Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, page 650
The problem indeed which the book principally suggests concerns this question of the completeness of the Boswellian Johnson. To some of us — I suspect, indeed, to a good many — Boswell represents the original source not only of knowledge about Johnson, but of our knowledge of English literature in general. He was our introducer to the great anonymous club formed by English men of letters from the days when Shakespeare met Ben Jonson to the days when Carlyle discoursed to Froude. We became members of the craft in spirit under Boswell’s guidance, whether we have or have not become actually identified with it in the flesh. It therefore becomes next to impossible to abstract from Boswell: all our later knowledge has been more or less ingrafted upon him, however far we may have travelled from the source: Boswell gave the nucleus: and more or less consciously we have used his world as a standard inevitably taken into account in all later judgments. To suppose Boswell non-existent is for such readers to suppose a kind of organic change in our whole estimate of literary characteristics. When reading, especially about some of the other famous talkers, Coleridge’s monologues or Sydney Smith’s explosions of fun, I find myself thinking how they would have sounded at the Mitre or the Turk’s Head. Thanks to Boswell, I take the Johnsonian article to be a fixed datum like the official yard at the Tower; and to be asked to put that out of my head is to be invited to deprive myself of my only measuring-rod. It is exceedingly difficult, at any rate, to put oneself outside of Boswell and to construct a portrait of Johnson simply out of such other materials as are here put together. I have read Hawkins and Mrs. Piozzi and the rest, but always with the help of the preconceived notions. Where they could be fitted into Boswell, I have accepted them as corroborations; but when they differed, I have probably rejected the uncongenial elements, with a perhaps careless assumption that they must be inaccurate. And yet, it seems only justice to these respectable persons to consider whether we ought not to reopen the point. If Mme. d’Arblay saw something of Johnson which was not revealed to Boswell, may we not discover similar supplementary hints in the other attempts at portraiture?
Johnson’s life confirms one remark which is painfully impressed upon most readers of biography. A really first-rate biography ought, one may plausibly argue, to be the rarest of books. A man can write a poem by himself; but a biography requires not only a capable artist and a good subject, but the rare combination of circumstances which brings them together under the proper conditions. The most interesting part of most men’s lives — and Johnson was no exception — is the early struggle in which their faculties were developing and the victory being won. A man, too, as Johnson said to Mrs. Piozzi, ‘commonly grows wickeder as he grows older’; he would always, he declared, take the side of the young in a dispute, ‘for you have at least a chance of virtue till age has withered its very root.’ So far as my personal experience has gone, I think that Johnson was too nearly right. At any rate, the period of aspirations and illusions is the most interesting. Yet if a man lives to a full age, the companions of his youth are mostly dead; and the survivors, if by some fortunate chance there be any who are capable of articulate story-telling, look back too sadly and too bitterly on the old days to restore the old impressions to life. Happy, in this respect at least, are those who die young. Die before you are forty and you may have friends capable of describing you at your best and freshest. But, as generally happens, Johnson’s early friends had passed away long before his death. Except from incidental suggestions in his life of Savage and a few stray anecdotes, we have no vivid impressions of the period in which he was struggling for employment on The Gentleman’s Magazine or slaving at the Dictionary and still cheered by the presence of his wife. Johnson himself once suggested the names of one or two friends who could tell his future biographers about his early life. They were such as that worthy ‘squarson’ (in Sydney Smith’s phrase), Dr. Taylor, in whom even Boswell could only once detect something like a sparkle of wit, and that of most doubtful quality. The professional biographer knows too well by sad experience what is the kind of information to be extracted from such sources: probably a couple of utterly pointless anecdotes, which he is forced to insert because he has asked for them, and which introduce some hopeless jumble of dates and facts. Johnson would not have been more than actually unfortunate if his sole official biographer had been such a one as Sir John Hawkins, of whom it is recorded by his venerated friend that he was ‘an honest man at bottom’; though, ‘to be sure, he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality and a tendency to savageness that cannot easily be defended.’ His rivals, who agreed in little else, agree in their judgment of Hawkins. We may explain away Boswell’s antipathy: ‘Hawkins,’ he writes to his friend Temple, ‘is, no doubt, very malevolent. Observe how he talks of me “as quite unknown”!’ Boswell, according to Miss Hawkins, wished to be described as ‘The Boswell,’ whereas he had only appeared as ‘a native of Scotland,’ Hawkins’s meanness and malignity, however, are asserted on less suspicious evidence. He was turned out of the club for rudeness to Burke. Jeremy Bentham calls him a ‘good-for-nothing fellow,’ who was always wondering — which Bentham oddly seems to regard as an inconsistency — at the depravity of other people. The amiable Bishop Percy called him a ‘most detestable fellow’: and the suave Reynolds told Malone that he was not only ‘mean and grovelling’ but ‘absolutely dishonest.’ He tried to cheat Johnson’s black servant, Barber, out of a watch which his master had given to him when dying; and thereby came in for some stinging ridicule from Person. Hawkins, indeed, was grievously scandalised by Johnson’s liberal bequest of an annuity to Barber; and the more so, one guesses, because it seems to have been only through Hawkins’s importunity that Johnson was induced to make a will at the last moment. A man who succeeded in combining the censures of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Bentham, and Porson, to say nothing of Boswell, Malone, and Murphy, must certainly have had his weaknesses. Yet Johnson had a kindness for him; and one rather guesses that, after all, he was nothing worse than an unusually dull, censorious, and self-righteous specimen of the British middle-class of his time. His most characteristic saying is that Fielding was the ‘inventor of a cant phrase, goodness of heart, which means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog.’ A good man is one who can see the wickedness of Tom Jones and fully appreciate the virtues of Blifil. Now, if Johnson had died at the age of fifty-four or fifty-five, Hawkins, had he condescended to undertake the task, would have had no rivals in writing a biography, and we should have been duly grateful to him. For even in his very dingy and distorting mirror we should have caught sight of a grotesque, but impressive figure, an uncouth Dominie Sampson, who, without Boswell, would indeed be puzzling but would still show touches of the familiar qualities. Hawkins was dimly aware, for example, though he cannot give proofs, that Johnson could be humorous, and tells one anecdote of the ‘high jinks’ which, by Boswell’s era, had become impossible. When Mrs. Lennox published one of her immortal novels in 1751, Johnson induced Hawkins — with a shudder — to ‘spend a whole night in festivity.’ A party of twenty sat up at the Devil’s Tavern: where there was a ‘magnificent hot apple-pye’ stuck with bay leaves— ‘because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox had written verses’ — nay, ‘Johnson encircled her brows’ with laurel, and performed ceremonies of his own invention, and kept it up till morning. At the dawn of day, his face ‘still shone with meridian splendour’ — reminding us of a famous performance of Socrates, though Johnson supported his spirits by lemonade instead of wine, and the conversation was more proper than that at the Platonic Symposium, if hardly so brilliant. Poor Hawkins, however, slunk off about eight with a ‘sensation of shame’ at the resemblance which the night’s entertainment bore to a ‘debauch.’ He had the strength of mind to overcome these misgivings, and even to give this little narrative, and defy any doubts which it might suggest as to his own dignity. There was nothing, he is anxious to make us understand, which would have shocked even that reverent admirer of the ‘dixonary,’ Miss Pinkerton of Chiswick Mall. For the most part, it must be admitted, Hawkins has such readers before his eyes, and Johnson is with him the great moralist and author of the Rambler, whom M. Taine found — no wonder — to be unreadable. From Hawkins taken alone, we might have dimly divined aspects of the Boswellian Johnson; but, on the whole, the lexicographer would have been little more than a fine specimen of the old denizens of Grub Street. His discourse, says Hawkins, was of the ‘didactic kind, replete with original sentiments expressed in the strongest and most correct terms.’ Yet even Hawkins cannot quite damp the genuine fire in a few specimens which he has preserved.
Among the earlier friends we must reckon one incomparably superior person. Reynolds knew Johnson from about 1754, and gives his impressions in two imaginary conversations. These, which were first published by Croker, are of very great interest. One would like to know, indeed, whether they were written in complete independence of Boswell; for the coincidence is close and curious. They are meant to illustrate Reynolds’s own remark, that Johnson considered Garrick to be his property, and would allow no one either to praise or to blame him without contradiction. No doubt Reynolds and Boswell had heard Johnson’s comments often enough to account for a common element; and, in any case, the similarity implies a valuable corroboration of Boswell’s perspicuity. Reynolds, we may be sure, had a good eye for character, and looked at Johnson from the position of an equal, not a hero-worshipper. Yet the general result is the same, though the sharpness of the impression is naturally much greater in Boswell’s verbal report. So, speaking of Garrick’s being unspoilt by the attentions of great men, Johnson is made to say by Reynolds, that ‘it is to the credit of Garrick that he never laid claim to this distinction. It was as voluntarily allowed as if it had been his birthright. In this I confess I looked on David with some degree of envy, not so much for the respect he received as for the manner of its being acquired. What fell into his lap unsought, I have been forced to claim,’ and so on. In Boswell, Johnson remarks that Garrick had had applause ‘dashed in his face, sounded in his ears, and went home every night with the plaudits of a thousand in his cranium. Then, Mr. Garrick did not find but made his way to the tables, the lives, and almost the bedchambers, of the great. If all this had happened to me, I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way.’ Obviously the substance is the same; but Johnson’s words, in passing through the medium of Reynolds’s bland and decorous interpretation, have lost all the vivid concrete imagery that fixes them in our memory. Johnson’s only recorded blush was on the occasion of having said something rude to Reynolds; and we can easily believe that the Reynolds atmosphere would soften and occasionally emasculate the pithy utterances of his friend. Reynolds’s painted portraits of ‘Blinking Sam’ show a power of interpreting the outward appearance which no doubt indicates a keen perception of the character beneath. But on reading his portrait in words, we feel that in some cases a photographic likeness is incomparably more effective than a judiciously toned and harmonised study by an ambitious artist. An interesting appendage to this paper gives the recollections of Sir Joshua’s poor trembling sister Frances. When Boswell tried to get some of Johnson’s letters from her, her ‘too nice delicacy’ prevented her compliance. She was ambitious enough to write some little poems, which Johnson assured her were ‘very pretty,’ and had much moved him. Considering that in the ten first lines she makes ‘come’ rhyme to ‘prolong,’ ‘steep’ to ‘meet,’ and ‘averse’ to ‘redress,’ one is not surprised that, though Johnson advised her not to burn them, he did not persuade her to publish them. The Recollections though prepared for publication, also stayed in her desk. They show quaintly the impression made by Johnson on the nerves of the shrinking poetess. She was pleased at their first interview by hearing him tell how, when he went home at two in the morning, he would put pennies into the hands of children sleeping in the streets, that they might buy a breakfast when they awoke. She gives various anecdotes of kindness which he had showed — as in giving her advice in such a delicate matter as her difficulties with her famous brother. But she had a struggle. He was, she says, ‘in affections mild,’ but could not be called ‘in manners gentle.’ His celebrity, she thinks, was ‘sublimated, as one may say, with terror and with love.’ He was very rarely or never ‘intentionally asperous’ (Miss Reynolds has some delightful phrases), unless in defence of religion or morality: but he ‘inverted the common forms of civilised society.’ Miss Reynolds looks upon him as a monstrous combination — a sage, if not a saint, confined by a strange freak of nature in the outside of a Caliban. Nobody, accordingly, has given more singular accounts of his amazing appearance: especially his performance of what she calls his ‘straddles.’ She tells how he would suddenly contort his feet into a geometrical diagram, while his hands were raised as high as possible above his head, or apparently meant to imitate a jockey at full speed; how, when he passed through a door, he would whirl poor blind Miss Williams about as he whirled and twisted in his gesticulation, or else leave her groping outside while he made a spring across the threshold, apparently attempting (in modern phrase) to establish a record for jumping. When Miss Reynolds took a walk with him in Twickenham meadows, he collected a crowd by these ‘extraordinary antics/ and afterwards seesawed so violently while reading Grotius’s De Veritate that people came up to ask what was the matter. Dr. Campbell also declares that Johnson looked like an idiot, without a rag of sense, and was ‘for ever dancing the devil’s jig,’ or making a drivelling effort to ‘whistle in his absent paroxysms.’ No other biographer speaks so strongly of these amazing performances; and probably they had got upon Miss Reynolds’s nerves. She amiably wishes to explain his apparently ‘asperous’ conduct; and certainly a man who was half deaf, so blind, as she declared, that he could not recognise a friend’s face half a yard off, and, moreover, liable to become at any moment a mere bundle of automatic contortions, might be expected to tread on other people’s toes, literally and metaphorically, without bad intentions. The ‘two primæval causes,’ as Miss Reynolds has it, his ‘intellectual excellence’ and his ‘corporeal defects,’ made him apparently harsh. The corporeal defects ‘tended to darken his perceptions of what may be called propriety and impropriety in general conversation,’ and the intellectual force made him hit hard. Miss Reynolds, no doubt, is speaking to the point; but it is plain, too, that she would be horror-struck rather than amused whenever Johnson descended from his pedestal of the Rambler. He is still with her a heap of contradictory qualities.
