Dr. Johnson and His Circle Part 3

The fact is that Johnson never, even in his religion, left his open eye or his common sense behind him: and common sense told him, what a brighter light concealed from St. Francis but the history of his Order was to show too plainly within half a century of his death, that poverty is at least for ordinary men no a.s.sured school of the Christian virtues. Johnson's att.i.tude towards the poor, in fact, included the whole of sympathy and understanding but not one t.i.ttle of sentiment.

They had the benefit of the greater part of his small income; he gave constantly, both to those who {121} had claims on him and to those who had none, really loving the poor, says Mrs. Thrale, "as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy," and insisting on giving them, not merely relief, but indulgence and pleasure. He wished them to have something more than board and lodging, some "sweeteners of their existence," and he was not always frightened if the sweeteners preferred were gin and tobacco. His very home he made into a retreat, as Mrs. Thrale says with little exaggeration, for "the lame, the blind, the sad and the sorrowful"; and he gave these humble friends more than board and lodging, treating them with at least as ceremonious a civility as he would have used to so many people of fashion.

He held no theories of political or social equality; on the contrary, he looked upon such theories as mischievous nonsense: but the respect paid to him in his later years by great personages never made him take a Mayfair or "county-family" view of life. He might stay at Inverary, visit Alnwick and be invited to Chatsworth, but it took more than the civilities of three Dukes to blind him to the fact that on a map of humanity all the magnates in the world occupy but a small s.p.a.ce. Even in the days when he lived at {122} his ease in a rich man's house and, when in his own, would dine out every day for a fortnight, he never surrendered himself, as so many who have at last reached comfort do, to the subtle unrealities of the drawing-room. He would not allow the well-do-to to call themselves "the world": and when Sir Joshua said one day that n.o.body wore laced coats any longer and that once everybody had worn them, "See now," said Johnson, "how absurd that is; as if the bulk of mankind consisted of fine gentlemen that came to him to sit for their pictures. If every man who wears a laced coat (that he can pay for) was extirpated, who would miss them?" So when Mrs. Thrale once complained of the smell of cooking he told her she was a fortunate woman never to have experienced the delight of smelling her dinner beforehand. "Which pleasure," she answered, "is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pa.s.s through Porridge Island of a morning!" Johnson's answer was the grave rebuke of a man from whose mind the darker side of a prosperous world was never long absent. "Come, come, let's have no sneering at what is serious to so many: hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear lady, turn another way that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge Island to wish for {123} gratifications they are not able to obtain: you are certainly not better than all of them: give G.o.d thanks that you are happier." It is Mrs. Thrale who herself tells the story: and it is to her credit that she calls Johnson's answer a just rebuke.

But Johnson's equality was that of the moralist, not that of the politician. He was the exact opposite of a leveller, believing in the distinction of ranks as not only a necessity of society, but an addition to its strength and to the variety and interest of its life.

He himself scrupulously observed the formalities of social respect, and would no doubt, like Mr. Gladstone, have repudiated with horror the idea of being placed at dinner above the obscurest of peers. His bow to an Archbishop is described as a studied elaboration of temporal and spiritual homage, and he once went so far as to imply that nothing would induce him to contradict a Bishop. There no doubt he promised more than the presence of a stupid Bishop or a Whig Bishop would have allowed him to perform. For no considerations of rank ever prevented him from expressing his own opinions or trampling upon those of other people. Except Swift, perhaps, he was the most independent man that ever lived. Of Swift's jealous and angry arrogance he had nothing.

But he was full of what he {124} himself called "defensive pride."

That was his answer when he was accused of showing at least as much pride as Lord Chesterfield in the affair of the Dictionary; "but mine,"

he said, "was defensive pride." He was always on his guard against the very appearance of accepting the patronage of the great. Even Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of sn.o.bbery in him. At Inverary he would not let Boswell call before dinner lest it should look like fishing for an invitation; and when he dined there the next day and sat next the Duke, he did not refrain, even in that Whig holy of holies, from chaffing about one of the Campbells who "had been bred a violent Whig but afterwards kept better company and became a Tory"! So once, when he dined at Bowood with Lord Shelburne he refused to repeat a story at the request of his host, saying that he would not be dragged in as story-teller to the company. And he would never give the authority for any fact he mentioned, if the authority happened to be a lord. Indeed he carried his st.u.r.dy independence so far that in his last years he fancied that his company was no longer desired in these august circles. "I never courted the great," he said; "they sent for me, but I think they now give me up"; adding, in reply to Boswell's polite disbelief, "No, sir; great lords and great {125} ladies don't love to have their mouths stopped."

Here again Johnson represented the typical Englishman as foreigners then and since have read his character. An accepter and respecter of rank as a social fact and a political principle, he was as proud in his way as the proudest man in the land. Tory as he was, for him every freeborn Englishman was one of the "lords of human kind": a citizen of no mean city, but of one in which--

". . . e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan, And learns to venerate himself as man!"

