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The Greatness of Samuel Johnson

Monday, January 9, 2006

We have here Volume XVIII of the new and massive Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's complete works, an example of the best modern scholarship and editing, superbly produced. Samuel Johnson merits such an effort: his greatness, force of mind and character are evident in every sentence he wrote.

The general reader very likely will know Johnson through James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson LLD (1784), recognized as a classic when it appeared and by readers ever since. There are some problems with it, however, though I'll say more about them in a moment. But Johnson was important as a writer, as well as figure in Boswell's book, a man of letters, a poet, a critic of lasting value, an essayist, a lexicographer. He was absolutely central to the second half of the eighteenth century in England.

But first to Volume XVIII. It contains everything Johnson wrote specifically on the English language, including his "Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language" (1747), his "History of the English Language," and his "Grammar of the English Language." The Dictionary itself appeared in 1755 and raised him from relative obscurity to national and even international renown. It took forty experts of the French Academy to produce a comprehensive dictionary; Johnson did his alone, with some clerical help. The English thought that the proper proportion, one Englishman doing the work of forty Frenchmen.

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That the general reader will read extensively in the selections contained in this volume is unlikely, but their signal importance in the history of thought should be understood. "History" is the key word to be remembered. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of the historical consciousness. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol. I, 1776) was one of the major results; biography, including Boswell's, another; and the novel, imitating history though fiction, still another. Even Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) understands events empirically and historically, unlike Hobbes and Locke, who reasoned from assumptions about human nature.

Johnson and other eighteenth century thinkers were alarmed about what history meant for language. The English language had changed. To them, as to an uninstructed reader today, Chaucer's Middle English hovered at the edge of intelligibility. Old English was like a foreign language, Beowulf and the Pearl poet unintelligible. Since moral and intellectual heritage was carried through literature, this process was dangerous. Alexander Pope feared that, as Chaucer now seemed, so would Dryden (and Pope himself) one day.

The English language had to be fixed, at least to the best extent possible. And the effort to do so succeeded. Today, one does not need to be a scholar to be able to read not only Johnson but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Dryden and Pope are not as Chaucer is, almost out of reach. The eighteenth century, with Johnson playing a major role, fixed definitions, rules of spelling, grammar, and syntax, and the words that are acceptable in discourse meant for a general audience, excluding slang, obscenity, and specialized terms. Very occasionally, humor crept into his definitions:

lexicographer. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the significance of words.

Methodist. One of a new kind of puritans lately arisen, so called from their profession to live by rules and in constant method.

network. Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances with interstices between the intersections.

oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

tory. (A cant term, derived, I suppose, from an Irish word signifying a savage.) One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.

whig. The name of a faction.

You would be surprised, opening Johnson's Dictionary, to find how different it is from any dictionary you are using. People read it for pleasure, instruction in style, and moral counsel. In addition to definitions, Johnson added examples of usage chosen from the best authors, so the Dictionary was a kind of anthology. Johnson's examples instructed morally as well as stylistically. Keep it on your bed table for a few pages of improvement before going to sleep.

You may remember that at the beginning of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp, graduating from Miss Pinkerton's school, receives from Miss Pinkerton herself—who had known Johnson—a copy of the Dictionary (presumably abridged). Becky admires Napoleon, and at her first opportunity flings the Dictionary from her coach window. Rejecting rules, convention, moral instruction, the entire past, and indefatigable, she is ready to begin her own Napoleonic assault on society.

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I said that Johnson was a great writer. As he said in his Life of Milton, which combines biography with literary criticism,

If there be, what I believe there is in every nation, a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain phraseology so congenial to the analogy and principles and styles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered; this style is to be sought in the common intercourse of life.

The language of literature is constantly reinvigorated according to that principle by Wordsworth, by Pound, by Hemingway. As Wordsworth wrote in "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" (1800):

My purpose was to imitate, and, so far as possible, to adapt, the very language of men . . . to bring language nearer to the language of men . . . naturally arranged according to the laws of metre [it] does not differ from that of prose.

Johnson wrote a small body of poetry in English, and one great poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749), a theme from Juvenal congenial to Johnson's moral realism:

"The bold Bavarian, in a luckless hour, Tries the dread summits of Caesarian pow'r With unexpected legions bursts away, And sees defenseless realms receive his sway... The baffled prince in honour's flatt'ring bloom Of hasty greatness finds the fatal doom, His foes derision, and his subject's blame, And steals to death from anguish and from shame." (ll. 241- 254)

He repeats this theme in his philosophical novel Rasselas, its opening sentence masterful in its periodicity and its rise-and-fall expressing the fate of illusion:

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to Rasselas, the prince of Abyssinia."

