And Johnson belonged whole-heartedly to that century, lived in it, knew it more intimately perhaps than any man, believed in it and loved it without ever the shadow of a fear that there might be revolutionary surprises in store for the complacent self-assurance of its attitude towards literature, society and {223} life. These were plainly unusual qualifications for interpreting its great men to us. And when to these qualifications is added, as it was in Johnson's case, a mind of great power, and great pleasure in using its power, and a gift of expression which has seldom been surpassed, it is evident that a book like the Lives is certain to be, what it is, one of the great monuments and landmarks of our literature. No literary excursionist who has travelled to look at it has ever regretted his journey. For there is in it the mind of a whole age: yet not fossilized or mummified as in other hands it might so easily have become by now, as the mind of any age must soon become when it is left entirely to itself. Johnson did not leave it entirely to itself. It is true that in all matters of political or literary controversy his mind was narrowly imprisoned in the opinions of his own or his father's age: and that is what makes him such an admirable witness to them; but here as elsewhere the life-giving quality in him lies in his hold on the universal human things which are affected by no controversies and belong to all the ages. None of his books exhibit more of what he himself calls "the two most engaging powers of an author." In it "new things are made familiar and familiar things are made new." The famous criticism of the "metaphysical poets" is so {224} written that a plain man feels at home in it: the thrice-told tale of the lives of Pope and Addison is so retold that every one thinks he reads it for the first time. The man who had in his earlier works sometimes seemed the most general and abstract even of eighteenth-century writers, becomes here, by force of his interest in the primary things of humanity, almost a pioneer of the new love of externalities, a relater of details, an anticipator of his own Boswell.

To the critical discussions he gave less space than to the lives, and no one will pretend to wish he had done the opposite. Allusion has already been made to his limitations as a critic of poetry. He was blind to the most poetic qualities of the greatest men: the purest poetry, the poetry that has refined away all but the absolutely indispensable minimum of prose alloy, often escaped him altogether, sometimes simply irritated his prejudices. Omne ignotum pro injucundo. He found people enthusiastic admirers of Milton's Lycidas or Gray's Odes, was angry at others enjoying what he found no pleasure in, and vented his temper on Gray and Milton. Though Collins was his friend he makes no mention of the Ode to Evening. In these cases and some others the critic is much less scrupulously fair than the biographer, to tell the truth, nearly {225} always is. There is perhaps a malicious touch here and there in the lives of Milton, Swift and Gray: but little as he liked any of them, how fairly in each case the good points of the man are brought out, and how they are left at the end quite overbalancing the rest in our memories! But in the case of their works it is different. He has little to say about Gray's Elegy, which he admired, and much about his Odes, which he disliked.

Yet, in spite of some incapacity and some unfairness, Johnson's criticism of poetry is still a thing to be read with interest, profit and admiration. After all poetry is an art as well as an inspiration: it may almost be said to be a business as well as a pleasure. There is still, when all has been said, that indispensable alloy of prose in its composition without which it crumbles into fragments, or evaporates into mere mist. The critical questions which Horace and Boileau and Pope discuss do not include the highest: but they include much that no poet can put aside as beneath him. In this field Johnson ranks among the masters of criticism. His mind did not travel outside its limits, but to the work to be done within them it brought knowledge, reflection, vigour and acuteness. His reading had shown him how the writing of verses, the construction of sentences, the {226} effective use of words, had advanced from the uncouthness and extravagance of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans to the amazing brevity, finish and dexterity of Pope. It is good for us to see it too with his eyes. We are apt to see only the beauty and truth that were lost in the process, and the mechanical clockwork that followed upon its completion. These he could not see: but we are in no danger of forgetting them, while we are in danger of forgetting that Pope's achievement gave us the most quotable verse that ever was written, and that his brilliancy and wit quickened the powers of expression of a whole nation. To understand this is well worth while: and Johnson helps us to understand it. Nor will the fact of his thinking that Pope improved upon Homer and that his translation is a model of melody, do us any harm: for we are not likely to follow him in either opinion.