He had all an Englishman's pride in England, as was prettily seen in his reply to Mrs. Thrale in the theatre at Versailles; "Now we are here what shall we act, Dr. Johnson? The Englishman at Paris?" "No, no; we will try to act Harry the Fifth"; and at bottom he thought that a free Englishman was too great a man to be patronized by any one on earth.

But there was something better than pride at the root of his whole att.i.tude towards the rich and the poor; and that was his humanity.

Again and again, as one studies him, one comes back to that, his humanity, his love of men as men. It was that which made him one of {126} the earliest and fiercest enemies of the slave trade. So early as 1740 he maintained the natural right of the negroes to liberty; and he once startled "some very grave men at Oxford" by giving as his toast "Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies."

This was his invariable att.i.tude from first to last, and it was no mere scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in _Taxation No Tyranny_, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" No Tory prejudices and no sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American rebels, describing Jamaica as "a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves," and speaking indignantly of the thousands of black men "who are now repining under English cruelty." He denounced, as not only wicked but also absurd and foolish, the opinion common among the "English barbarians that cultivate the southern islands of America,"

that savages are to be regarded as scarcely distinct from animals; and he dreaded discoveries of new lands because he was always afraid they would result in conquest and cruelty.

And this was not the public and vicarious {127} humanity with which we are too familiar. What he preached to others he practised himself. He loved all life and all the men and women whom he saw living it. It takes one's breath away at first to find the grave moralist of _The Rambler_ coolly saying to Mrs. Thrale and f.a.n.n.y Burney, "Oh, I loved Bet Flint!" just after he had frankly explained to them that that lady was "habitually a s.l.u.t and a drunkard and occasionally a thief and a harlot." But the creature was what we call a "character," had had many curious adventures, and had written her life in verse and brought it to Johnson to correct, an offer which he had declined, giving her half a crown instead which she "liked as well." He had, in fact, got below the perhaps superficial s.l.u.t and harlot to the aboriginal human being, and that once arrived at he never forgot it. Nor did he need the kindly humours of old acquaintance to enable him to discover it. No moral priggishness dried up the tenderness with which he regarded the most forlorn specimens of humanity. Boswell tells this story. "Coming home late one night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk: he took her upon his back and carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of those wretched females who had fallen into the lowest {128} state of vice, poverty and disease. Instead of harshly upbraiding her he had her taken care of with all tenderness for a long time at considerable expense till she was restored to health, and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living." Like Mr. Gladstone, he exposed his own character to suspicion by his kindness to such poor creatures as this.

His heart was always open to the miserable, so that Goldsmith said that the fact of being miserable was enough to "ensure the protection of Johnson." Sir John Hawkins says that, when some one asked him how he could bear to have his house full of "necessitous and undeserving people," his reply was, "If I did not a.s.sist them no one else would, and they must be lost for want." He always declared that the true test of a nation's civilization was the state of its poor, and specially directed Boswell to report to him how the poor were maintained in Holland. When his mother's old servant lay dying he went to say good-bye to her and prayed with her, while she, as he says, "held up her poor hands as she lay in bed with great fervour." Then, after the prayer, "I kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain that she had ever felt and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes and {129} great emotion of tenderness, the same hope. We kissed and parted. I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more."

Let all pictures of Johnson as a harsh and arrogant bully fade away before this touching little scene. The truth is that at the root of the man there was an unfailing spring of human love. One who knew him very well said that peace and goodwill were the natural emanations of his heart. All sorts of weakness found a friend in him. He was markedly kind to children, especially little girls, to servants, to animals. When he was himself in great poverty he would put pennies in the hands of the children sleeping on doorsteps in the Strand, as he walked home in the small hours of the morning. He left most of his property to his negro servant Frank: and so united a delicate consideration for Frank's feelings with an affection for his cat Hodge that he always went out himself to buy oysters for Hodge lest Frank should think himself insulted by being employed to wait upon a cat.

Nor did this human and social element in him show itself only in such grave shape as hatred of slavery and tenderness to the poor. His sense of kinship with other men was, indeed, a serious conviction held on serious grounds. But it was also the expression of his natural good nature, and overflowed into {130} the obvious channels of kindly sociability which come to every man unsought, as well as into these deeper ones of sympathy which are only found by those who seek them.

Those who know him only through Boswell are in danger of over-accentuating the graver side of his character. In Boswell's eyes he was primarily the sage and saint, and though he exhibits him playing many other parts as well it is on these two that the stress is especially laid. Other people, notably f.a.n.n.y Burney, who in his last years saw a great deal of him at the Thrales', enable us to restore the balance. She loved and honoured him with an affection and reverence only short of Boswell's: and her youth, cleverness and charm won Johnson's heart as no one won it who came so late into his world. Like Boswell she had a touch of literary genius, and luckily for us she used it partly to write about Johnson. Hers is the most vivid picture we have of him after Boswell's, and it is notable that she is for ever laying stress on his gaiety. The seriousness is there, and she thoroughly appreciated it; but the thing that strikes any one coming to her from Boswell is the perpetual recurrence of such phrases as "Dr.

