The Life of Samuel Johnson

by James Boswell

  This is the Johnson who was animated by the ‘spirit of contradiction’ and a ‘love of argumentative contest’, who might at any moment be overtaken by the ‘humour of opposition’.54 Sometimes the motive for this was ostentation, as Johnson confessed to Boswell: ‘When I was a boy, I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.’55 It was a failing he did not entirely outgrow, as Boswell noted in 1776: ‘The truth, however, is, that he loved to display his ingenuity in argument; and therefore would sometimes in conversation maintain opinions which he was sensible were wrong, but in supporting which, his reasoning and wit would be most conspicuous.’56 Boswell thought this characteristic so central to Johnson’s personality that he allowed it to stand at the climactic point of the summary assessment which closes the book:

  In him were united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing: for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could, when he pleased, be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and, from a spirit of contradiction and a delight in shewing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity; so that, when there was an audience, his real opinions could seldom be gathered from his talk…57

  Yet it was also a principle not exclusively aggressive, since it existed in Johnson in close conjunction with other, milder, emotions. As David Garrick’s description of Johnson’s way of wit suggests – ‘Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no’ – there was a roughness even in his affection, a thread of violence woven through his gambolling.58

  But contradiction or ‘dexterity in retort’ for Johnson was much more than a foible of character.59 His great dictum that ‘Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth’ installs the fact and experience of contradiction as the virtuous centre of any search for the true. Towards the end of his life, he cited this understanding of the value and purpose of contradiction as almost the summation of his philosophy: ‘In short, Sir, I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.’60 Not all Johnson’s friends, even the closest of them, shared this understanding of the utility of contradiction, but Johnson was adamant in defence of it, as he showed in a revealing exchange with Langton:

  He however charged Mr. Langton with what he thought want of judgement upon an interesting occasion. ‘When I was ill, (said he) I desired he would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper, on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this, – that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?’ BOSWELL. ‘I suppose he meant the manner of doing it; roughly, – and harshly.’ JOHNSON. ‘And who is the worse for that?’ BOSWELL. ‘It hurts people of weak nerves.’ JOHNSON. ‘I know no such weak-nerved people.’61

  Johnson well knew how a veneer of courtesy can conceal indifference or even malice. That knowledge guided his pen when he composed the famous letter reproving the Earl of Chesterfield for his failures as a patron, and it is the source of that letter’s peculiar power as a piece of writing: a mordant unmasking of unmeaning civility which nevertheless employs many of the literary tropes of courtliness, such as indirection and classical allusion – tropes discredited and disdained in the very act of being set to work.62

  This Johnsonian suspicion of courtesy must have strengthened his belief in the virtue of frank opposition. Nevertheless, it was a policy which took its toll on the practitioner, as well as on the recipient. Johnson’s unstinted admiration for Burke, notwithstanding the gulf between their politics, seems in part to have been based on how Burke roused Johnson:

  And once, when Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr. Burke having been mentioned, he said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.’ So much was he accustomed to consider conversation as a contest, and such was his notion of Burke as an opponent.63

  But the cost of combativeness was, for Johnson, nothing in comparison to the reassurance it supplied, as he revealed in his response to the controversy caused by his political pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny (1775): ‘His Taxation no Tyranny being mentioned, he said, “I think I have not been attacked hard enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds.” ‘64 The need for a rebound, for the ‘collision of mind with mind’, was a matter not just of confirming the vigour of the initial impulse from Johnson.65 For it was also through such emphatic encounters that the self came to know and to enjoy both itself and the external world – this for Johnson was the ‘medicine of correction’.66 This is the key to understanding what for Johnson was at stake in his defiant misreading of Berkeley’s philosophy:

  After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’67

  There could be nothing more disingenuous, however, than Johnson’s acquiescence in what he must have been aware was Boswell’s travesty of the propositional content of Berkeley’s philosophy, and nothing more sophistical than his assertion that kicking a stone constituted a refutation of that philosophy.68 (Berkeley never contended that our perceptions of solidity were false, simply that it was not clear how one could move beyond such perceptions reliably to infer the presence of material substance.)69 So it was natural for Johnson to prefer chastisement over encouragement as a motive to improvement, be it educational or spiritual.

