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THE GIFT OF
Clements Library
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Samuel Johnson

The
PERS ON AL IT Y
of DR. JOHNSON

BY
THOMAS MARC PARROTT
Professor of English in Princeton
University
º:
NEW YORK -
JAMES POTT & COMPANY
I 9 o 6
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Wºº & J
Copyright, 1901
By THE BookLovERs LIBRARY
Copyright, 1903, 1904
By THE LIBRARY PUBLISHING Co
Copyright, 1904
By JAMES Pott & Co.
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass.
4%4093-03|
THE PERSONALITY OF DR JOHNSON

The
Personality of Dr. Johnson
T is almost impossible for us, looking back
over the century and a quarter which
separates us from the death of Dr. Johnson,
to realize the position which for thirty years
he had held in the world of English letters.
And when at last by an effort of the historic
imagination we attain to some imperfect con-
ception of his place, we ask ourselves with
something like amazement to what this un-
disputed supremacy was due. Johnson was
the last literary autocrat of England, the
“great Cham of literature,” as his contem-
porary, Smollet, aptly called him. He filled
the throne which had been occupied before
him by Pope, by Dryden, and by Ben Jonson,
each of them, if not a greater man, assuredly
[ 132 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
a greater writer. Yet it may well be ques-
tioned whether any of them ever received
such undivided homage as was accorded dur-
ing the last years of his life to Samuel John-
son. It was not on account of the lack of
fellow-workers in the field of polite letters
that Johnson was so honored. His claim to
recognition rested upon his work as a moral
philosopher, a prose writer, and a poet. Now
in depth and originality of thought he was
surpassed by at least three of his contem-
poraries, Hume, Burke, and Adam Smith.
As a master of prose style Johnson is now,
perhaps, too generally undervalued, yet in the
weightier matters, such as invention, humor,
and power of characterization, his work is not
to be compared with that of such masters as
Fielding and Goldsmith. And as for poetry,
it is only by a certain effort of the will that the
modern reader trained in the romantic school
of Tennyson and Keats, and looking back
from them to Milton and Shakespeare, can
[ 133 ]
Studies of a Booklover
admit the claim of Johnson’s sonorous and
rhetorical couplets to be poetry at all.
The fact seems to be that Johnson’s dicta-
torship was due to his personality rather than
to his productions, to his spoken rather than
to his written words. The greatest writers
have lost themselves in their work: Homer is
only a name; Shakespeare's true self is barely
discernible through his plays and poems.
Johnson, on the other hand, has left the im-
press of his strong, acute, yet sharply limited
personality on every line he wrote. In one
of his outbursts of dogmatic criticism Johnson
says, most unjustly, that no man could have
fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure
had he not known the author. It would be
far less unjust, and probably a close approxi-
mation to the truth, to say that no man to-day
reads the Rambler or Rasselas except as he is at-
tracted to them by the fame of their author, and
with the hope, not always realized, of finding in
them the cause and justification of that fame.
[134 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
Naturally in our day, when the whole aspect
of the world has been changed by the economic
revolution, the discoveries of science, and the
triumph of democracy, the cause and justi-
fication of Johnson’s fame is harder to dis-
cover in his books than it was in his own time.
And even in his own time, as has already been
suggested, it was probably rather to his com-
manding personality than to his works that
his supremacy was due. Fortunately for us
his personality still survives, imperishable and
wholly independent of his work. By some
happy fate, as if in compensation for the
hardships and miseries of his youth, he en-
countered in middle life the man who was
to make him immortal. No happier con-
junction of men could be imagined than that
of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.
Johnson loved to talk, Boswell to listen;
Johnson was perhaps the most entertaining
and effective talker that ever lived, Boswell
was indisputably the best reporter of conver-
[135 |
Studies of a Booklover
sation; Johnson asserted his right, almost
tyrannically at times, to be the absolute lord
of every society into which he entered, Boswell
was willing either to efface himself, or to
obtrude himself just far enough to catch the
great man’s eye and provoke one of those
outbursts which delighted the hearers at that
time and have delighted thousands of readers
ever since. Johnson was pardonably proud,
and somewhat over quick to take offense,
though always eager to forgive; Boswell, on
the other hand, was almost humiliatingly
wanting in self-respect, incapable of resent-
ment, and only too ready to be forgiven.
Finally, Johnson’s ideas, beliefs, and principles
were as firm and immutable as bronze; Bos-
well’s mind was wax to receive and marble
to retain; and thus the hero left upon his
worshiper an indelible imprint which has
transmitted his own true form and features
to all posterity. The two men were made
for each other, and if Boswell has achieved
[ 136 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
immortality in the company of Johnson, he
has obtained no more than his just reward.
It is quite time to have done with Macaulay's
silly paradox that it was only because he was
so great a fool that Boswell wrote so great a
book. Carlyle answered that paradox at the
time. “Falser hypothesis,” he says, “never rose
in human soul.” Unfortunately the popu-
larity of Macaulay's essay on Boswell’s Life
of Johnson stands to Carlyle’s work on the
same subject in inverse ratio to the real value