Johnson was gaily sociable," "Dr. Johnson was in high spirits, full of mirth and sport," "Dr. Johnson was in exceeding humour." {131} On one day in 1778 he appears in her journal as "so facetious that he challenged Mr. Thrale to get drunk"; and the next year, when he was seventy, she writes that he "has more fun and comical humour and love of nonsense about him than almost anybody I ever saw." Even in 1783, after he had had the stroke which was the beginning of the end, she speaks of his "gaiety." The explanation is no doubt partly that Miss Burney was a woman and saw him chiefly with women, Boswell a man who saw him chiefly with men. Even without her genius she would not be the first young woman whose admiring affection has seemed to an old man to give him back his youth. And she had not only her own sudden and surprising celebrity but all that happy ease of the Streatham life, and the cleverness and good humour of Mrs. Thrale, to help her. No wonder Johnson was at his brightest in such circ.u.mstances.

But his easy sociability there was no sudden revolution in his nature.

Sir John Hawkins, who, though never a very congenial companion, had known him longer than almost any of his friends, says of him that he was "a great contributor to the mirth of conversation." And constant glimpses of his lighter side are caught all through Boswell, such as that picture of him at Corrichatachin, in Skye, {132} sitting with a young Highland lady on his knee and kissing her. We have already heard his peals of midnight laughter ringing through the silent Strand. The truth is that both by nature and by principle he was a very sociable man. That is another of the elements in his permanent popularity. The man who liked all sorts and conditions of men when he was alive has one of the surest pa.s.sports to the friendliness of posterity. Johnson, like Walter Scott, could and did talk to everybody, or, rather, join in any talk that anybody started; for he seldom spoke first even among his friends. It was probably to this ease of intercourse that he owed the stores of information with which he often surprised his hearers on all sorts of unlikely subjects, such as on one occasion that of the various purposes to which bones picked up in the streets by the London poor are put, and the use of a particular paste in melting iron. But in these casual conversations he was not consciously seeking information as Scott partly was; he was just giving play to his natural sociability, or perhaps deliberately acting on the principle of _humani nihil_, which no one ever held more strongly than he.

He always condemned the cold reserve so common among Englishmen. Two strangers of any other nation, he used to say, will find {133} some topic of talk at once when they are thrown into an inn parlour together: two Englishmen will go each to a different window and remain in obstinate silence. "Sir, we as yet do not enough understand the common rights of humanity." He boasted that he was never strange in a strange place, and would talk at his best in a coach with perfect strangers to their outspoken amazement and delight. At all times he hated and dreaded being alone, both on moral and medical grounds, having the fear of madness always before him. He said that he had only once refused to dine out for the sake of his studies, and then he had done nothing. He praised a tavern chair as the throne of human felicity, better indeed, because freer, than anything to be found at a private house; for only "a very impudent dog indeed can freely command what is in another man's house." He loved to a.s.sert that all great kings (among whom he curiously included Charles II, "the last King of England who was a man of parts") had been social men; and he was the most convinced of Londoners because it was in London that life, which to him meant the exercise of the social and intellectual faculties, was to be found at its eagerest and fullest. If, as Mrs. Thrale said, all he asked for happiness was conversation it must be admitted that his {134} standard was exacting both in quant.i.ty and quality. He never wanted to go to bed, and if any one would stay with him, would sit talking and drinking tea till four in the morning. Yet his instantaneous severity in reproving inaccuracies or refuting fallacies was so alarming that he sometimes reduced a whole company to the silence of fear. The last thing he wished, no doubt, but it is one of the tragedies of life that power will not be denied its exercise, even to its own misery. But these were the rare dark moments; as a rule, as we have seen, all who came into a room with him were entranced by the force, variety and brilliance of his talk.

His natural turn was to be the very opposite of a killjoy; he loved not merely to be kind to others but to be "merry" with them, Mrs. Thrale tells us: loved to join in children's games, especially those of a "knot of little misses," of whom he was fonder than of boys: and always encouraged cards, dancing and similar amus.e.m.e.nts. He was by temperament and conviction a conformer to the innocent ways of the world: and once, when some Quaker was denouncing the vanities of dress, he broke out, "Oh, let us not be found when our Master calls us, ripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues! . . . Alas, sir, {135} a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." Though he practised some severities, such as fasting, himself, he was altogether opposed to an austere view of life: was no friend, he said, to making religion appear too hard, by which he thought many good people had done harm. Though he walked with enthusiastic reverence on any ground trodden by saints or hermits, yet he was quite clear that retirement from the world was for ordinary men and women both a mistake and a crime; and he regarded with special distrust all "youthful pa.s.sion for abstracted devotion." The Carthusian silence was, of course, particularly obnoxious to the master and lover of talk. "We read in the Gospel," he said, "of the apostles being sent to preach, but not to hold their tongues." We all like to find reasons of religion or philosophy in justification of our own pleasures: and no doubt one hears the personal prejudices of the lover of society as well as the serious thought of the student of life in the warmth with which he denounces solitude as "dangerous to reason without being favourable to virtue," and declares that "the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superst.i.tious, and possibly mad."

