Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, page 642
Probably most people will think that the passage in question deserves a very slight fraction of the praise bestowed upon it; but the criticism, like most of Johnson’s, has a meaning which might be worth examining abstractedly from the special application which shocks the idolaters of Shakspeare. Presently the party discussed Mrs. Montagu, whose Essay upon Shakspeare had made some noise. Johnson had a respect for her, caused in great measure by a sense of her liberality to his friend Miss Williams, of whom more must be said hereafter. He paid her some tremendous compliments, observing that some China plates which had belonged to Queen Elizabeth and to her, had no reason to be ashamed of a possessor so little inferior to the first. But he had his usual professional contempt for her amateur performances in literature. Her defence of Shakspeare against Voltaire did her honour, he admitted, but it would do nobody else honour. “No, sir, there is no real criticism in it: none showing the beauty of thought, as formed on the workings of the human heart.” Mrs. Montagu was reported once to have complimented a modern tragedian, probably Jephson, by saying, “I tremble for Shakspeare.” “When Shakspeare,” said Johnson, “has got Jephson for his rival and Mrs. Montagu for his defender, he is in a poor state indeed.” The conversation went on to a recently published book, Kames’s Elements of Criticism, which Johnson praised, whilst Goldsmith said more truly, “It is easier to write that book than to read it.” Johnson went on to speak of other critics. “There is no great merit,” he said, “in telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is better than that. You must show how terror is impressed on the human heart. In the description of night in Macbeth the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness — inspissated gloom.”
After Boswell’s marriage he disappeared for some time from London, and his correspondence with Johnson dropped, as he says, without coldness, from pure procrastination. He did not return to London till 1772. In the spring of that and the following year he renewed his old habits of intimacy, and inquired into Johnson’s opinion upon various subjects ranging from ghosts to literary criticism. The height to which he had risen in the doctor’s good opinion was marked by several symptoms. He was asked to dine at Johnson’s house upon Easter day, 1773; and observes that his curiosity was as much gratified as by a previous dinner with Rousseau in the “wilds of Neufchatel.” He was now able to report, to the amazement of many inquirers, that Johnson’s establishment was quite orderly. The meal consisted of very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb with spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding. A stronger testimony of good-will was his election, by Johnson’s influence, into the Club. It ought apparently to be said that Johnson forced him upon the Club by letting it be understood that, till Boswell was admitted, no other candidate would have a chance. Boswell, however, was, as his proposer said, a thoroughly “clubable” man, and once a member, his good humour secured his popularity. On the important evening Boswell dined at Beauclerk’s with his proposer and some other members. The talk turned upon Goldsmith’s merits; and Johnson not only defended his poetry, but preferred him as a historian to Robertson. Such a judgment could be explained in Boswell’s opinion by nothing but Johnson’s dislike to the Scotch. Once before, when Boswell had mentioned Robertson in order to meet Johnson’s condemnation of Scotch literature in general, Johnson had evaded him; “Sir, I love Robertson, and I won’t talk of his book.” On the present occasion he said that he would give to Robertson the advice offered by an old college tutor to a pupil; “read over your compositions, and whenever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out.” A good anecdote of Goldsmith followed. Johnson had said to him once in the Poet’s Corner at Westminster, —
Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.
When they got to Temple Bar Goldsmith pointed to the heads of the
Jacobites upon it and slily suggested, —
Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.
Johnson next pronounced a critical judgment which should be set against many sins of that kind. He praised the Pilgrim’s Progress very warmly, and suggested that Bunyan had probably read Spenser.
After more talk the gentlemen went to the Club; and poor Boswell remained trembling with an anxiety which even the claims of Lady Di Beauclerk’s conversation could not dissipate. The welcome news of his election was brought; and Boswell went to see Burke for the first time, and to receive a humorous charge from Johnson, pointing out the conduct expected from him as a good member. Perhaps some hints were given as to betrayal of confidence. Boswell seems at any rate to have had a certain reserve in repeating Club talk.
This intimacy with Johnson was about to receive a more public and even more impressive stamp. The antipathy to Scotland and the Scotch already noticed was one of Johnson’s most notorious crotchets. The origin of the prejudice was forgotten by Johnson himself, though he was willing to accept a theory started by old Sheridan that it was resentment for the betrayal of Charles I. There is, however, nothing surprising in Johnson’s partaking a prejudice common enough from the days of his youth, when each people supposed itself to have been cheated by the Union, and Englishmen resented the advent of swarms of needy adventurers, talking with a strange accent and hanging together with honourable but vexatious persistence. Johnson was irritated by what was, after all, a natural defence against English prejudice. He declared that the Scotch were always ready to lie on each other’s behalf. “The Irish,” he said, “are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, sir, the Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.” There was another difference. He always expressed a generous resentment against the tyranny exercised by English rulers over the Irish people. To some one who defended the restriction of Irish trade for the good of English merchants, he said, “Sir, you talk the language of a savage. What! sir, would you prevent any people from feeding themselves, if by any honest means they can do it?” It was “better to hang or drown people at once,” than weaken them by unrelenting persecution. He felt some tenderness for Catholics, especially when oppressed, and a hearty antipathy towards prosperous Presbyterians. The Lowland Scotch were typified by John Knox, in regard to whom he expressed a hope, after viewing the ruins of St. Andrew’s, that he was buried “in the highway.”