Murphy was another friend of about the same period, whose essay is very properly reproduced here. It would make a respectable article in a biographical dictionary; but does not get beyond the humble merits attainable in such works. It was not till Johnson had emerged from his struggles and was reposing under the shelter of his passion that he at last met the predestined biographer. Boswell met him on 16th May 1763, and Mrs. Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) 11th January 1765. Of the two, Mrs. Piozzi had certainly the best opportunities, and, indeed, opportunities better than those which have come to the most famous of biographers. Lockhart had not seen so much of Scott nor Froude of Carlyle. Both Lockhart and Froude, however, had the advantage of abundant material. They could tell the earlier story in the words of their own heroes; though in both cases the literary skill which turned the materials to account was of the highest order. Johnson’s later correspondence is characteristic enough, but only a few fragments survive to cast an occasional gleam of light upon the earlier period. In the main, therefore, the interest has to depend, not upon the narrative, but upon the fully developed character. We have to infer what Johnson was by our knowledge of what he became. Mrs. Piozzi, naturally, did not attempt a biography. She was with her second husband in Italy when she put together from memory the collection of anecdotes which, after Boswell, is, with all shortcomings, the nearest approach to a satisfactory portrait of Johnson. Mrs. Piozzi’s book was a thorn in the flesh to Boswell, who, however, has frequently the pleasure of chuckling over some demonstrable inaccuracy. She has been made into a kind of devil’s advocate in the case of Johnson’s canonisation. Hayward, in his life of her, took her part in the famous quarrel. He had, of course, no difficulty in pointing out that the British prejudices roused by her second marriage were not justifiable in the court of pure reason. An Italian musician is certainly not in the nature of things inferior to an English brewer. Piozzi appears moreover to have been a real gentleman though he was a fiddler and a foreigner; and, therefore, it must be fully granted that the wrath of Johnson and other friends, including her own daughters, at Mrs. Thrale becoming Mrs. Piozzi was absurd from a philosophical point of view. How far it was excusable, when we consider the social atmosphere of the time, need not be considered. The fact remains that the anecdotes are coloured by the intention. Nobody, I think, can doubt that the real cause of alienation was Mrs. Piozzi’s knowledge that the marriage, rightly or wrongly, would offend her own circle, and, above all, would shock her revered monitor. She is, therefore, inclined to dwell upon the ‘asperous’ side of Johnson’s performances, and to argue that the yoke which had been bearable when it was shared by Thrale became altogether intolerable when she had to support it by herself. Comparison with her own journals shows that this view, which is insinuated throughout, did not really correspond to the facts. It was not Johnson’s mode of devouring his ‘pudden,’ or his rough speeches about Mrs.Thrale’s sentimentalisms, which became suddenly inexcusable, but the way in which he showed his contempt for Piozzi. Granting this, however, the book, if a book ‘with a tendency,’ is still an admirable supplement to Boswell; though it is now chiefly interesting as a measure of Boswell’s skill. We need not inquire whether the anecdotes told by both are given most accurately by one or the other; whether he told Hannah More to consider what her flattery was worth, before she choked him with it, or more gently entreated the ‘dearest lady,’ after many deprecations, to consider its value before she ‘bestowed it so freely’; or whether he told Mrs. Piozzi that the world would be none the worse, or that she would not herself be much concerned, if all her relations were spitted like larks and roasted for Presto’s supper. Was he ridiculing her feeling or reproving her levity? We can never know for certain, but we can see clearly enough in other cases which reporter can tell a story most artistically. Some of Boswell’s critics speak as though