Dr. Johnson and His Circle Part 6

Let us glance at some of the names that would find places in that list.

We may begin with the statesmen. There is first of all Shelburne, who was Prime Minister the year before Johnson died; the most mysterious figure in the politics of that day, George III's Jesuit of Berkeley Square, the "Malagrida" of the pamphleteers, to whom Goldsmith {237} made his well-known unfortunate remark, "I never could conceive the reason why they call you Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man." But for all this sinister reputation he was certainly an able and interesting man. He was a great patron of the arts, a princely collector of ma.n.u.scripts, and an unusually enlightened student of politics if not a great statesman. How intimately Johnson knew him is, like almost everything about Shelburne, uncertain; but it is known that they used to meet in London and that Johnson once at least was Shelburne's guest at Bowood. A greater man who was never Prime Minister was a much more intimate friend. Fox talked little before Johnson; and the two men were as different in many ways as men could be. Of the two it was certainly not the professed man of letters who was the greater lover of literature. But Fox was a member of "The Club," and an intimate friend of Burke and Reynolds, and in these ways he and Johnson often met. In spite of all differences each made a great impression on the other. Fox indignantly defended Johnson's pension in the House of Commons so early as 1774, and the last book read to him, except the Church Service, was Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Johnson was like the rest of the world dazzled by the daring {238} parliamentary genius of Fox, and said that he had "divided the kingdom with Caesar so that there was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the sceptre of George III or the tongue of Fox." He was for the King against Fox, because the King was his "master," but for Fox against Pitt because "Fox is my friend."

Another contemporary statesman who was intimate with Johnson was the cultivated and high-minded William Windham. No one had a greater reverence for Johnson. The most scrupulous of men, he was probably attracted to Johnson most of all by his character, and sought in him a kind of director for his conscience. Johnson, however, disapproved of scruples, and when Windham expressed, as Boswell says, "some modest and virtuous doubts" whether he ought to accept the post of Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland because of the dubious practices supposed to be necessary to the holding of that office, all the answer he got was "a pleasant smile" and "Don't be afraid, sir, you will soon make a very pretty rascal." But Windham took no discouragements and was to the end one of Johnson's most devoted disciples. He put such a value on Johnson's society that he once rode forty miles out of his way on a journey in {239} order to get a day and a half with him at Ashbourne: and he was one of the little band of friends who constantly visited the dying man in the last days of his life. One day when he had placed a pillow to support the old man's head, Johnson thanked him and said, "That will do--all that a pillow can do." He was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral.

A less famous political friend was William Gerard Hamilton, with whom he at one time engaged in political work of some sort serious enough to induce him to write a special prayer about it. "Single speech Hamilton," as he was called, behaved badly to Burke and was, it seems, widely distrusted; but Johnson maintained a life-long friendship with him, and had a high opinion of his conversational powers. Hamilton in return thought that he found in Johnson, when not talking for victory, a "wisdom not only convincing but overpowering"; and showed his grat.i.tude by placing his purse at Johnson's disposal when he supposed him to be in want of money. It was he--a man of public business and affairs all his life--who said of Johnson's death that it had "made a chasm which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: there is {240} n.o.body; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson." So also thought another member of Parliament, George Dempster, whom Burns honoured with his praise. He once told Boswell not to think of his health, but to sit up all night listening to Johnson; for "one had better be palsied at eighteen than not keep company with such a man." Another politician in his circle was Fitzherbert, a man of whom Burke had the highest opinion, and of whom Johnson made the curious remark that he was the most "acceptable of men because his good qualities were negative and he offended no one."

Fitzherbert spoke of Johnson in the House of Commons as his friend and called him "a pattern of morality."

Two other well-known political figures may be mentioned as acquaintances of Johnson; both men of more ability than character.