This sturdy British and High Church prejudice did not prevent the worthy doctor from having many warm friendships with Scotchmen, and helping many distressed Scotchmen in London. Most of the amanuenses employed for his Dictionary were Scotch. But he nourished the prejudice the more as giving an excellent pretext for many keen gibes. “Scotch learning,” he said, for example, “is like bread in a besieged town. Every man gets a mouthful, but no man a bellyful.” Once Strahan said in answer to some abusive remarks, “Well, sir, God made Scotland.” “Certainly,” replied Johnson, “but we must always remember that He made it for Scotchmen; and comparisons are odious, Mr. Strahan, but God made hell.”
Boswell, therefore, had reason to feel both triumph and alarm when he induced the great man to accompany him in a Scotch tour. Boswell’s journal of the tour appeared soon after Johnson’s death. Johnson himself wrote an account of it, which is not without interest, though it is in his dignified style, which does not condescend to Boswellian touches of character. In 1773 the Scotch Highlands were still a little known region, justifying a book descriptive of manners and customs, and touching upon antiquities now the commonplaces of innumerable guide books. Scott was still an infant, and the day of enthusiasm, real or affected, for mountain scenery had not yet dawned. Neither of the travellers, as Boswell remarks, cared much for “rural beauties.” Johnson says quaintly on the shores of Loch Ness, “It will very readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the understanding.” And though he shortly afterwards sits down on a bank “such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign,” and there conceived the thought of his book, he does not seem to have felt much enthusiasm. He checked Boswell for describing a hill as “immense,” and told him that it was only a “considerable protuberance.” Indeed it is not surprising if he sometimes grew weary in long rides upon Highland ponies, or if, when weatherbound in a remote village in Skye, he declared that this was a “waste of life.”
On the whole, however, Johnson bore his fatigues well, preserved his temper, and made sensible remarks upon men and things. The pair started from Edinburgh in the middle of August, 1773; they went north along the eastern coast, through St. Andrew’s, Aberdeen, Banff, Fort George, and Inverness. There they took to horses, rode to Glenelg, and took boat for Skye, where they landed on the 2nd of September. They visited Rothsay, Col, Mull, and Iona, and after some dangerous sailing got to the mainland at Oban on October 2nd. Thence they proceeded by Inverary and Loch Lomond to Glasgow; and after paying a visit to Boswell’s paternal mansion at Auchinleck in Ayrshire, returned to Edinburgh in November. It were too long to narrate their adventures at length, or to describe in detail how Johnson grieved over traces of the iconoclastic zeal of Knox’s disciples, seriously investigated stories of second-sight, cross-examined and brow-beat credulous believers in the authenticity of Ossian, and felt his piety grow warm among the ruins of Iona. Once or twice, when the temper of the travellers was tried by the various worries incident to their position, poor Boswell came in for some severe blows. But he was happy, feeling, as he remarks, like a dog who has run away with a large piece of meat, and is devouring it peacefully in a corner by himself. Boswell’s spirits were irrepressible. On hearing a drum beat for dinner at Fort George, he says, with a Pepys-like touch, “I for a little while fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me.” He got scandalously drunk on one occasion, and showed reprehensible levity on others. He bored Johnson by inquiring too curiously into his reasons for not wearing a nightcap — a subject which seems to have interested him profoundly; he permitted himself to say in his journal that he was so much pleased with some pretty ladies’ maids at the Duke of Argyll’s, that he felt he could “have been a knight-errant for them,” and his “venerable fellow-traveller” read the passage without censuring his levity. The great man himself could be equally volatile. “I have often thought,” he observed one day, to Boswell’s amusement, “that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns” — as more cleanly. The pair agreed in trying to stimulate the feudal zeal of various Highland chiefs with whom they came in contact, and who were unreasonable enough to show a hankering after the luxuries of civilization.
Though Johnson seems to have been generally on his best behaviour, he had a rough encounter or two with some of the more civilized natives. Boswell piloted him safely through a visit to Lord Monboddo, a man of real ability, though the proprietor of crochets as eccentric as Johnson’s, and consequently divided from him by strong mutual prejudices. At Auchinleck he was less fortunate. The old laird, who was the staunchest of Whigs, had not relished his son’s hero-worship. “There is nae hope for Jamie, mon; Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He’s done wi’ Paoli — he’s off wi’ the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, and who’s tail do you think he’s pinned himself to now, mon?” “Here,” says Sir Walter Scott, the authority for the story, “the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. ‘A dominie, mon — an auld dominie — he keeped a schule and caauld it an acaademy.’” The two managed to keep the peace till, one day during Johnson’s visit, they got upon Oliver Cromwell. Boswell suppresses the scene with obvious reluctance, his openness being checked for once by filial respect. Scott has fortunately preserved the climax of Old Boswell’s argument. “What had Cromwell done for his country?” asked Johnson. “God, doctor, he gart Kings ken that they had a lith in their necks” retorted the laird, in a phrase worthy of Mr. Carlyle himself. Scott reports one other scene, at which respectable commentators, like Croker, hold up their hands in horror. Should we regret or rejoice to say that it involves an obvious inaccuracy? The authority, however, is too good to allow us to suppose that it was without some foundation. Adam Smith, it is said, met Johnson at Glasgow and had an altercation with him about the well-known account of Hume’s death. As Hume did not die till three years later, there must be some error in this. The dispute, however, whatever its date or subject, ended by Johnson saying to Smith, “You lie.” “And what did you reply?” was asked of Smith. “I said, ‘you are a son of a —— .’” “On such terms,” says Scott, “did these two great moralists meet and part, and such was the classical dialogue between these two great teachers of morality.”