But real as the social element in Johnson {136} was, and important as the remembrance of it is for a corrective of the too solemn portrait of him for which Boswell gives some excuse, it never got the mastery of him. In the ordinary way the life of the pre-eminently social man or woman gradually disappears in a dancing sunshine of sociability. The b.u.t.terfly finds crossing and recrossing other b.u.t.terflies in the airy, flowery s.p.a.ces of the world such a pleasant business that it asks no more: above all, it does not care to ask the meaning of a thing so easy and agreeable as day to day existence. The pleasures and the business that lie on life's surface, the acquaintances and half friends that are encountered there, are enough for it: and the crowded empty days glide by as easily and as imperceptibly as a boatful of dreaming idlers drifting on unawares till the pace suddenly quickens for a moment, and almost before the speed wakens them they are struggling hopelessly in the whirlpool at the bottom of the fall. But, for Johnson, society had no sleeping potion strong enough to overcome his ever-wakeful sense of the issues of life. Underneath all the "gaiety" that Miss Burney liked to record, there was one of the gravest of men, a man whose religion had a strong "Day of Judgment" element in it, who believed as literally as Bunyan in heaven {137} and h.e.l.l as the alternative issues of life, except that he allowed himself some Catholic lat.i.tude of hope as to that third possibility which provides the most human of the three divisions of Dante's great poem. Most people, even the most strictly orthodox, would now say that Johnson's religion contained too much consciousness of the Divine Judgment and too little of the Divine Love.

But at least the fear of G.o.d, which was to him a thing so real and awful, had nothing in it of the att.i.tude, so common in all ages and all religions of the world, which attempts to delude or defeat or buy off the hostility of a capricious despot by means of money, or magical arts, or a well devised system of celestial alliances. In Johnson it came simply from the sense of sin and issued in the desire to live better. He was as ethically minded as any one in that moralizing century: only that he added to ethics the faith in G.o.d and conviction of sin which have a power on life unknown to mere moral philosophy. He lived among good men, mainly, but men, for the most part, whose intellectual att.i.tude towards the Christian faith was one of detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not be his att.i.tude. He was the last man in the world to be content with anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking {138} was to him a pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He might have been either Hume or Butler, either Wesley or Gibbon, but he was certain not to be, what the average cultivated man in his day was, a respectable but unenthusiastic and unconvinced conformer.

Conventional acquiescence is easy provided a man does not choose to think or inquire; but, as Carlyle said, that would not do for Johnson: he always zealously recommended and practised inquiry. The result was what is well known. His mind settled definitely on the opposite side to Hume and Gibbon: the Christian religion became intensely real to him, sometimes, it almost seems, the nightmare of his life, often its comfort and strength, present, at any rate, audibly and visibly, in every company where he was; for no man was ever so little ashamed of his religion as Johnson. It was the principle of his life in public as well as in private. Hence that spectacle which Carlyle found so memorable, of "Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire able to purify and fortify his soul, and hold real Communion with the Highest, in the Church of St. Clement Danes; a thing to be looked at with pity, admiration, awe."

That church still remains; the least altered, {139} perhaps, with the possible exception of the house in Gough Square, of all the buildings which once had the body of Johnson inside them; a place of pilgrimage for many Johnsonians who, refusing to be driven away by the commonplace window which officially honours his memory, are grateful to find the seat he used to occupy marked out for their veneration: and not altogether ungrateful even for the amateur statue which stands in the churchyard, looking towards his beloved Fleet Street. There were performed the central acts of those half tragic Good Fridays, those self-condemning Easter Days, recorded in his private note-books: there, on the Good Friday of 1773, he took Boswell with him, and Boswell observed, what he said he should never forget, "the tremulous earnestness with which Johnson p.r.o.nounced the awful pet.i.tion in the Litany: 'In the hour of death, and at the day of judgment, good Lord deliver us.'"

We now know more in some ways about his religious life than his friends did, because we have the private prayers he wrote for his own use, the sermons he composed for others, and a few notes, chiefly of a religious kind, describing his doings and feelings on certain days of his life.

But all the evidence, private and public, points the same way. His prayers are among the best in English, pulsing {140} and throbbing with earnest faith and fear, yet entirely free from the luscious sentimentality of so many modern religious compositions. He was in the habit of making special prayers for all important occasions: he made them, for instance, sometimes before he entered upon new literary undertakings, as in the case of _The Rambler_; and he took Boswell into the Church at Harwich and prayed with him before he saw him off for Utrecht. No one who was with him on such occasions failed to be impressed by his profound and awe-inspiring sincerity. Mrs. Thrale says that when he repeated the _Dies Irae_ "he never could pa.s.s the stanza ending _Tantus labor non sit ca.s.sus_ without bursting into a flood of tears"; and another witness records how one night at a dinner where some one quoted the nineteenth psalm his worn and harsh features were transformed, and "his face was almost as if it had been the face of an angel" as he recited Addison's n.o.ble version of that psalm.