his only merit were in his accuracy. He had the courage, though his contemporaries gave it uglier names, to take out his notebook and set down the words at the instant when they dropped from Johnson’s lips. He realised, though in a queer way, the immense value of a contemporary note, and was as great a reformer in biography as Gibbon in history. That undoubtedly was a merit, especially at the time when biographers in general thought it a duty even to alter such contemporary documents as they had; and to give without warning, as Mason did in the case of Gray, or even Lord Sheffield in the case of Gibbon, not the actual letter, but a compound of different letters. Even Boswell indeed, as appears from his notebook, thought himself at liberty to touch up phrases, though he may have thought that he was bringing rough notes nearer to the truth. But it is plain that this was only one condition of his success. Most proverbial good sayings, one is inclined to suspect, are partly due to the reporters, or rather to generations of reporters. They have been smoothed and polished like pebbles on a beach by continuous attrition in the mouths of men, and if we could see them in their original enunciation they would be comparatively rough and clumsy. On the other hand, the detached witticism loses, and may entirely change, its significance when taken as an isolated gem. The special skill of Boswell is in his power of giving, not the felicitous phrase by itself, but the dramatic situation in which it was struck out, and to which, even in its unpolished state, it owed its impressiveness. In that he is not only superlative but, I fancy, unique. There are countless collections of ‘anas’ and ‘table-talks’ from which we get some impression of the good things said by famous men. There are imaginary conversations which are sometimes admirable, even though we perceive, as we read them, that no real conversation was ever so continuous, or logical, or polished. Boswell seems to be alone in the art of presenting us in a few lines with a conversation which is obviously as real as it is dramatic. We listen to Johnson, but to Johnson surrounded by Garrick and Goldsmith and Burke and Wilkes, and appreciate not only the thing that was said, but what gave it point and appropriateness at the time, and under the circumstances. The fact was, of course, made possible by the nature of the Johnsonian circle. There are many admirable sayings in the table-talk of Coleridge, but a report of the whole would have obviously given us nothing but a diluted and discursive lecture. Carlyle’s talk would have been in the same relation to his Reminiscences or his Latter-day Pamphlets. But Johnson’s talk was superior to his writings, just because it was struck out in the heat of ‘wit combats’ with a circle which, even if it took the passive part of mere sounding-board, was essential to the effect. No one, however, except the inimitable Boswell clearly saw this or was able to turn the remark to account. Mrs. Piozzi gives us good things, but they are detached and discontinuous. She reports the phrases which for one reason or other had happened to stick in her memory. She is evidently eking out her recollections by bits of written Johnsonese. Johnson might perhaps have written in the Rambler, but could never have said in talk, that certain people are ‘forced to linger life away in tasteless stupidity, and choose to count the moments by remembrance of pain instead of enjoyment of pleasure.’ She probably gives an unintentionally false colouring to some of the sayings; and, in any case, is unable to make a harmonious blending of the various elements. She remembers every now and then that Johnson was, on her showing, to be a man of the highest virtue; and she proceeds to tell us how much he felt for the poor; or how sorry he could be when he found that he had wounded a man’s feelings unintentionally, or what excellent advice and help he would give to friends who were really in want of it. Mrs. Piozzi, however, being a singularly quick and vivacious lady, with a sarcastic and occasionally cynical turn, and no very profound appreciation of character, just stitches her anecdotes together as they come, and does not trouble herself to blend them into a consistent whole.