"Rasselas," or "Prince Alas." This pessimism, perhaps paradoxically, has a bracing effect: live where you stand; tomorrow you will not be happier.

F.R. Leavis judges that Johnson's poetry and prose are related to his conversation, by "social weight," meaning the weight of experience reflected in expression. Like his writing, his conversation often has this sense of finality. Though poor, and obliged to leave Pembroke College, Oxford after a year, Johnson was the antithesis of a romantic rebel. He loathed Voltaire and Rousseau, and said the first Whig was the Devil. Pessimistic about human nature through his knowledge of history as well as introspection, Johnson valued the restraints of institutions and accepted manners. Leavis places his prose in the mainstream from Bunyan through Jane Austen to George Eliot, a prose of tempered and mature normality.

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I said earlier that problems exist concerning Boswell's great Life of Samuel Johnson LLD (the degree was an honorary one from Oxford), problems that can be put this way. If you were transported back to 1776 and met Johnson in London, would he be the same man you meet in Boswell?

Boswell employed beautifully the empirical method, bringing his Johnson before the reader as vividly as any figure in all of literature. Using minute particulars to create a picture, as in, he said, "Flemish" portrait painting -- he had in mind Van Eyck and Vermeer -- he dedicated his biography of Johnson to Joshua Reynolds, the great English portrait painter. Boswell's own portraiture is invariably memorable. Here is Johnson on May 16, 1763, when Boswell arranged their first meeting in Tom Davies's bookshop:

His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had a little shriveled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head ; his shirtneck and knees of his breeches were loose; and he had a pair of buckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment he began to talk.

Dutch portrait painting never surpassed that. But Boswell, following Plutarch, wanted his hero to be exemplary, morally inspiring, and the story he tells is only great difficulty overcome. Johnson was poor, blind in one eye, the other eye also imperfect; he was marked by the scars of childhood infection of the lymph glands; bony and lanky as a young man, he became in maturity bulky and immensely strong. He could be cruel verbally, and sometimes violent physically. Boswell not only wanted his Johnson to be inspiring, but, three decades younger than Johnson, Boswell possessed what might be called a softer "pre-romantic" sensibility; he also wrote for readers in the year 1784, such an audience contemporary with the Methodist-inspired Societies for the Reformation of Manners. The actual Johnson would have had collisions with that puritanized sensibility (see his Dictionary definition of "Methodist," above).

What happened as Boswell revised his manuscript we now know from the discovery of that manuscript amid the enormous quantity of Boswell papers that came to light during the 1940s, and are now the property of Yale. Baker-Berry has a copy of the four-volume Boswell manuscript, with Boswell's alterations, edited superbly by Marshall Weingrow. We know what Johnson actually said or did in contrast with what Boswell wrote. A few examples will have to stand for a vast number of efforts by Boswell to soften his portrait. For example, we have the anecdote about Johnson during a production of his play Irene. What we read in the manuscript is: "I'll come no more behind you scenes, David [Garrick], for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my genitals." That was too much for Boswell, though he himself was a notorious rake. He changed what Johnson said to "the silk stockings and white bubbies of your actresses excite my amorous propensities." Boswell's own amorous propensities made his London Journal, culled from his newly discovered papers, a best seller when it was published in 1950.

In a discussion with Boswell about the high value society places upon women's chastity, Johnson defends the double standard. In the Life, we read that chastity "is the great principle which she is taught. When she has given up that principle, she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue, which are all included in chastity." In the manuscript Johnson is much more direct: "the great principle which every woman is taught is to keep her legs together." The following passage in the manuscript was reluctantly eliminated from the Life by Boswell:

JOHNSON: Wise married women...detest a mistress but don't mind a whore. My wife told me that I might lie with as many women as I pleased provided I loved her alone. BOSWELL: She was not in earnest. JOHNSON: But she was. Consider, Sir, how gross it is in a wife to complain of her husband's going to other women merely as women. It is that she has not enough tail what she would be ashamed to avow. BOSWELL: And was Mrs. Johnson so liberal, Sir?