As literary criticism the greatest of the Lives are those of Cowley, Dryden and Pope. But Johnson is not to be altogether despised even where he is plainly inadequate. Some of his strictures upon the poets whom he did not understand are sound enough in themselves: there is little to say against them except that they stand alone. The defect in his criticism of Lycidas is not that he attacks the mythological confusion of the poem—which is in fact {227} its weakness, not its strength; but that he gives no hint of sensibility to its haunting beauty of phrase, of melody, of association, of passionate feeling, not perhaps for its nominal subject, but for the brief life of human friendship, for the mingled tragedy of love and fame and death. So again with Collins and Gray. Johnson is perfectly right in saying that Collins is too harsh and obscure, too apt to lose his way "in quest of mistaken beauties": where he is wrong is in not saying that he produced one of the most perfect Odes in our own or any other language. And even in Gray's case, where he is at his worst, there are things which an intelligent lover of Gray is the better for reading. There had been a good deal of unintelligent and too promiscuous admiration of Gray's Odes in Johnson's day: and he performed a service, which is still a service, by pointing out that there is in some of their phrases a certain element of affectation and artificiality. It is true, and still necessary to be said, that Gray's "art and struggle are too visible, and that there is in his Odes too little appearance of ease and nature." The object of criticism is the whole of truth: and to see only the imaginative power, the metrical learning and skill, the gift of language, the gift of emotion, in Gray, is not to see the whole. It is more important to see these things than {228} to see what Johnson saw: but in a complete criticism of Gray room must be found for an allusion to that element in him of which Johnson says, with some truth as well as malice: "he has a kind of strutting dignity and is tall by walking on tiptoe." In these matters we may listen with advantage to Johnson's instinct for reality; as we also may to his knowledge of the art of letters, when he points out quite truly that Samson Agonistes has no plot, and when he puts his finger at once on that central defect of Paradise Lost that "it comprises neither human actions nor human manners." That is too broadly stated no doubt: but it is true that the subject of poetry is the free play of human life, and that, from supernatural interference and from the peculiar position of Adam and Eve, there is far too little of this in Paradise Lost. Nor was it likely that a man of Johnson's learning and power of mind would confine himself in a book of this kind to the mere praise and blame of a succession of writers. That is his principal business: but of course he constantly overflows into general topics bearing upon literature or poetry as a whole. In these everybody who cares to think about the art of writing or analyse the pleasures of reading will find his account: they come in everywhere, of course. Now he makes some shrewd remarks, {229} not so much needed by the poets of his day as by the novelists of our own, about the danger of detailed enumeration by which description so often loses all its power: for "of the greatest things the parts are little." Now he is incidentally laying down the true ideal of the translator: to "exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them, had his language been English." Now he is discoursing at length on what it was Wordsworth's misfortune never fully to understand, the immense power of association upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and noblest emotions fail of their effect if expressed in words ordinarily connected with trivial, vulgar, or ignoble actions, and therefore necessarily arousing in the reader a state of mind unfit for the reception of greatness. Or again he will speak of the value of surprise in literature; "the pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected." Or he will enlarge, as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls "exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of representative metres and onomatopoeic words. No one will pretend that all he says in these general excursions is final: but it is always the work of a man who had {230} read a great deal and had applied a very vigorous mind to what he had read. For all these reasons the Lives of the Poets will always be eagerly read by those who wish to understand a great man and a great period of English literature. But they will be read still more for their pleasantness, humanity and wisdom.



CHAPTER VI

THE FRIENDS OF JOHNSON

Johnson thought human life in general, and his own in particular, an unhappy business. Boswell once urged, in reply to his melancholy, that in fact life was lived upon the supposition of happiness: houses are built, gardens laid out, places of amusement erected and filled with company, and these things would not be done if people did not expect to enjoy themselves. As so often happens in these arguments Boswell appears to us to be substantially right. But the only reply he drew from Johnson was, "Alas, sir, these are all only struggles for happiness." And he went on to give a curious illustration of his rooted conviction that every man knew himself to be unhappy if he stopped to {231} think about it. "When I first entered Ranelagh it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind such as I never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think: but that the thoughts of each individual there would be distressing when alone." What he thought was true of all men was certainly true of himself. He hated and dreaded to be alone. It was the pain of solitude quite as much as the pleasure of society that drove him abroad, and induced him to make a business of keeping alive old friendships and procuring new, till he had formed as large and as interesting a circle of acquaintances as any English man of letters has ever had.