  It was a strand of character which could also take less sombre forms. A melancholy Johnson, wandering through Paris in the company of the brewer Henry Thrale and his vivacious wife, and suddenly mindful of the absence of his own, dead, wife (who would he thought have taken pleasure in the magnificence of the city and its palaces), resolved his own indifference before splendour, not into any stoicism, but rather into a consequence of his emotional isolation: ‘Having now nobody to please, I am little pleased.’70 Energetic interaction was for Johnson a mode of being, not just in the sense of being a settled disposition of character, but more deeply because it allowed him to discover the contents and trace the boundaries of his own mind. Take this fragment of conversation between Boswell and Johnson on the subject of respect:

  JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, we know very little about the Romans. But, surely, it is much easier to respect a man who has always had respect, than to respect a man who we know was last year no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year. In republicks there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.’ BOSWELL. ‘At present, Sir, I think riches seem to gain most respect.’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir, riches do not gain hearty respect; they only procure external attention.’71

  The distinction between respect and attention is a fine insight. It is forged by the heat of contradiction (‘No, Sir…’), and draws other fine distinctions in its wake, for when Boswell introduces the subject of ‘riches’ to the conversation, Johnson’s imagination moves from politics to money and his language is suddenly impregnated with fiscal figures (‘gain’, ‘procure’) – figures which, in their own suggested gradations of worth, capture and express something of the difference between genuine respect and mere attention which Johnson wishes here to convey. The practice of desyn
-onymization – the careful separating out of the different shades of meaning between words which custom has confused – was plainly as central to Johnson as it would later be to Coleridge.72 This is why the the Dictionary is the pivotal work in Johnson’s canon, and why also Boswell’s praise of Johnson’s writings, as furnishing ‘bark and steel for the mind’, is deserved.73 Combativeness contributed powerfully to these achievements.

  But, inaddition to these external collisions, for Johnson the cardinal principle of conflict also possessed a more intimate aspect, expressing itself asan internal war ofcontraries. This was a’conflict ofopposite principles’of which, asBoswellrecords, Johnsonhad’Muchexperience’.74 Boswell’s famousimage for Johnson’s mind presents it to us as the site of unremitting struggle:

  His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.75

  Many of Johnson’s conflicts were with people or things or ideas for which he seems secretly to have nursed an affinity, even a craving. For instance, in the Life Boswell frequently discusses Johnson’s relationship with alcohol. The friend of Johnson’s youth the Birmingham surgeon Edmond Hector, ‘who lived with him in his younger days in the utmost intimacy and social freedom’, told Boswell that Johnson ‘loved to exhilarate himself with wine’.76 On his arrival in London in 1737, however, Johnson ‘abstained entirely from fermented liquors: a practice to which he rigidly conformed for many years together, at different periods of his life’.77 Meeting his old acquaintance Oliver Edwards in 1778, Johnson spoke frankly about his fitful use of alcohol: ‘I now drink no wine, Sir. Early in life I drank wine: for many years I drank none. I then for some years drank a great deal.’78 By March 1781, however, Johnson was drinking once more, as Boswell discovered when he went to dinner at the Thrales:

  He [Thrale] told me I might now have the pleasure to see Dr. Johnson drink wine again, for he had lately returned to it. When I mentioned this to Johnson, he said, ‘I drink it now sometimes, but not socially.’ The first evening that I was with him at Thrale’s, I observed he poured a quantity of it into a large glass, and swallowed it greedily. Every thing about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.79

  The inability to be moderate meant that Johnson might reel from extremity to extremity – in this case, from abstinence to bingeing – and part of the justification for the episodes of surrender (Johnson said that he drank ‘to get rid of myself, to send myself away’) was that they made possible another act of resistance.80 That Johnson had a strong appetite for alcohol seems clear: ‘I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it. University College has witnessed this.’81 That he took a secret pleasure in the effects of alcohol, while fearing that weakening of conscious rational control which intoxication brings in its wake,82 and fearing also to let those effects be publicly visible, is also suggested by his intermittent habits of solitary drinking.83 But the most striking feature of Johnson’s attitude towards alcohol is the way it reveals a structural feature of his personality which was also an element in his moral philosophy, namely the need from time to time abruptly and utterly to deny that to which you feel drawn.

