s, and also why he would write of himself in the very first of those essays that ‘I have suffered much of the fretfulness, the gloom, and the despair that can torment a thinking being.’28 As for Johnson, Richard Brocklesby’s analysis of his mental condition, sent in a letter to Boswell in December 1784, emphasizes how Johnson’s undoubted intellectual powers did as much to unsettle as to steady the precarious balance of his mind. Johnson ‘often expressed the feelings and uncertainties of his mind’ to Brocklesby, so this is no superficial or cursory opinion:
He had the most logical apprehensive, and book informed vigorous Mind, that I have ever known, but withal, his views of Nature and of the Universe and of all the various objects to contemplate which Philosophy invites an unfetterd, speculative mind, were narrow, partial and much confined. His Religion was the true $$ [superstition] of Plutarch, which narrowed the wonderful powers of his judgement and made his extraordinary talents of Mind continually at war with each other, so that in his later days his Philosophy seemed to draw his mind one way and his Religion byassed him to the contrary, and this may have occasioned that continual perplexity, and doubts, and fears, in which the greater portion of his life was passed…29
William Bowles concurred: ‘It is very well known that in the latter part of Dr. Johnson’s life he became much dejected with gloomy apprehensions respecting his reception in a future world.’30 The object of Johnson’s melancholy was futurity, but its cause may have been more earthly. The Revd William Adams ascribed it to the resumption of alcohol: ‘The History of his Melancholy about 20 years before his death, which was indeed dreadful to see, I am not enough acquainted with: but I always conjectured it to be owing to the sudden transition from water drinking, which was his Habit invariably for 15 years or more, to drinking Wine, in which by hi
s own Account he indulged himself very liberally.’31 But, whatever the cause, and whatever the object, it was the case that Boswell and Johnson were both prey to melancholic self-torment.
In the company of the other, each may have been distracted from this tendency in himself by the display of the same quality in his friend. Hence, perhaps, Johnson’s enigmatic ‘sly look’ – the moth’s name might with equal propriety have been Johnson. To escape from the self by contemplating an image of the self may seem paradoxical. Nevertheless, it may be psychologically plausible, and furthermore it resonates with the complexities of Johnson’s attitude towards the self – Johnson who could on the one hand write essays enforcing the principle of ‘cognosce te ipsum’ (know thyself) as enshrining ‘all the speculation requisite of a moral agent’, but who also confessed to Reynolds that the ‘great business of his life… was to escape from himself ‘.32 Friendship satisfied both imperatives by providing distraction as well as indirect introspection. To be in the company of Boswell was like viewing the head of Medusa in a mirror: through reflection, the harmful could become useful. Friendship, alongside all its moral benefits and social pleasures, might also serve as one of those techniques for the ‘management of the mind’ which Johnson thought so necessary, and which he believed could be obtained by ‘experience and habitual exercise’.33 In this respect, Boswell was the most useful of Johnson’s friends, the man who played the part of psychological lightning rod perhaps better, certainly for longer, than had either Richard Savage (his companion during his early days in London) or Beauclerk. But this utility did not necessarily make him Johnson’s dearest friend.34 There is no mention of Boswell in Johnson’s will – an oversight which roused anger and disappointment in friends of Boswell such as William Johnson Temple and Mary Adey.35 To Mrs Piozzi, Johnson asserted that it was Dr Taylor of Ashbourne who was ‘better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now alive’.36 It was to Bennet Langton – not to Boswell – that the dying Johnson tenderly quoted Tibullus’ line ‘Te teneam moriens deficiente manu’ (‘When I expire, let my trembling hand hold yours’): a gesture which is saturated with a sense of strong yet delicate friendship.37 And it was Langton who informed Boswell of the strength of Johnson’s feeling for Topham Beauclerk: ‘His affection for Topham Beauclerk was so great, that when Beauclerk was labouring under that severe illness which at last occasioned his death, Johnson said (with a voice faultering with emotion,) “Sir, I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk.” ‘38
The stubborn trace of instrumentality in Boswell and Johnson’s friendship – the uneasy feeling repeatedly awakened in the reader of the Life of Johnson that each man to some extent pursued his own goals by means of the other – is most vivid in those moments, of which the engineering of a meeting between Johnson and John Wilkes is the most celebrated,39 when we see Boswell tampering with the life as lived in order to produce sensational material for the life as written. Johnson occasionally growled at this treatment:
He sometimes could not bear being teazed with questions. I was once present when a gentleman asked so many as, ‘What did you do, Sir?’ ‘What did you say, Sir?’ that he at last grew enraged, and said, ‘I will not be put to the question. Don’t you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what, and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow’s tail long? why is a fox’s tail bushy?’40
But for the most part Johnson seems to have been complicitous in this unstated, but nevertheless palpable, process of literary production which was advantageous both to him and to Boswell.41 Later in life Johnson touched again on this subject: ‘To be contradicted, in order to force you to talk, is mighty unpleasing. You shine, indeed; but it is by being ground.’42 But the chance to shine often reconciled Johnson to the grinding.