Lord Chancellor Thurlow was a type of the lawyer who fights his way to success and cares for little else. But he was a true and generous friend to Johnson, for whose proposed journey to Italy he offered to provide the means. And if his career allowed any one to think meanly of his abilities, Johnson's opinion of them would be a sufficient answer. He always maintained that "to make a speech in a public a.s.sembly is a knack"; it {241} was the question and answer of conversation, he thought, that showed what a man's real abilities were.

And out of that test Thurlow came so triumphantly that Johnson said of him, "I would prepare myself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow.

When I am to meet with him I should wish to know a day before." He paid him the same compliment more than once; and the man to whom he paid it cannot have been the least interesting element in that interesting circle. A very different figure was the infidel and demagogue Wilkes, of whom Johnson had used the most violent language in public and private, but with whom, under the dexterous management of Boswell, he came to be on terms of friendly acquaintance. The story of how Boswell brought them together, of which Burke said that there was "nothing to equal it in the whole history of the _Corps Diplomatique_,"

is one of the very best things in the _Life_. Of course they never became friendly, but they met occasionally and Johnson sent Wilkes a presentation copy of his _Lives_. The acquaintance is one of the most striking instances of the real tolerance which lay behind Johnson's outbursts of prejudice. He and Wilkes had nothing in common but quick brains, witty tongues, social gifts and dislike of the Scotch; but that was enough. {242} Johnson would have sympathized with the respectable freeholder of Middles.e.x who, when canva.s.sed for his vote by Wilkes replied, "Vote for you, sir! I would rather vote for the devil!" But he would have sympathized even more with the candidate's reply: "But--in case your friend does not stand?"

No one will say that a set of acquaintances which stretched from Burke at one end to Wilkes at the other did not provide strong and varied political meat for the society to which they belonged. It is just the same when we look beyond politics. If all Johnson's acquaintances could have been gathered into one room, the unlikeliest people would have found themselves together. The saintly John Wesley, for instance, and the very far from saintly Topham Beauclerk, make a curious pair.

Yet both of them loved and honoured Johnson all their lives and both were always loved, at any rate, by him; and the one who got the less honour got the more love. No one could take such liberties with Johnson as this man who had been the cause of a divorce and was behaving badly to the wife whom he had stolen. Johnson did not spare Beauclerk the rebukes he deserved: but he could not resist the intellectual gifts and social charm of that true descendant of Charles II. When Beauclerk {243} lay dying Johnson said, "I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk"; and when he was dead, Johnson wrote to Boswell, "Poor dear Beauclerk--_nec, ut soles, dabis joca_." That he could win the warm affection of such a man as Beauclerk is one more proof of the breadth of his sympathies. The most surprising people felt his fascination. Wraxall says that he had seen the beautiful d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire, "then in the first bloom of youth, hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson's lips, and contending for the nearest place to his chair"; and it is recorded of Kitty Clive the actress, whom he used to go and see in the green-room, that she said of him, "I love to sit by Dr. Johnson: he always entertains me."

But neither d.u.c.h.esses, nor actresses, nor even young men of fashion, whose conjugal affairs had been the talk of the town, were more than occasional or single splendours in the Johnsonian heaven: its fixed stars of ordinary nights were less dazzling persons. Many were scholars, of course, as befitted a man of books. The greatest, but one of the least frequent or intimate, was Gibbon. He was a member of "The Club" and a friend of Reynolds and Fox: but his feeling for Johnson was apparently one of fear unmingled with love. Though {244} he met them both fairly often, he never mentions Boswell, and Johnson only once or twice. The historian who could not talk was not likely to appreciate the great talker who cared nothing for history: so one is not surprised to find Johnson dismissed in the famous _Memoirs_ as merely the "oracle" of Reynolds. A much greater friend was another member of "The Club," Percy, of the _Reliques of Poetry_, afterwards a Bishop, with whom he often quarrelled but was always reconciled. Boswell managed the most important of their reconciliations by obtaining a letter from Johnson testifying to Percy's merit which so pleased Percy that he said, "I would rather have this than degrees from all the Universities in Europe." The whole story is a curious proof of the respect in which Johnson was held: for Percy's grievance was that Johnson had snubbed him in the presence of a distinguished member of his own family, "to whom he hoped to have appeared more respectable by showing how intimate he was with Dr. Johnson." Johnson laughed at Percy's ballads and would have been the last person to guess the immense influence the publication of the _Reliques_ was to have on the development of English literature in the next century: but he knew his value, and said he never met him without learning something from him.

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Among other men of interest with whom he may be said to have been intimate at one time or another in his life may be mentioned his old pupil David Garrick, the most famous and perhaps the greatest of English actors, whom he loved and abused and would allow no one else to abuse: Richardson, the author of _Clarissa_, who once came to his rescue when he was arrested for debt, and of whose powers he had such a high opinion that he declared that there was "more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_"; the two Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly antic.i.p.ated the poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, who wrote against Hume and edited Clarendon; Savage, the poet of mysterious birth whose homeless life he sometimes shared and finally recorded: George Psalmanazar, the converted impostor, an even more mysterious person, whom Johnson reverenced and said he "sought after" more than any man: booksellers like Cave and Davies and the brothers Dilly: scholarly lawyers like Sir William Scott, afterwards {246} Lord Stowell, whom he made executor to his will, and Sir Robert Chambers whom he reproved for tossing snails over a wall into his neighbour's garden till he heard the neighbour was a Dissenter, on which he said, "Oh, if so, toss away, Chambers, toss away"; and physicians like Heberden, beloved of Cowper, whom Johnson called _ultimus Romanorum_, and Laurence, President of the College of Physicians, to whom he addressed a Latin Ode. All these were men of interest either in themselves or in their experience of life; all brought something worth having to the society in which they lived; and with all of them Johnson may be said to have been on intimate terms.

Nor did he confine his friendship to men. He had a higher opinion of the intellectual capacities of women than most men of his time, and many of the most remarkable women of the time enjoyed his intimacy.

Among them may be mentioned Elizabeth Carter, the translator of Epictetus, whom he thought the best Greek scholar he had known, and praised for being also a good maker of puddings; f.a.n.n.y Burney, of whose novels he was an enthusiastic admirer; Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Macaulay, and Hannah More, the chief learned ladies of the day, all three women of real ability; and his own brilliant and witty Mrs. Thrale, who {247} without being a professed "blue stocking" has for Johnson's sake and her own quite eclipsed the "blue stockings" in the interest of posterity. Altogether it is an astonishing list. Johnson never thought of himself as a man to be envied; but if man is a social being, and no man was so more than Johnson, there can be few things more enviable, in possession or in retrospect, than the society, the friendship, or, as it often was, the love, of such men and women as these.

If we go further and extend the inquiry to those who can scarcely be called intimate friends, but with whom he was brought into more or less frequent social contact, the list becomes, of course, too long to give.

But it may be worth while to mention that it would again include a very large number of men who had something in them above the ordinary. For instance, so great a name as that of Hogarth would be found in it, making with Allan Ramsay whom he also knew well and Reynolds who was perhaps the most intimate of all his friends, a remarkable trio to gather round a man who cared nothing for painting. He managed without that to impress them so much that Reynolds gave the credit of whatever was best in his _Discourses_ to the "education" he had had under Johnson: and Hogarth declared that his conversation was to the talk {248} of other men "like t.i.tian's painting compared to Hudson's." This outer circle includes also distinguished architects like Sir William Chambers who built Somerset House, and Gwynn who built Magdalen Bridge at Oxford and the English bridge at Shrewsbury: bishops like Barnard of Killaloe, and Shipley the liberal and reforming bishop of St. Asaph: poets like Collins and Young: historians and divines like Robertson and Hugh Blair: philosophers and men of science like Adam Smith and Sir Joseph Banks: with a certain number of intelligent peers like Lord Orrery the friend of Swift, Lord Marchmont the friend of Pope, and Lord Elibank whom Smollett praised for his "universal intelligence" and who said, when he was already seventy, that he would go five hundred miles to enjoy a day in Johnson's company; besides public men like Lord Charlemont the Irish statesman and traveller who once went to visit Montesquieu, and Lord Macartney who had gone as amba.s.sador to Russia and was soon to go in the same position to Pekin.

It is unnecessary to extend the list. All these men knew Johnson to a greater or less extent, and added to the interest of his life, as they add to the interest of Boswell's record of it. Many or most of them are known to have recognized the greatness of Johnson. {249} The words of some have been quoted and others might easily be added. Johnson often appears great in the books he wrote, and often too in the books which others have written about him: but it seems certain that unlike most authors he was far greater in bodily presence than he can be in his own or any one else's books. Even Boswell's magic pen cannot quite equal the living voice. To the overpowering impression made by that voice upon those who heard it, sometimes of almost bodily fear, oftener of a delight that could not have enough, always of amazed astonishment, the testimonies are not only innumerable, but so strongly worded and so evidently sincere as to suggest the conclusion that the fortunate listeners are attempting to relate an experience unique in the world's history. Even those who had suffered from his rudeness like Wraxall, the author of the well-known _Memoirs_, give the impression of being unable to find words strong enough to describe the power of his presence, so that they use expressions like the "compa.s.s of his gigantic faculties" and "the sublime attainments of his mind" in speaking of the gap felt by the company when he left a room. The latter expression at any rate hardly seems to us exactly to fit Johnson; but no doubt Wraxall uses the word "sublime" because he wants {250} to imply that there was something in Johnson's talk utterly out of the reach of ordinary men of ability. In fact it does seem probable that no recorded man has ever talked with Johnson's amazing freedom and power. Such an a.s.sertion cannot be proved, of course; but it would be difficult to exaggerate the weight of the evidence pointing in that direction. We have seen the kind of society in which he lived. In that society, rich in so many kinds of distinction, he was always accorded, as his right, a kind of informal but quite undisputed precedence. And it seems to have been the same among strangers as soon as he had opened his mouth. Whenever and wherever tongues were moving his primacy was immediate and unquestioned. The actual ears that could hear him were necessarily few; no man's acquaintances can be more than an insignificant fraction of the public. But in his case they were sufficiently numerous, distinguished and enthusiastic to send the fame of his talk all over the country. Is he the only man whose "Bon Mots,"

as they were called, have been published in his lifetime? "A mighty impudent thing," as he said of it, but also an irrefragable proof of his celebrity.

And on the whole his popularity, then and since, has equalled his fame.

Much is said of his rudeness and violence, but the fact remains {251} that in all his life it does not appear to have cost him a single friend except the elder Sheridan. Those who knew him best bear the strongest testimony to the fundamental goodness of his heart. Reynolds said that he was always the first to seek a reconciliation, Goldsmith declared that he had nothing of the bear but his skin, and Boswell records many instances of his placability after a quarrel. The love his friends felt for him is written large all over Boswell's pages.

And of that feeling the public outside came more and more to share as much as strangers could. Even in his lifetime he began to receive that popular canonization which has been developing ever since. Perhaps the most curious of all the proofs of this is the fact mentioned by Boswell in a note, "that there were copper pieces struck at Birmingham with his head impressed on them, which pa.s.s current as halfpence there, and in the neighbouring parts of the country." Has that ever happened to any other English writer? Well may Boswell cite it in evidence of Johnson's extraordinary popularity. It is that and it is more. There is in it not merely a tribute of affection to the living and speaking man, there is also an antic.i.p.ation of the most remarkable thing about his subsequent fame. That has had all along, as we saw at first, a {252} popular element in it. It has never been, like that of most scholars and critics, an exclusively literary thing, confined solely to people of literary instincts. Rather it has been, more and more, what the newspapers and the _Johnsoniana_ and these coins or medals already suggested, something altogether wider. Samuel Johnson was in his lifetime a well-known figure in the streets, a popular name in the press. He is now a national inst.i.tution, with the merits, the defects, and the popularity which belong to national inst.i.tutions. His popularity is certainly not diminished by the fact that he was the complacent victim of many of our insular prejudices and exhibited a good deal of the national tendency to a crude and self-confident Philistinism. These things come so humanly from him that his wisest admirers have scarcely the heart to complain or disapprove. They laugh at him, and with him, and love him still. But they could not love him as they do if he embodied only the weaknesses of his race. The position he holds in their affection, and the affection of the whole nation, is due to other and greater qualities. It is these that have given him his rare and indeed unique distinction as the accepted and traditional spokesman of the integrity, the humour, and the obstinate common sense, of the English people.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The finest Library Edition of the complete works of Johnson is that published at Oxford in nine volumes in 1825. Another good one, the volumes of which are less heavy, is that of 1823 in twelve volumes, edited by Alexander Chalmers.