  We can see this in Johnson’s mental life, as well as in his physical existence. One of the great structuring antagonisms in the Life is that which exists between Johnson and the man whom, in 1762, Boswell had hailed as ‘the greatest Writer in Britain’, David Hume.84 Johnson was outspoken in his disdain for Hume’s sceptical philosophy: ‘Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.’85 However, in the same conversation Johnson discloses that Hume is the image of his own earlier self, for ‘Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.’86 Johnson’s vehement rejection of Hume is thus to some extent the child of their proximity: ‘He would not allow Mr. David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him, “Sir, he was a Tory by chance.” ‘87 So the areas of vigorous dissent – for instance, Johnson’s denial that beauty can be resolved into utility, which is an implicit reproof of Hume’s argument in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)88 – need to be placed alongside areas of substantial (although unacknowledged by Johnson) agreement between the two men: on, for instance, the harmlessness of luxury,89 or the tendency to exaggerate the merit of antiquity at the expense of modernity,90 or why it was that more importance was rightly attached to female chastity than to male.91

  The vigour of Johnson’s repudiation of Hume springs from his uneasy consciousness of partial closeness. It is a doubleness of relation which is wonderfully distilled into the central episode of this strand of the Life of Johnson, namely Johnson’s response to Boswell’s appalled but fascinated account of Hume’s persisting in rejecting the consolations of Christianity on his deathbed:

  I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume’s persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. Johnson. ‘Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right.’ I said, I had reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. Johnson. ‘It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very improbable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth.’92

  The complicating but submerged circumstance which enriches this moment beyond being merely a denial of Hume’s deathbed composure is the fact that in discrediting Hume’s unshaken irreligion Johnson employs a version of Hume’s own argument against miracles (namely, that it is always much more likely that men will lie in their own interest than that anything which falls outside the customary course of nature should occur).93 In reproving Hume, Johnson also echoed him. It is a moment which captures the passionate ambivalence underlying Johnson’s declarations of attachment or rejection, which typically emerged from a background of powerfully divided sentiments.94

  The internal tension in Johnson’s opinions and character is nowhere more clear than in his politics. In recent years the subject of Johnson’s political beliefs has become freshly controversial, with Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill arguing for a strong and enduring Jacobite commitment against those who see more nuance and equivocation in Johnson’s politics.95 There is no doubt that Johnson was raised in a milieu which was strongly Tory, even Jacobite.96 His father, Michael Johnson, was as Boswell tells us ‘a zealous high-churchman and royalist, and retained his attachment to the unfortunate house of Stuart, though he reconciled himself, by casuistical arguments of expediency and necessity, to take the oaths imposed by the prevailing power’.97 Staffordshire, the county where Johnson grew up, was a stronghold of Tory sentiment, and in 1712, when only three years old, Johnson, ‘the infant Hercules of toryism’, had heard that darling of the High Church faction Henry Sacheverell preach in Lichfield Cathedral when at the wildest height o
f his popularity.98 In his youth Johnson would inveigh against George II as ‘unrelenting and barbarous’ with such vehemence that bystanders would be startled.99 Throughout his life he missed no opportunity to deride with ‘rough contempt’ that watchword of Whiggism, liberty,100 and to exalt whenever possible the contrasting virtue of subordination, which he believed ‘tends greatly to human happiness’.101 He consorted with and gave succour to confessed Jacobites such as William Drummond.102 And Boswell, in a comment which has encouraged in some quarters feverish speculation about whether or not Johnson could have been ‘out’ in the ‘45, ponders the significance of the gap in Johnson’s publications in the years 1745 and 1746:

  It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746, those years which were marked by a civil war in Great-Britain, when a rash attempt was made to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. That he had a tenderness for that unfortunate House, is well known; and some may fancifully imagine, that a sympathetick anxiety impeded the exertion of his intellectual powers: but I am inclined to think, that he was, during this time, sketching the outlines of his great philological work.103

  Boswell’s calming supposition, that Johnson in fact spent the months of the ‘45 planning the Dictionary, is surely salutary. For there is much evidence to complicate the simple picture of Johnson’s political opinions which I have just sketched. In the first place, it is clear that Johnson’s political ideas were not static throughout his life, but moved steadily away from the emphatic Toryism of his youth. London: A Poem, published in 1738, was, like Marmor Norfolciense (1739), impregnated with anti-Walpolean sentiment; but later in life Johnson would praise Walpole as a ‘fixed star’, comparing him to his benefit with the elder Pitt.104 Despite his tenderness for the Stuarts, Johnson seems never to have entertained very cordial feelings towards the Nonjurors, seeing them as hypocrites, denying to them the power of reasoning, and himself refraining from ever entering a Nonjuring meeting-house.105 Johnson’s comment on the unexpectedness of his pension – ‘Here, Sir, was a man avowedly no friend to Government at the time, who got a pension without asking for it’ – hints at the migration of his political sentiments towards reconciliation with the fact of the Hanoverian dynasty.106 Like many others of his generation, Johnson seems eventually to have subscribed to the sane doctrine that a claim to the throne, questionable at its first assertion, might nevertheless improve over time as a result of successful, settled, tenure: