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CHAPTER VII.

FROM 1730 TO 1760.

SAMUEL

JOHNSON,

1709-1784.

THE great "Moralist and "Lexicographer was the son of a respectable bookseller in Lichfield, where he was born on the 18th of September. The mistress of a dame's school there praised him as the best scholar she ever had. After five years at a higher school in Lichfield, one year at the school of Stourbridge, and two years loitering at home, he was sent, at the age of nineteen, to Pembroke College, Oxford. He was too desultory to confine himself to the studies of the place, and continued in the library of the college the wide miscellaneous reading he had practised in his father's shop. Yet his fluent command of Latin procured him marked attention. A Latin hexameter version of Pope's 'Messiah,' which he executed as a Christmas exercise, was considered so good that Pope is said to have declared that posterity would be in doubt which was the original and which the translation. Owing to poverty, he left Oxford in 1731 without taking a degree. Too constitutionally irregular to settle down to a profession, he lived at home for several months; acted for several months as an usher; lived with a friend in Birmingham; translated for a Birmingham bookseller 'Lobo's Journey to Abyssinia' (pub. in 1735); returned to Lichfield; married Mrs Porter of Birmingham, a widow with £800; and set up a boarding-school near Lichfield. Finally, the school not succeeding, he removed to London in 1737, and for the next quarter of a century maintained himself by his pen.

Had he been born a generation sooner, and gone to London in

the reign of Queen Anne, he might have been retained as a partywriter, and well rewarded. Bolingbroke or Harley might have employed him to abuse Marlborough or browbeat the 'Freeholder.' But in 1737 party-writers were not in demand. The man of letters might possibly meet with a wealthy patron, but his trust was chiefly in the booksellers, who were beginning to compete for the favour of the public with periodicals, editions, translations, and every sort of compilation that was likely to sell. There was plenty of employment, though at a low rate of remuneration, for men of ability; and had Johnson possessed ordinary business habits and industry, he might have lived comfortably. During the first ten years of his London life he wrote chiefly for CAVE, the publisher of the Gentleman's Magazine' (established in 1731), composing prefaces, lives of eminent men, abridgments, and miscellaneous papers. He succeeded William Guthrie as writer of the Parliamentary Debates (which were forbidden to be reported, but which Cave introduced into his Magazine as the proceedings of the Senate of Lilliput, sending men to the House to bring away what they could remember, and getting a clever man to compose speeches according to their reports). In 1738 he published his poem "London." In 1747 his fame was well established, and he was engaged by a combination of London booksellers for £1575 to prepare his famous Dictionary. In 1750, before this was completed, he began the work that raised his fame to its full height, a periodical under the title of The Rambler.' This he carried on single-handed twice a-week for two years. In 1753 he made several contributions to 'The Adventurer.' The Dictionary was completed in 1755; and, to grace his name on the title-page, the University of Oxford presented him with the degree of M.A. Thereafter he continued his multifarious writings for a livelihood. In 1756 he wrote several reviews and other papers for the newlystarted 'Literary Magazine.' From 1758 to 1760 he wrote the papers known as 'The Idler' for Payne's Universal Chronicle.' In 1759 he wrote 'Rasselas.'

The year 1762 relieved him from his quarter of a century of literary drudgery, bringing him from Government an annual pension of £300. From that date he wrote comparatively little; his chief productions were the Notes to his edition of Shakspeare, 1765; his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,' and 'Taxation no Tyranny,' 1775; and the last and best of his works, 'The Lives of the Poets,' prefixed as detached Prefaces to an edition of the English Poets, 1779-81. After being made independent by the pension, he spent a great part of his time in social enjoyment, becoming the conversational oracle of a circle of distinguished literary friends. In 1763 he met Boswell, to whose painstaking record he is mainly indebted for the perpetua

tion of his fame. In 1764 he founded the Literary Club (still existing), which met every Monday at the Turk's Head. In 1765 he made the acquaintance of the Thrales; dined with them frequently; and finally came to be considered as a member of their family. At his own house in Bolt Court, where Boswell found him on his return from the Hebrides, he charitably kept a number of humble dependants-Mrs Williams, Mrs Desmoulins, Dr Robert Levett, Black Frank, and a cat called Hodge. Among the intimate associates of his latter years were Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Topham Beauclerk, Langton, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Murphy. He died in his house in Bolt Court.

"He is,

Johnson's appearance was far from prepossessing. indeed," says Miss Burney, "very ill-favoured. He has naturally a noble figure, tall, stout, grand, and authoritative; but he stoops horribly; his back is quite round, his mouth is continually opening and shutting as if he were chewing something; he has a singular method of twirling his fingers and twisting his hands; his vast body is in constant agitation, see-sawing backwards and forwards; his feet are never for a moment quiet; and his whole great frame looks often as if it were going to roll itself quite voluntarily from its chair to the floor." One of his cheeks was disfigured by the marks of scrofula; and his face showed the peculiar nervous twitching known as St Vitus's Dance. His gait was rolling and clumsy; he seemed to be struggling with fetters.