In the year 1774 Boswell found it expedient to atone for his long absence in the previous year by staying at home. Johnson managed to complete his account of the Scotch Tour, which was published at the end of the year. Among other consequences was a violent controversy with the lovers of Ossian. Johnson was a thorough sceptic as to the authenticity of the book. His scepticism did not repose upon the philological or antiquarian reasonings, which would be applicable in the controversy from internal evidence. It was to some extent the expression of a general incredulity which astonished his friends, especially when contrasted with his tenderness for many puerile superstitions. He could scarcely be induced to admit the truth of any narrative which struck him as odd, and it was long, for example, before he would believe even in the Lisbon earthquake. Yet he seriously discussed the truth of second-sight; he carefully investigated the Cock-lane ghost — a goblin who anticipated some of the modern phenomena of so-called “spiritualism,” and with almost equal absurdity; he told stories to Boswell about a “shadowy being” which had once been seen by Cave, and declared that he had once heard his mother call “Sam” when he was at Oxford and she at Lichfield. The apparent inconsistency was in truth natural enough. Any man who clings with unreasonable pertinacity to the prejudices of his childhood, must be alternately credulous and sceptical in excess. In both cases, he judges by his fancies in defiance of evidence; and accepts and rejects according to his likes and dislikes, instead of his estimates of logical proof. Ossian would be naturally offensive to Johnson, as one of the earliest and most remarkable manifestations of that growing taste for what was called “Nature,” as opposed to civilization, of which Rousseau was the great mouthpiece. Nobody more heartily despised this form of “cant” than Johnson. A man who utterly despised the scenery of the Hebrides as compared with Greenwich Park or Charing Cross, would hardly take kindly to the Ossianesque version of the mountain passion. The book struck him as sheer rubbish. I have already quoted the retort about “many men, many women, and many children.” “A man,” he said, on another occasion, “might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”
The precise point, however, upon which he rested his case, was the tangible one of the inability of Macpherson to produce the manuscripts of which he had affirmed the existence. MacPherson wrote a furious letter to Johnson, of which the purport can only be inferred from Johnson’s smashing retort, —
“Mr. James MacPherson, I have received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian.
“What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture: I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable; and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.
“SAM. JOHNSON.”
And so laying in a tremendous cudgel, the old gentleman (he was now sixty-six) awaited the assault, which, however, was not delivered.
In 1775 Boswell again came to London, and renewed some of the Scotch discussions. He attended a meeting of the Literary Club, and found the members disposed to laugh at Johnson’s tenderness to the stories about second-sight. Boswell heroically avowed his own belief. “The evidence,” he said, “is enough for me, though not for his great mind. What will not fill a quart bottle, will fill a pint bottle. I am filled with belief.” “Are you?” said Colman; “then cork it up.”
It was during this and the next few years that Boswell laboured most successfully in gathering materials for his book. In 1777 he only met Johnson in the country. In 1779, for some unexplained reason, he was lazy in making notes; in 1780 and 1781 he was absent from London; and in the following year, Johnson was visibly declining. The tenour of Johnson’s life was interrupted during this period by no remarkable incidents, and his literary activity was not great, although the composition of the Lives of the Poets falls between 1777 and 1780. His mind, however, as represented by his talk, was in full vigour. I will take in order of time a few of the passages recorded by Boswell, which may serve for various reasons to afford the best illustration of his character. Yet it may be worth while once more to repeat the warning that such fragments moved from their context must lose most of their charm.
On March 26th (1775), Boswell met Johnson at the house of the publisher, Strahan. Strahan reminded Johnson of a characteristic remark which he had formerly made, that there are “few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” On another occasion Johnson observed with equal truth, if less originality, that cultivating kindness was an important part of life, as well as money-making. Johnson then asked to see a country lad whom he had recommended to Strahan as an apprentice. He asked for five guineas on account, that he might give one to the boy. “Nay, if a man recommends a boy and does nothing for him, it is sad work.” A “little, thick short-legged boy” was accordingly brought into the courtyard, whither Johnson and Boswell descended, and the lexicographer bending himself down administered some good advice to the awestruck lad with “slow and sonorous solemnity,” ending by the presentation of the guinea.