Phrases that came unbidden to his voice or pen show the same constant sense of this life as a thing to be lived in the sight and presence of Eternity. When at Boswell's request he sends him a letter of advice, one of his sentences is "I am now writing, and you, when you read this, are reading, under the Eye of Omnipresence." {141} So on one occasion he said, "The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity"; and he would quote Law's remark that "every man knows something worse of himself than he is sure of in others." Such sayings do not come to the lips of men to whom the life of the spirit and the conscience is not a daily and hourly reality.

That it was to Johnson; and no one understands him who does not lay stress on it. It does not always appear in such grave guise as in these instances, but it is always there. We may take our leave of it as we see it in simpler and happier shape in Boswell's account of himself and Johnson sharing a bedroom at Glen Morrison. "After we had offered up our private devotions and had chatted a little from our beds, Dr. Johnson said 'G.o.d bless us both for Jesus Christ's sake!

Good-night.' I p.r.o.nounced 'Amen.' He fell asleep immediately."

A serious conviction held by a human being is generally found to be an inner citadel surrounded by a network of prejudices. It was only Johnson's intimate friends who were admitted into the central fortress of his faith: the rest of the world saw it plainly indeed, but did not get nearer than the girdle of defensive prejudices outside, and to them they {142} often got nearer than they liked. Whether people discovered that Johnson was a Christian or not, they were quite certain to discover that he was a Churchman. His High Church and Tory guns were always ready for action, and Lord Auchinleck is perhaps the only recorded a.s.sailant who succeeded in silencing them. The praise he gave to the dearest of his friends, "He hated a fool, he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig: he was a very good hater," was exactly applicable to himself. For us the word Whig has come to mean a dignified aristocrat who, by the pressure of family tradition, maintains a painful a.s.sociation with vulgar Radicals: for Johnson it meant a rebel against the principle of authority. From that point of view he was accustomed to say with perfect justice that the first Whig was the Devil. His sallies at the general expense of the enemies of "Church and King" must not be confused with those on many other subjects, as, for instance, on the Scotch, which were partly humorous in intention as well as in expression. He trounced the Scotch to annoy Boswell and amuse himself.

He trounced Whigs, Quakers and Presbyterians because he loved authority both in Church and State. These latter outbursts represented definite opinions which were held, as usually happens, with all the {143} more pa.s.sion because reason had not been allowed to play her full part in their maturing. Johnson could hold no views to which he had not been able to supply a rational foundation: but in these matters pa.s.sion had been given a free hand in the superstructure.

In this way his Tory outbursts have a smack of life about them not always to be found in the utterances of sages. High Tories were not often seen in the intellectual London world of these days: they were to be found rather in country parsonages and college common-rooms. In London Whiggery sat enthroned and complacent. It is, therefore, with a pleasant sense of the fluttering of Whig dovecotes that we watch Johnson, always, as Miss Burney said, the first man in any company in which he appeared, startling superior persons by taking the high Tory tone. He once astonished an old gentleman to whose niece he was talking by saying to her, "My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite"; and answered the uncle's protest by saying, "Why, sir, I meant no offence to your niece, I meant her a great compliment. A Jacobite, sir, believes in the divine right of kings. He that believes in the divine right of kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the {144} divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig: for _Whiggism is a negation of all principle_." But it was not often that his Toryism expressed itself in anything so like a chain of reasoning as this. As a rule, it appears rather in those conversational sallies, so pleasantly compounded of wrath, humour, and contempt, which are the most remembered thing about him. It provides some of the most characteristic; as the dry answer to Boswell who expressed his surprise at having met a Staffordshire Whig, a being whom he had not supposed to exist, "Sir, there are rascals in all countries"; or the answer Garrick got when he asked him "Why did not you make me a Tory, when we lived so much together?" "Why," said Johnson, pulling a heap of half-pence from his pocket, "did not the King make these guineas?" Or the true story he liked to tell of Boswell who, he said, "in the year 1745 was a fine boy, wore a white c.o.c.kade, and prayed for King James, till one of his uncles gave him a shilling on condition that he should pray for King George, which he accordingly did. So you see that _Whigs of all ages are made the same way_." In the same vein is his pleasant good-bye to Burke at Beaconsfield before the election of 1774. {145} "Farewell, my dear sir, I wish you all the success which can possibly be wished you--_by an honest man_." Even the fiercer outburst about Patriotism (that is according to the meaning of the word in those days, the pretence of preferring the interests of the people to those of the Crown), "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," gains an added piquancy from the fact that it was uttered at "The Club" under the nominal though absentee chairmanship of Charles Fox, soon to be the greatest of "patriots," and in the actual presence of Burke.

But as a rule the fiercest a.s.saults were reserved for Presbyterians and Dissenters in whom political and ecclesiastical iniquity were united.