That fact is an important element in his fame. A great talker cannot exert his talent in solitude; he cannot properly exert it except in a society of intelligent men who can understand, appreciate, and in some degree contend with him. Johnson would not have been the wonderful talker he was if he had lived like Richardson among gaping women and stupid {232} toadies. He did the very opposite. He lived among men several of whom possessed powers of mind quite as great as his own, however different, while their achievements seem to posterity decidedly greater than his. Our impression of his overwhelming distinction as a talker is not derived only from our own judgment as we read Boswell's record of it. It is derived almost as much from the fact that men so great as those he lived with acknowledged it with one accord. The primacy of Johnson was among them all an unquestioned article of faith. Hawkins, who knew him for so many years, says of him that "as Alexander and Caesar were born for conquest, so was Johnson for the office of a symposiarch, to preside in all conversations"; and he adds, "I never yet saw the man who would venture to contest his right." But the greatest tribute came from the greatest of his friends. When Langton, walking home one evening with Burke after both had dined in Johnson's company, regretted that Johnson had seized upon all the topics started by Burke, so that Burke himself had said little upon them, the reply of Burke is well known, "Oh, no; it is enough for me to have rung the bell to him." Such words from such a man are final and unanswerable. And they are confirmed by every other member of his {233} inner circle, and indeed by almost every person who knew him and has left any opinion on the subject. Not the least significant tribute is that of those—including men no less great than Gibbon and Fox—who had not the courage to ring that dangerous bell which so often was brought down upon the head of the ringer. The "wonder and astonishment" he inspired were universal; and among those who really knew him they were commonly mingled with love. But whether there were love or not there was generally some degree of awe, even of actual fear, as apparently in the case of Gibbon. The unquestioned ascendency he possessed and exercised over men and women not accustomed to be over-awed is plainly written all over Boswell's story. The most celebrated of the scenes that prove or exhibit it is no doubt that of the signing of the "Round Robin" at Sir Joshua Reynolds's house in 1776, when a company which included, besides Reynolds himself, Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Colman, J. Warton, and Barnard, afterwards Bishop of Killaloe, were anxious to protest to Johnson against his proposed Latin Epitaph on Goldsmith; but not one dared to approach him about it or even to be the first to sign a letter to be sent to him. So a sailors' Round Robin, drawn up by Burke, was adopted, and all the {234} signatures ran round it in equal daring. But the same thing appears perhaps even more curiously in a remark of Boswell's about a dinner at the house of Allan Ramsay. The company included Reynolds, Robertson the historian, Lord Binning and Boswell; and, Johnson being late in coming, they took to discussing him and his character. Soon, of course, he made his appearance; and then, says Boswell, "no sooner did he, of whom we had been thus talking so easily, arrive, than we were all as quiet as a school upon the entrance of the head-master." The best parallel perhaps to Johnson's position in his social world is that of the elder Pitt in Parliament. In each case the awe which was felt was much more than a mere vulgar fear of punishment; there was that in it, no doubt; but there was also a much rarer and finer thing; what we can only describe vaguely as a consciousness of the presence of greatness.

It is worth while to look a little more closely at the composition of this society in which Johnson reigned as unquestioned king. The most remarkable thing of all about it is that its inner and most intimate circle included four men of genius. Johnson had few or no closer friends than Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and Boswell. Of these the first two were acknowledged as the greatest {235} painter and the greatest orator then living in England or perhaps in Europe; the third, when he died, had some claim to be the truest poet; and, what is more remarkable, the lapse of over a hundred years has found little or nothing to detract from the fame each won from his contemporaries. Of Boswell it is enough to repeat that, while he could not compare with these men in life or action or general powers of mind, and therefore enjoyed no contemporary fame, he left a book behind him at his death which every succeeding generation has increasingly recognized as possessing that uniqueness of achievement which is another phrase for genius. Four such men alone would make a society such as few men have lived in. But Johnson's society is as remarkable for the variety and quantity, as for the quality, of its distinction. No one can look through the invaluable index of Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition of Boswell without being struck by this. If one were to make a list of all the people whom Johnson saw frequently or occasionally in the course of his life it would include an astonishing number of interesting names. Part of the fascination of Boswell's book lies in that. It is first and foremost the portrait of a man, and everything is kept in subordination to that. But it is also the picture of a whole {236} age and country. Sir Leslie Stephen remarked that nearly every distinguished man of letters of that time came into contact with Johnson. He mentions Hume and Gray as the only exceptions. There may be others, as for instance Sterne, to be added. But it remains true that Johnson was in exceptionally close personal touch with the whole literary world of his day. And Boswell has known how to make use of all that to give interest and variety to his book. Nor was Johnson ever, as we have seen, a mere narrow man of letters. He had a universal curiosity about life and men. He could talk to every one, and every one found his talk interesting, consequently Boswell's record of his acquaintance is by no means a mere series of literary portraits. The society is of all the sorts of men and women that intelligent men can care to meet, the talk on almost all the subjects which such people can care to discuss.