Among the very numerous editions of particular works the following may be mentioned--

_The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's "Lives of the Poets"; with Macaulay's "Life of Johnson._" Edited, with a Preface by MATTHEW ARNOLD. 1878.

_History of Ra.s.selas, Prince of Abyssinia_. Edited, with Introduction and Notes by GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL. 1887.

_Lives of the English Poets_. By SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. Edited by GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L. In three volumes. 1905.

_Johnson on Shakespeare_. Essays and Notes selected and set forth with an Introduction. By WALTER RALEIGH. 1908.

_The Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D._ Collected and edited by GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL. In two volumes. 1892. Only a few of the letters are given in the editions of the complete works. In this edition the letters already given by Boswell in his _Life_ are not reprinted.

_Select Essays of Dr. Johnson_. Edited by GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL. In two volumes. 1889. (Temple Library.) These Essays are chiefly from _The Rambler_ and _The Idler_.

_Wit and Wisdom of Samuel Johnson_. Selected and arranged by GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL. 1888. This consists of sayings on various subjects arranged alphabetically, with an interesting introduction.

The main authority for the life of Johnson is, of course, Boswell. His account is given in two books, the _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D._, published in 1785, and the _Life_ which followed in two volumes in 1791. {254} The best edition of the _Life_ is that edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill in six volumes, one of which is given to the _Tour to the Hebrides_, published in 1887. No one who has worked on Johnson since that year can overstate his debt to this book or his grat.i.tude to its author. The prettiest and pleasantest of all editions of Boswell is that known as Wright's Croker. It is a revision by J. Wright of the edition by J. W. Croker, and includes a collection of Johnsoniana. It consists of ten handy volumes, ill.u.s.trated by many steel engravings, and first appeared in 1831.

The most important of the many accounts of Johnson left by other contemporaries are those given by Mrs. Thrale, f.a.n.n.y Burney and his executor, Sir John Hawkins. Mrs. Thrale's is contained in a volume ent.i.tled _Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL. D., during the last Twenty Years of his Life_. _By Hester Lynch Piozzi_. It was first published in 1786. f.a.n.n.y Burney's picture of him is to be found in her _Diary and Letters_, of which the best edition is that by Austin Dobson, 1904. Sir John Hawkins prefixed a Life of Johnson to the edition of his works which he brought out in 1787. Dr. Birkbeck Hill has reprinted a large collection of biographical matter drawn from a variety of sources in his two volumes of _Johnsonian Miscellanies_, 1897.

The critical studies of Johnson are of course innumerable. Among the best are Carlyle's, printed in his _Works_ among the _Miscellaneous Essays_, Sir Leslie Stephen's volume in the "English Men of Letters"

series, and Sir Walter Raleigh's _Six Essays on Johnson_. The _Life_ written by Macaulay for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ and reprinted by Matthew Arnold in his edition of the _Six Chief Lives_ must not be confused with the essay reprinted in the collected Essays.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill published in 1879 an edition of Boswell's correspondence with the Hon. A. Erskine, and of his _Journal of a Tour to Corsica_, reprinted from the original editions. Boswell's Letters to his and Gray's friend, the Rev. J. W. Temple, were first published in 1857.