When he was walking in the ruins of St. Andrews and some one asked where John Knox was buried, he broke out "I hope in the highway. I have been looking at his reformations." And he wished a dangerous steeple not to be taken down, "for," said he, "it may fall on some of the posterity of John Knox: and no great matter!" So when he and Boswell went to the Episcopal church at Montrose he gave "a shilling extraordinary" to the Clerk, saying, "He belongs to an honest church,"

and when Boswell rashly reminded him that Episcopalians were only dissenters, that is, only _tolerated_, in Scotland, he brought down upon {146} himself the crushing retort, "Sir, we are here as Christians in Turkey." These ingeniously exact a.n.a.logies were always a favourite weapon with him; and perhaps the most brilliant of them all is one he used on this same subject in reply to Robertson, who said to him in London, "Dr. Johnson, allow me to say that in one respect I have the advantage of you; when you were in Scotland you would not come to hear any of our preachers, whereas, when I am here, I attend your public worship without scruple, and, indeed, with great satisfaction." "Why, sir," said Johnson, "that is not so extraordinary: the King of Siam sent amba.s.sadors to Louis the Fourteenth: but Louis the Fourteenth sent none to the King of Siam." This topic also enjoys another distinction.

It is one of many proofs of the superlative excellence of Johnson's talk that it cannot be imitated. Hundreds of clever men have made the attempt, but, with the exception of a single sentence, not one of these manufactured utterances could impose for an instant upon a real Johnsonian. That single exception deals with this same anti-Presbyterian prejudice. It is variously inscribed to Thorold Rogers and to Birkbeck Hill, the most Johnsonian of all men. It supposes that Boswell and Johnson are walking in Oxford, and Boswell, endowed with {147} the gift of prophecy, asks Johnson what he would say if he were told that a hundred years after his death the Oxford University Press would allow his Dictionary to be re-edited by a Scotch Presbyterian. "Sir," replies Johnson, "to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent." Here and here alone is something which might deceive the very elect.

In several of these last utterances the bias is as much anti-Scotch as anti-Presbyterian. Of course Johnson, as his _Journey to the Western Islands_ amply proves, had no serious feeling against Scotchmen as Scotchmen like the settled convictions which made him dislike Presbyterians. But then, as always, the Scot had a specially "gude conceit" of himself and a clannish habit of pushing the interest of his brother Scots wherever he went, so that it was commonly thought that to let a Scot into your house or business was not only to let in one conceited fellow, but to be certain of half a dozen more to follow.

The English were then still so far from their present admiring acceptance of Scotsmen as their ordinary rulers in Church and State that they had not even begun to think of them as their equals.

Scotland was at that time a very poor country, and the poor relation has {148} never been a popular character anywhere. Consequently Englishmen--and who was ever more English than Johnson?--commonly saw in the newly arrived Scot a pauper and an upstart come to live upon his betters: and they revenged themselves in the manner natural to rich relations. To Johnson's tongue, too, the Scots offered the important additional temptations of being often Whigs, oftener still Presbyterians, and always the countrymen of Boswell. This last was probably the one which he found it most impossible to resist. Happily Boswell had the almost unique good sense to enjoy a good thing even at the expense of his country or himself. It is to him, or perhaps at him, that the majority of these Scotch witticisms were uttered: it is by him that nearly all of them are recorded, from the original sally which was the first sentence he heard from Johnson's lips, in reply to his "Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." "That, sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help"--to the famous reply at the Wilkes dinner, when some one said "Poor old England is lost,"--"Sir, it is not so much to be lamented that old England is lost as that the Scotch have found it."

On this topic Johnson would always let {149} himself go. Again and again the generous connoisseurship of Boswell describes not only the witticism but the joyous gusto with which it was uttered. On no subject is the great talker's amazing ingeniousness of retort more conspicuous. When Boswell most justly criticized the absurd extravagance of his famous sentence about the death of Garrick eclipsing the gaiety of nations, Johnson replied, "I could not have said more nor less. It is the truth; _eclipsed_, not _extinguished_; and his death _did_ eclipse; it was like a storm." _Boswell_. "But why nations? Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?"

_Johnson_. "Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed. Besides nations may be said--if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety--which they have not." So when Johnson said the Scotch had none of the luxuries or conveniences of life before the Union, and added, "laughing," says Boswell, "with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present," "We have taught you and we'll do the same in time to all barbarous nations--to the Cherokees--and at last to the Ourang-outangs," Boswell tried to meet him by saying "We had wine before the Union." But this only got him into worse trouble. "No, sir, you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk." {150} _Boswell_. "I a.s.sure you, sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness." _Johnson_. "No, sir; there were people who died of dropsies which they contracted in trying to get drunk."

This was said as they sailed along the sh.o.r.es of Skye; and of course the whole tour in Scotland afforded many opportunities for such jests.

There was the wall at Edinburgh which by tradition was to fall upon some very learned man, but had been taken down some time before Johnson's visit: "They have been afraid it never would fall," said he.

There was St. Giles's at Edinburgh, which provoked the chaffing aside to Robertson, "Come, let me see what was once a church." There were the beauties of Glasgow of which Adam Smith boasted, and provoked the famous question "Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?" There was the supposed treelessness of Scotland, on which he dwells in the _Journey_, and which once led him to question whether there was a tree between Edinburgh and the English border older than himself; and to reply to Boswell's suggestion that he ought to be whipped at every tree over 100 years old in that s.p.a.ce, "I believe I might submit to it for a baubee!" It led also to the pleasantry in which he emphasized his conviction that the oak stick he had brought from London was stolen and not {151} merely lost when it disappeared in Mull; "Consider, sir, the value of such a _piece of timber_ here."