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 manuscripts, 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 gratitude 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} nobody; 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 assembly 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 Middlesex who, when canvassed 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 Duchess 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 Duchesses, 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.

{245}

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 anticipated 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; Fanny 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 Titian'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 ambassador 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 "compass 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 assertion 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 pass 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 anticipation 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 institution, with the merits, the defects, and the popularity which belong to national institutions. 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.



{253}

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 Rasselas, 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 gratitude 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, illustrated 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, Fanny Burney and his executor, Sir John Hawkins. Mrs. Thrale's is contained in a volume entitled 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. Fanny 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.



{255}

INDEX

(Principally of Persons known to Dr. Johnson, or mentioned in his Writings or Conversation)

Adams, Dr., 91, 166 Addison, J., 140, 192, 194, 222, 224, 229 Argyll, Duke of, 73, 83, 84, 121, 124 Auchinleck, Lord, 71, 72, 142

Bankes, Sir J., 108, 218, 246 Barclay, Mr., 105 Baretti, J., 89, 113, 218 Barnard, Bishop, 233, 248 Beauclerk, Topham, 55, 108, 115, 242, 243 Berkeley, Bishop, 203, 204 Binning, Lord, 234 Blair, H., 248 Bolingbroke, Lord, 166 Boswell, J., 8 and passim Boswell, Mrs., 49 Bryant, J., 90 Burke, E., 54, 56, 70, 83, 108, 136, 144-5, 173, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242 Burney, Fanny, 105, 127, 130, 131, 136, 143, 184, 246 Bute, Lord, 103 Butler, Bishop, 120, 138, 248

Carmichael, Miss, 167, 169 Carter, Elizabeth, 246 Cave, E., 245 Chambers, Sir R., 246 Chambers, Sir W., 248 Charlemont, Lord, 248 Charles II, 138 Chatham, Earl of, 81, 95 Chesterfield, Earl of, 86, 88, 124 Clarissa Harlowe, 196-7 Clive, Kitty, 243 "Club, The," 37, 47, 54, 67, 83 Collins, W., 177, 220, 224, 227, 248 Colman, G., 108, 233 Corbet, Mr., 91 Cowley, A., 23, 65, 186, 189, 207 Cowper, W., 108, 246 Croker, 38

Davies, Mr., 16, 73, 74, 115, 245 Davies, Mrs., 74 Dempster, G., 240 Derrick, S., 73 Devonshire, Duchess of, 243 Devonshire, Duke of, 18 Dictionary, The, 8, 15, 30, 98, 100-2, 124, 147, 187, 202, 207-111 Dilly, C., 164, 245 Dodsley, R., 98 Douglas, Bishop, 245 Dryden, J., 177, 184, 186, 189, 192, 201, 205, 214, 220, 221, 222, 226

Edwards, O., 44 Elegy, Gray's, 225 Elibank, Lord, 84, 248 Errol, Lord, 84

Falkland Islands, 107 False Alarm, The, 107, 188 Fielding, H., 109 Fitzherbert, W., 240 Foote, S., 115-6 Ford, Sarah, 87 Fox, C. J., 83, 145, 161, 233, 236, 237, 238, 243 Frank, 129 Franklin, B., 81 Frederick the Great, 76

Garrick, D., 83, 94, 98, 115, 144, 147, 149, 245 Gentleman, Mr., 73 Gentleman's Magazine, 92, 95 George III, 17, 86, 103, 106, 236, 238 Gibbon, E., 54, 68, 83, 138, 184, 201, 233, 242, 243 Gifford, W., 90 Goldsmith, O., 54, 83, 107, 128, 155, 156, 181, 184-5, 233, 234, 236, 243, 250, 251 Gray, T., 16, 17, 66-7, 80, 151, 177, 220, 224, 225, 227, 228, 236 Gwynn, J., 248

Hallam, 83 Hamilton, W. G., 289 Hawking, Sir J., 128, 131, 232 Heberden, Dr., 108, 246 Hervey, H., 94 Hodge, 129 Hogarth, W., 247 Holland, Lord, 80 Hume, D., 81, 138, 236