It is a paradox of play that, in any game, the opponents are also collaborators, and a further paradox that they collaborate precisely by opposing one another – their conflict engenders the game they create together. The moments of disagreement, of opposition and of conflict, between Boswell and Johnson which we encounter in the Life sometimes have this gaming quality to them: they are the grinding which produces brilliance. Boswell repeatedly draws his reader’s attention to issues or topics on which he disagreed with Johnson: topics such as the respective merits of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, the current crisis in Corsica, the significance of Sir John Dalrymple’s discovery that the Whig martyrs Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell had been secret pensioners of Louis XIV, the war with the American colonies, and the institution of slavery, which Johnson consistently attacked, and Boswell shamefully defended:
I beg leave to enter my most solemn protest against his [Johnson’s] general doctrine with respect to the Slave Trade. For I will resolutely say – that his unfavourable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information… To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.43
When he does this, Boswell is in part preening himself before the reader and displaying the fact that he is not merely Johnson’s creature – this is the function of these passages in the life as written.44 But in the life as lived, these episodes served the different function of drawing Johnson out. In the transition from experience to literature, they migrate from utility to ostentation.
To draw Johnson out was also, one suspects, at least at times the purpose of another kind of difference between the two men, namely their occasional bouts of coolness or sullenness.45 The Life records a number of interruptions in their friendship: for instance, in 1764 and 1765 (when Boswell records that Johnson ‘did not favour me with a single letter for more than two years’), in 1767 (‘I received no letter from Johnson this year’), in 1770 (‘a total cessation of all correspondence between Dr. Johnson and me’), in 1778, and in 1784.46 Doubtless some of these apparent estrangements were innocent; but surely not all. In 1779 Boswell reveals that ‘I did not write to Johnson, as usual, upon my return to my family, but tried how he would be affected by my silence.’47 In 1780 Johnson began a letter by chiding Boswell for having ‘taken one of your fits of taciturnity, and [having] resolved not to write till you are written to; it is but a peevish humour, but you shall have your way.’48 And plainly Johnson suspected another of these experiments of silence in the winter of 1784, when he wrote to Boswell (who acknowledges that he had been ‘with much regret long silent’) and commented on the absence of the letters which had provided comfort in the midst of his ailments: ‘In this uncomfortable state your letters used to relieve; what is the reason that I have them no longer? Are you sick, or are you sullen?’49
To sickness and sullenness might be added calculation, and Boswell’s willingness to work upon Johnson by employing what seem close to the arts of coquetry. All this was part of the greater artfulness which produced the Life, but it was a risky strategy. In a character as labile as that of Boswell, it was (as we have seen) hard always to keep the feigned clearly separated from the felt, and the felt could easily have led to rupture, as it nearly did in 1778, in consequence of a dinner party at which Boswell had not been able to control Johnson’s environment:
there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends. I was so much hurt, and had my pride so much roused, that I kept away from him for a week; and, perhaps, might have kept away much longer, nay, gone to S
cotland without seeing him again, had not we fortunately met and been reconciled. To such unhappy chances are human friendships liable.50
And also human books, for this tiff might have not only ended Boswell’s friendship with Johnson, but also aborted the Life of Johnson. So the reader of the Life might shudder at this passage, which reveals the slenderness of the thread by which the ‘work which they are now perusing’ (to return to that Boswellian phrase) once hung.51
If, for Boswell, resistance could be an instrument for literary production, for Johnson it was a trait much more deeply etched into his character, and which even assumed an ethical significance. Many of the most vivid phrases and images of the Life reflect the centrality of the practice and principle of opposition in Johnson’s personality. Johnson’s appetite for opposition could take the form of a simple combativeness directed towards others, as when Boswell summed up an evening’s conversation in the words ‘Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several persons.’52 This is the Johnson who loved above all else to prevail:
This [an explanation of how medicated baths might bestow curative benefits] appeared to me very satisfactory. Johnson did not answer it; but talking for victory, and determined to be master of the field, he had recourse to the device which Goldsmith imputed to him in the witty words of one of Cibber’s comedies: ‘There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.’53