To-day we think of Scotland as one of the most beautiful countries in the world and go there in thousands for that reason. But that was not why Johnson went. He had little pleasure in any landscape scenery, and none in that of moors and mountains. Indeed n.o.body had in those days except Gray. And Gray was the last man in whose company Johnson was likely to be found differing from his contemporaries. So that though he saw much of what is finest in the n.o.ble scenery of Scotland, it hardly drew from him a single word of wonder or delight: and his only remembered allusion to it is the well-known sally hurled ten years earlier at the Scotsman in London who thought to get on safe ground for the defence of his country by speaking of her "n.o.ble wild prospects,"

but only drew upon himself the answer, "I believe, sir, you have a great many. Norway, too, has n.o.ble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious n.o.ble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you, the n.o.blest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to London!"

So dangerous it always was to put a phrase into Johnson's mouth! So dangerous above {152} all to try to make him prefer anything to his beloved London. Perhaps no nation in the world has cared so little about its capital city as the English. When one thinks of the pa.s.sionate affection lavished on Athens, Rome, Paris, even, strange as it seems to us, on Madrid, one is tempted to accuse the English of dull disloyalty to their own n.o.ble capital city. London played, at any rate till the French Revolution, a far more important part in English life than any other capital in the life of any other country. In the reign of Charles II, according to Macaulay, it was seventeen times as large as Bristol, then the second city in the Kingdom; a relative position unique in Europe. And all through our history it had led the nation in politics as well as in commerce. Yet of the best of all tributes to greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little.

There is Milton's n.o.ble burst of eloquence in the _Areopagitica_, but that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and politics of London at a particular moment. Spenser's beautiful allusion in the _Prothalamion_ to "mery London my most kyndly nurse"

and to the "sweet Thames" whom he invites to "run softely till I end my song" is among the few tributes of personal affection paid by our poets to the great city. And it is still true {153} to-day that the tutelary genius of London is none of the great poets: it is Samuel Johnson. At this moment, as these pages are being written, the railway stations of London are filled with picture advertis.e.m.e.nts of the attractions of the great city. And who is the central figure in the picture that deals with central London! Not Shakespeare or Milton, but Johnson. The worn, rather sad face, more familiar to Englishmen than that of any other man of letters, with the wig and brown coat to make recognition certain, is chosen as the most useful for their purpose by advertisers probably innocent of any literature, but astute enough in knowing what will attract the people.

Johnson's love of London, however, was of his own sort, quite unlike that of Charles Lamb for instance, or that of such a man as Sir Walter Besant. He cared nothing for architecture, and little for history.

Still less had his feeling anything to do with the commercial greatness of London. He had a scholar's contempt for traders as people without ideas fit for rational conversation. The man who scoffed at the "b.o.o.bies of Birmingham" as unworthy of notice in comparison with the gownsmen of Oxford or even the cathedral citizens of Lichfield, whose experience of commercial men made him declare that "trade could not be {154} managed by those who manage it if it had much difficulty," was not likely to have his imagination fired by talk about London as the centre of the world's commerce. What he cared about was a very different thing. He thought of London as the place in all the world where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument: but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes, and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual pleasures which to him were the only real pleasures, and which made London for him a heaven upon earth. "He who is tired of London is tired of life," he said on one occasion; and on another, when some one remarked that many people were content to live in the country, he replied, "Sir, it is in the intellectual as in the physical world; we are told by natural philosophers that a body is at rest in the place that is fit for it: they who are content to live in the country are fit for the country." He was not one of them: {155} he wanted Charing Cross and its "full tide of human existence," and thought that any one who had once experienced "the full flow of London talk" must, if he retired to the country, "either be contented to turn baby again and play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a little pond, and die for want of his usual food." He was more than once offered good country livings if he would take orders, but he knew that he would find the "insipidity and uniformity" of country life intolerable: and he stayed on to become the greatest of Londoners.

There is probably to this day no book, not a professed piece of topography, which mentions the names of so many London streets, squares and churches, as Boswell's _Life of Johnson_. Many sights that Johnson saw we can still see exactly as he saw them; many, of course, have disappeared; and many are so utterly changed as to be unrecognizable.

The young poet may still stand where he and Goldsmith stood in Poets'

Corner and say in his heart with Johnson--

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."

But when he goes on as they did to Temple Bar, he will find that ancient monument retired into the country and certainly {156} nothing whatever to remind him of the Jacobite heads still mouldering on it, which gave occasion to Goldsmith's witty turning of his Tory friend's quotation--

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur ISTIS."

But on that holy ground the Johnsonian will hardly miss even Temple Bar. For most of Johnson's haunts and homes, the Mitre and the c.o.c.k, the Churches of St. Clement and of the Temple, his houses in Johnson's Court and Gough Square, are or were all hard by: and the memory will be far too busy to allow room for the disappointments and lamentations of the eye.