Idler, The, 15, 103, 185, 193-5 Irene, 94, 95, 98

Johnson, M., 87, 91 Johnson, Mrs. (mother), 87, 92, 101, 128 Johnson, Mrs. (wife), 92-6, 99-100 Journey to the Western Islands, 107, 147, 150, 193

King Lear, 177

Langton, B., 89, 113, 115, 232 Laurence, Dr., 246 Law, W., 120, 141 Letter to Lord Chesterfield, 86, 88 Levett, R., 108, 183 Life of Richard Savage, 96 Lives of the Poets, 14, 36, 107, 177, 185, 188, 193, 202, 207, 219 et seq. London, 95, 96 Lonsdale, Lord, 86 Loudoun, Lord, 84 Lucan, Lord, 104-6 Lycidas, 203-4, 224, 226

M'Aulay, Rev. J., 50 Macartney, Lord, 248 Macaulay, Mrs., 20, 246 Macbeth, 97, 177 Maclean, Sir A., 112 Macpherson, J., 117, 166 Mallet, D., 192 Marchmont, Lord, 248 Milton, J., 9, 152, 153, 177, 190, 203, 204, 206, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228 Monboddo, Lord, 84, 149 Montagu, Mrs., 246 Montgomerie, Margaret, 82 More, Hannah, 246 Murphy, A., 109

Newton, Bishop, 166-7 Northumberland, Duke of, 121

Orlando Furioso, 89 Orrery, Lord, 222, 248 Ossian, 117, 166

Paoli, 71, 72, 77, 79, 80, 82, 109, 245 Paradise Lost, 204, 228 Parliamentary Debates, 95 Patriot, The, 107 Percy, Bishop, 244, 249 Pitt, W., 51 Pope, A., 11, 16, 17, 18, 25, 34-5, 59, 65, 96, 102, 177, 180, 181, 182, 220, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 248 Porter, Mrs. See Mrs. Johnson Pot, Mr., 98 Prayers and Meditations, 194 Prologues, 98, 107 Psalmanazar, G., 245

Queen Anne, 87

Rambler, The, 15, 224, 99-100, 127, 140, 179, 185, 186, 193 et seq., 197, 199, 200 Ramsay, A., 234, 247 Rasselas, 15, 28, 103, 185, 186, 187, 193, 194, 196-7, 201-3 Reliques of Poetry, Percy, 249 Reynolds, Sir J., 44-5, 54, 70, 83, 85, 97, 109, 111, 122, 160, 161, 188, 189, 233, 234, 236, 238, 243, 247, 250, 251 Richardson, S., 196-7, 245 Robertson, W., 145, 146, 150, 234, 248 Rousseau, J. J., 77, 80, 174

Samson Agonistes, 204, 228 Savage, R., 96, 245 Scott, Sir W., 245 Settle, E., 189 Shakespeare, 7, 9, 14, 15, 31-3, 97, 98, 102, 107, 176, 177, 193, 202, 207, 211 et seq., 220 Shelburne, Lord, 124, 236-7 Sheridan, R. B., 197, 233, 250 Sheridan, T., 251 Shipley, Bishop, 246, 248 Siddons, Mrs., 163-4 Smith, Adam, 83, 150, 248 Smollett, T., 103, 248 Sterne, L., 236 Stowell, Lord, 246 Swift, 12, 123, 182, 217, 222, 225

Tate, N., 177 Taxation no Tyranny, 66, 107, 126 Taylor, Rev. J., 107, 108 Temple, Rev. W., 56, 81 Thomson, J., 220 Thrale, Mr., 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 131, 186-7 Thrale, Mrs., 19, 46, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 112, 113, 121, 122-3, 125, 127, 131, 133, 134, 140, 246-7 Thurlow, Lord, 47-8, 240-1

Vanity of Human Wishes, 99, 182, 183 Voltaire, 76, 77, 90, 138, 173, 174

Waller, E., 205 Warburton, Bishop, 25, 97 Warren, Mr., 92 Warton, J., 233, 245 Warton, T., 245 Wesley, J., 47, 56, 138, 159, 242 Wilkes, J., 148, 164, 188, 241-2 Williams, Mrs., 108 Windham, W., 108, 239 Wraxall, Sir N., 243, 248-9

Young, E., 248

THE END