Johnson's failure to answer that question directly remains in the reader's mind; and Boswell regretted cutting this entire passage, writing to his friend and advisor Edmund Malone that "It is however mighty good stuff." He also omits from the Life the fact that within a year of Tetty's death, Johnson sought a second wife, considered hasty then and perhaps now. Boswell also omits the fact that in her later years Tetty had become fat, difficult, alcoholic and addicted to opium (NB: Not illegal then). Such details would have detracted from Boswell's portrait of an idyllic marriage; though we know from Johnson's prayers after her death and other evidence that Johnson did love his wife and missed her profoundly when he was without her. In all of this it should be remembered that Elizabeth Porter was twenty years older than Johnson, who married her in 1745 when she was a widow of 45. Johnson's language and directness in what we have seen here remind us of how coarse the earlier eighteenth century could be. In addition we understand that Johnson had powerful sexual desires, in addition to desires for a whole range of other pleasures.

In many other passages Boswell softened the fact of Johnson's verbal or physical brutality that appears in the manuscript. There follow here a number of passages:

Mr. Beauclerk told me that one day at his house in the country when two large dogs were fighting/worrying. He [Johnson] went up to them and cuffed them asunder and at another time when cautioned not to put too many balls in a gun/charge lest it should burst, he put in six or seven and fired it against a wall.

Mr. Langton told me once at Oxford when they were swimming together, Mr. Langton showed him a pool which was reckoned particularly dangerous; upon which he went/made directly for/ plunged directly into it. And he confirmed to me a story which I was told how he was attacked in the street by four men, to whom he would not yield but fought them fairly until the watch came up...

Mr. Garrick told me that one evening at the play in the theater at Lichfield a gentleman took possession of a chair which placed him [Johnson] between the side scenes when he had quitted it for a moment. When he returned, he civilly demanded his seat and the gentleman having refused it, had laid hold of him and tossed him, chair and all and he chair he sat on into the pit. When Foote [an actor] threatened to mimic him upon the stage he purchased a large oak cudgel declaring his intention to beat him, which effectually checked the wantonness of the Wit.

In the Life, Boswell cut the violent verbs "cuffed," "plunged," "fought," and "beat." The episode of near-criminal assault at Lichfield thus tends to stand alone rather than as part of a violent pattern. Still, Johnson's physical strength and his willingness to use it come through in the Life.

The examples I have given here of Boswell's softening, indeed somewhat taming of Johnson are characteristic of the Life as a whole. But do they amount to misrepresentation? Clearly Boswell made these revisions in the interest of making Johnson more persuasively exemplary, as well as to appeal to the changing taste of a later generation. Perhaps we can judge them to be relatively minor, and, after all, Boswell's Johnson is the same man we meet in Sir John Hawkins's biography and in Hester Piozzi's Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson.

If you were to return to 1776 you would in fact meet Johnson, recognizable as Boswell's Johnson, especially when he was in polite company. Moreover, Boswell's Johnson is not entirely Boswell's Johnson, for the Life has a choric quality, as Boswell uses many direct quotations from Garrick, Dr. Burney, Reynolds, Langton, Beauclerk and others.

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In Boswell's Life of Johnson, along with the interest of Johnson as a great personality, what emerges as genuinely and memorably inspiring is a story of heroism, of enormous difficulty overcome, and it is this that many have found to be a force in their own lives. My own eighteenth-century literature professor at the Columbia Graduate School, James L. Clifford, a leading Johnson scholar, had not started out with that in mind. He had an engineering degree from MIT and went to work as the director of his family's plant, but the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 crippled the enterprise, forcing him to discharge many employees. Suffering from despair, he was to a great extent rescued by reading Boswell's Life. As Boswell had intended, his portrait of Johnson was morally bracing. Johnson's mature achievement was so impressive, monumental even, that from the perspective of such achievement we tend to forget the obstacles he overcame.

As a child, as I have said, he had the scars from infected lymph glands, was blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other, as well as deaf in one ear. Once, as a child, when not escorted to Dame Oliver's local school in Lichfield, he crawled over street-crossings so as not to fall into the gutter, and angrily turned away assistance. By the time he was old enough to go to Oxford his father's book-selling business had fallen into difficulties and Johnson was able to manage little more than a year at Pembroke College. His poverty made him rebellious, and, as he said, "I was miserably poor, and thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and authority." His early years in London as a writer were also miserably poor; some nights he slept on the warm sand heaps outside a glass works; and one of his closest associates was the semi-criminal poet Richard Savage. And throughout Boswell's Life there runs in Johnson a dark undercurrent of mental instability. He appears to have had his first severe collapse in 1729 when he was twenty years of age:

The 'morbid melancholy' which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life which very early marked his character, gathered such strength as to affect him in a dreadful manner. While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed by a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he was never perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence.

To put it bluntly, Johnson's periodic depression was close to insanity. Yet in Boswell he also has a tremendous enjoyment of life, London, social existence, talking and eating, going to the theater, judging that "He who is tired of London is tired of life." He, like Dickens, was a great Londoner, at a time when London and Paris were the great cities of the world. As he once remarked, "The full tide of humanity can be seen at Charring-Cross Road."

In his maturity Johnson possessed a regal quality, in his serious conversation as well as in his poetry and prose. It has been said that with his strange and convulsive gesticulations, which we now understand to have been symptoms of Tourette's syndrome, a nervous disorder, his wheezing and snorting and blowing out like a whale, his scarred visage, unkempt bulk and blind eye, with all of that oddity, Johnson had to dominate in order to avoid becoming the butt of ridicule. Even as softened by Boswell, who, after all could not soften everything, Johnson could be brutal, as when emerging from church one day he was told by an acquaintance that the sermon had been very good, Johnson answered, "Indeed it was. But how would you know?" Or, when it was remarked that Mrs. Montague's essay on Shakespeare did her honour, he replied, "Yes, it did her honour. But it would do no one else honour." His sallies could be rapier-sharp, and they cut.

Johnson, as a famous and accomplished man, was the central figure in an exceptionally brilliant circle, brought together at the initiative of Joshua Reynolds. The Literary Club, as it was called, met weekly at the Turk's Head tavern in Soho and included in addition to Reynolds, Boswell, Edmund Burke, who was the first modern, that is, empirical, political philosopher, Edward Gibbon, the great historian, Dr. Charles Burney, the musicologist and father of novelist Frances Burney, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and Bishop Thomas Percy, collector and student of old English ballads. Goldsmith's poem "Retaliation" provides an amusing portrait of the Club. They talked until the early hours of the morning, with Johnson the center of the exceptionally gifted circle, a major house of intellect during the last half of the eighteenth century.

Hence the appropriateness of that famous moment when King George III sought out Johnson in the library at Queen's House. George, despite his bad reputation among Americans, was a learned man and seriously interested in high culture. George, like most Englishmen, considered the American war a just one; they did not realize that it was ultimately unwinnable. Symbolic of Johnson's rise from poverty and his triumph over many obstacles, the scene is memorably recounted by Boswell:

His majesty having been informed of his occasional visits, was pleased to signify a desire that he should be told when Johnson next came to the library. Accordingly, the next time that Johnson did come, as soon as he was fairly engaged with a book, on which while he sat by the fire, he seemed quite intent, Mr. Barnard stole to the next apartment where the King was, and in obedience to his Majesty's commands mentioned that Dr. Johnson was in the Library. His Majesty said that he was then at leisure, and would go to him: upon which Mr. Barnard took one of the candles that stood on the King's table, and lighted his Majesty through a suite of rooms till they came to a private door into the Library, of which his Majesty had the key. Being entered, Mr. Barnard stepped forward hastily to Dr. Johnson, who was in a profound study, and whispered to him, 'Sir, here is the King.' Johnson started up and stood still. His majesty approached him, and at once was courteously easy.

Boswell's skillfully selected details both realize the scene and slow it down, delaying the meeting and increasing the suspense as the monarch of the great empire moves toward Johnson, reigning monarch of his realm of books. The repetition of the word "Majesty" emphasizes the importance of the moment. This scene, set up with Mr. Barnard's candle lighting the way through the concealed passageway would play well in the theater. And we know that while George III has inherited his eminence, Johnson's own intellect and striving has brought him here. In their conversation, Johnson is respectful but not intimidated, maintaining a difficult poise when interacting with so powerful a man, yet knowing he is fully worthy of the station he himself has achieved through mind rather than birth.

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How important is it, then, that Boswell softened, tamed, his great portrait of Samuel Johnson? Not that important, really, for the general reader. But for the historian, it remains important, because Johnson is important in so many ways. We want to know him as exactly as we can, know everything about him. The Johnson scholar Richard B. Schwartz makes this point eloquently:

Johnson's life is retold for a number of reasons, and one of the most important of these is the fact that Johnson serves as an intellectual and moral example. It is important that he opposed slavery both in word and deed. It is important that he refused opiates at the end of his final illness and it is important that he opposed the Seven Years' War. It is important to know that he kissed and fondled another woman while his wife was still alive and that he devised a number of strategies to deal with the fluctuation in his moods and mental states. It is important that he demonstrated maturity in good Eriksonian fashion, by helping younger writers to realize their potential and achieve their place.

Boswell knew the value of his hero, and rises to the occasion when Johnson dies by using the most magnificent sentences he could find, citing William Gerard Hamilton: "He has 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 nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."