But of course the great characteristic of Johnson is neither love of London nor hatred of Presbyterians, nor any of the other things we have been talking about; it is the love and power of talk. We cannot estimate talk nearly as accurately as we estimate writing: so much that belongs to the word spoken is totally lost when it becomes a word recorded: the light in the eye, the brow raised in scorn or anger, the moving lips whose amus.e.m.e.nt or contempt is a picture before it is a sound, the infinitely varying weight and tone of the human voice: all that is gone or seen only {157} very darkly through the gla.s.s of description. But since the talk itself as written down and the manner of it as described are all we have to judge by: and since as long as we are alive and awake we cannot avoid judging the things and people that interest us, we inevitably form opinions about talkers as well as about writers: and the best opinion of those who know English is undoubtedly that Johnson is the greatest of all recorded talkers. The best of all is very possibly some obscure genius who _caret vate sacro_: but Johnson with the invaluable help of Boswell has beaten him and all the others. What is the essence of his superiority? Not wisdom or profundity certainly. There, of course, he would be immeasurably surpa.s.sed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of talkers. Of course his talk comes to us chiefly through the medium of a man of transcendent genius; and Plato may have transcended his master as well as other things. But on the whole all the evidence goes to show that the talk of Socrates was the force which set ideas in motion, which modified the whole subsequent moral and intellectual life of Greece and Rome, and through them of the world; in fact, that the spoken word of Socrates has played a greater {158} part in the world than any written word whatsoever, except the Gospels and the Koran, both themselves, it may be noted, the record of a spoken word greater than the written book. Beside anything of this kind Johnson sinks of course into entire insignificance. But as an artist in talk, that is a man who talked well for the pleasure of it, as an end in itself, and whose talk was heard gladly as a thing of triumph and delight, bringing with it its own justification, he probably far surpa.s.sed Socrates. If he, too, had got to his trial he probably would have been as scornful as Socrates of the judgment of popular opinion. But he never would have got there, not only because he was too conservative to deny the established divinities, but because he was so entertaining that everybody liked listening to him, whatever he denied or affirmed.

Socrates, on the other hand, was evidently something of a bore, with a bore's unrelieved earnestness and inopportune persistence. His saying about "letting the talk lead us where it will," is an exact description of Johnson's practice, but nothing could be less like his own. He is always relentlessly guiding it towards a particular goal, from the path to which he will not have it for a moment diverted. Johnson, on the other hand, takes no thought whatever for the argumentative {159} morrow, never starts a subject, never sets out to prove anything. He talks as an artist paints, just for the joy of doing what he is conscious of doing well. The talk, like the picture, is its own sufficient reward.

The same sort of inferiority puts other famous talkers, Coleridge for instance, and Luther, below Johnson. They had too much purpose in their talk to be artists about it. The endless eloquence of the Highgate days, to say nothing about the greater days before Highgate, was a powerful element in that revival of a spiritual or metaphysical, as opposed to a merely sensational, philosophy which has been going on ever since. No such results can be attributed to Johnson's talk. But talk is one thing and preaching another: and the final criticism on Coleridge as a talker was given once for all in Charles Lamb's well-known answer to his friend's question: "Did you ever hear me preach, Charles?" "Never heard you do anything else." Luther again, though much more of a human being than Coleridge and apparently a livelier talker, was, after all, the leader of one of the greatest movements the world has ever seen, and like his disciple, Johnson's friend John Wesley, no doubt had no time to fold his legs, and have his talk out. Besides leaders of movements are necessarily somewhat narrow men. For {160} them there is only one thing of importance in the world, and their talk inevitably lacks variety. That, on the other hand, is one of the three great qualities in which Johnson's talk is supreme. Without often aiming at being instructive it is not only nearly always interesting but with an amazing variety of interest. The theologian, the moral philosopher, the casuist, the scholar, the politician, the economist, the lawyer, the clergyman, the schoolmaster, the author, above all the amateur of life, all find in it abundance of food for their own particular tastes. Each of them--notably for instance, the political economist--may sometimes find Johnson mistaken; not one will ever find him dull. On every subject he has something to say which makes the reader's mind move faster than before, if it be but in disagreement. Reynolds, who had heard plenty of good talkers, thought no one could ever have exceeded Johnson in the capacity of talking well on any subject that came uppermost. His mere knowledge and information were prodigious. If a stranger heard him talk about leather he would imagine him to have been bred a tanner, or if about the school philosophy, he would suppose he had spent his life in the study of Scotus and Aquinas. No doubt the variety was a long way from universality. Johnson was too {161} human for the dulness of omniscience. He had his dislikes as well as predilections. The least affected of men, he particularly disliked the then common fashion of dragging Greek and Roman history into conversation. He said that he "never desired to hear of the Punic War while he lived," and when Fox talked of Catiline he "thought of Tom Thumb." So when Boswell used an ill.u.s.tration from Roman manners he put him down with, "Why we know very little about the Romans."