He

Along with the scrofulous taint, he had inherited from his father a disposition to melancholy, which came upon him in cruel fits. During these gloomy seasons he was more imperious and irritable than Swift. He had inherited, also, a deep-rooted indolence and a hatred of regular work. His ambition, his desire to excel, was not alone sufficient to overcome this constitutional indolence. needed to be "well whipt" at school, and when grown to manhood he did little more than enough to keep himself and his wife from starving. England gave him but "fourpence-halfpenny aday," if she gave him no more, chiefly because he was too lazy to work for more.

His intellectual powers must not be judged by what he produced. He was indolent not in the sense of dozing away his time without thinking or reading, but in the sense of being averse both to productive exertion and to regular application. In his father's shop at Lichfield, in the college library at Pembroke, and in arranging the vast Harleian library of books and pamphlets, he was thoroughly in his element; ranging with luxurious pleasure from book to book, and insatiably storing up miscellaneous knowledge. Partly in consequence of thus reserving his strength, he was capable of intense concentration when he did apply his mind to production.

In dashing off a definition, a criticism, or a general precept, he seized with great force upon the leading features. In these moments of intense concentration, he had the power of doing in a wonderfully short time what Lord Brougham describes as seizing the kernel and leaving the husk. This habit of making short work with a subject gives his writings their most distinctive charThe bold comprehensive grasp, right usually in the main, has always deeply impressed the admirers of force. On the other hand, his hardihood in making untenably sweeping assertions, his inevitable omission of many considerations in the course of his intense but hurried survey, has severely tried the patience of the lovers of delicate accuracy.

acter.

His naturally powerful reason was a good deal clouded by various prejudices. He would believe no good either of republican or of infidel. He did injustice to Milton; he abused Bolingbroke without reading him; and Boswell mentions his having uttered about Hume a remark too gross to be committed to paper. He hated and ridiculed the French and the Scotch, and refused to be persuaded that anybody could live happily out of London. In these things, as in many others, he showed gross egotism and want of sympathy. Swift was not more overbearing nor more intolerant of contradiction. He had a peculiar horror of death, and if anybody was said to feel differently, he at once pronounced them either mad or mendacious. He was a humane, warm-hearted man, at least towards cases of extreme distress brought on by no fault of the sufferer; he opened his house as a retreat for several "infirm and decayed" persons; amused himself with their quarrels, and patiently endured their caprices. He had a few strong attachments. But even in his displays of benevolence and kindly affection, you see his natural love of domineering; he allowed nobody but himself to praise his favourites, and he treated them roughly when they deviated from his ideal of propriety. He was frequently humorous at his own expense, but he would allow nobody else to take liberties with him; he made boisterous mirth at the expense of certain of his friends, but he would not endure that the slightest air of ridicule should be thrown upon any of his own sayings or doings. Often in his writings he enforced the "vanity of human wishes." His 'Rasselas' is virtually a sermon on the impossibility of finding perfect happiness in this world; one of its professed objects is the benevolent achievement of damping the ardour of youth. Yet when anybody else ventured to complain in his presence, he was ready to avow that the world is a very enjoyable world, and to denounce all complaints as mere sentimental whining.

Though renowned as a biographer, he was far from being carried away by hero-worship. He is rather chary than enthusiastic

in his allowance of merit, and scatters without mercy any air of romance or exaggeration that may have been gathered about an eminent name by the zeal of admirers. When Sir Thomas Browne, whom Johnson is said to have admired and imitated, declares that "his life has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable," -Johnson remarks somewhat sarcastically that "self-love, cooperating with an imagination vigorous and fertile as that of Browne's, will find or make objects of astonishment in every man's life."

Opinions. In politics Johnson was a bigoted Tory. He could not repress his political leanings even in writing the definitions for his Dictionary. When writing the Parliamentary Debates for Cave, he "took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it." He wrote little in direct support of the Tories. After he received his pension he conceived himself bound to do something, and composed a few pamphlets-'The False Alarm,' 'The Falkland Islands,' 'The Patriot,' and 'Taxation no Tyranny.' In these he stated his views of true liberty and true patriotism, and maintained that the English Parliament had a right to tax the Americans without their consent.

Naturally a pious man, he was a bigoted Churchman. He hated Dissenters as "honestly" as he hated Whigs, infidels, French, and Scotchmen.

Though called the Great Moralist, he expounded nothing that could be called an ethical system. He simply applied strong good sense to the common situations of life. His first principles were understood, not stated.

The merits of his literary criticisms were the result of his good sense, their defects the result of his narrow sympathies and fragmentary knowledge. He seldom or never erred on the side of extravagant praise. He admired the wonderful powers of Shakspeare, defended the violation of the "unities," and the mixture of comedy with tragedy; but, along with the great dramatist's virtues he enumerated considerable failings--occasional "tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity," wearisome narration, and the introduction of frigid conceits and quibbles, to the ruin of true sublimity and pathos. His tendency was to banish from poetry everything that would not be approved of by sober reason. In some points his principles of criticism were better than his practice. He laid down that "in order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merits of a writer, it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age and the opinions of his contemporaries." But this was a perfection-height of critical qualification that indolence would not suffer himself to attain. He wrote his notes on Shakspeare without