of their respective pictures of hero and bi-
ographer; and it is permissible, therefore, in
view of the gross injustice done to one who
was not only Johnson’s biographer, but his
dear friend, to quote the too little known
words of Carlyle's verdict. “Boswell wrote a
good book,” so the final judgment runs, “be-
cause he had a heart and an eye to discern wis-
dom, and an utterance to render it forth; be-
cause of his free insight, his lively talent, above
all, of his love and child-like open-minded-
[ 137 )
Studies of a Booklover
ness. . . . Neither James Boswell's good book,
nor any other good thing, in any time, nor in
any place, was, is, or can be performed by any
man in virtue of his badness, but always and
solely in spite thereof.” -
It must not be forgotten that the picture of
Johnson that Boswell gives us is a picture of
Johnson in his declining years, his character
formed, his work, for the most part, done.
Johnson was already fifty-two when Boswell
met him, and although he had yet twenty-
three years of life before him these were tran-
quil and idle years compared with the misery
and grinding toil of his earlier life. The
period of his acquaintance with Boswell was
one long Indian summer in which the storm-
beaten hero rested from his labors and en-
joyed, so far as the deep-rooted melancholy
of his nature would allow, the sunshine of
prosperity. The Johnson whom we all know
in the famous biography, the great dictator of
literature, the autocrat of the famous club,
[ 138 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
the revered philosopher whose grotesque antics
moved his friends to alternate awe and laughter,
the tender-hearted and rough-mannered man
who bullied the strong and bowed humbly
to the weak, was the product of a long life
amid an environment unknown to Boswell
except by report, and of an heredity which,
had he known, he could not have appreciated.
Boswell has furnished us with full materials
for an estimate of Johnson's character; but
before we can be in a position to estimate it
rightly, we must know something of the
process by which that character was evolved.
Samuel Johnson was born in the cathedral
town of Lichfield in 1709. His father,
Michael, was a book-seller, a bigoted Tory
and a man of learning, but superstitious,
utterly careless of money matters, and afflicted
with the constitutional melancholy which was
characteristic of his famous son. Johnson, it
must be owned, had good grounds for melan-
choly; he inherited the taint of scrofula and
[139 |
Studies of a Booklover
in early childhood almost wholly lost his
sight from this disease. In spite of his great
physical strength, he suffered throughout his
life from a variety of ailments, he was attacked
by paralysis in his old age, and finally fell a
victim to a terrible complication of gout,
dropsy, kidney trouble, and lung disease.
When we remember the vociferous lamenta-
tions with which Carlyle bewailed his attacks
of dyspepsia and insomnia, or the less noisy
but more terrible misanthropy with which
Swift revenged himself upon a world which,
at least, was innocent of his physical suffer-
ings, we find something truly noble in the un-
shaken fortitude with which Johnson faced
his miseries. Their one result upon his mind,
it would seem, was a somewhat scornful treat-
ment of the affected sorrows and sentimental
troubles with which his age was so plentecusly
endowed.
The usual tales are told of Johnson's pre-
cocity. In spite of his deficient eyesight he
[140 |
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
read prodigiously. One of the most charac-
teristic of the anecdotes preserved by Boswell
tells how the boy climbed up a ladder in his
father's shop in search of some apples which
he fancied his brother had hidden behind a
huge folio on the upper shelf. The apples
were undiscoverable, but the book proved to
be a copy of Petrarch whose name Johnson
had come across somewhere in his voluminous
reading. Hunger was forgotten in the de-
light of a new discovery, and the boy sat upon
the ladder with the folio on his knees, reading
until he had finished a great part of the book.
The story is typical of much of Johnson's
life and, in particular, of his method of study,
accidental, spasmodic, intense and concen-
trated while the fit was on, sluggish and inter-
mittent when the moment passed. If he had
a subject to get up, he invariably neglected it.
When preparing his edition of Shakespeare,
he declined to avail himself of Garrick’s un-
rivalled collection of early editions and con-
[14] ]
Studies of a Booklover
temporary plays because he thought that Gar-
rick had not pressed him sufficiently to make
use of them. When he was composing the
Lives of the Poets, he snubbed Boswell for
busying himself to secure materials, and de-
clared that he didn’t care to know about Pope.
On the other hand, he probably read more
miscellaneous printed matter than any man
of his century. With all his reading, how-
ever, he was the very opposite of the typical
book-worm. No creature is more universally
despised by normal boys than a young book-
worm, but Johnson even in his school-days
exercised an undisputed sway over his asso-
ciates. He did his friends’ tasks for them,
he served as the standard by which every boy's
scholarship was tested, and he rode trium-
phantly to school in the morning mounted
upon a comrade's back, with two others sup-
porting him on either hand. -
Johnson was sent up to Oxford on the
promise, never fulfilled, of pecuniary support
[142 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
from certain of his father's friends. The
anecdotes that are told of his college life are
extremely characteristic. On his entrance he
amazed his tutor by quoting Macrobius, he
stayed away from lectures to slide on the ice
in Christ Church meadows, he neglected the
required exercises in Latin verse, but latinized
a poem of Pope's in such a masterly fashion
as to attract the notice of the whole university.
His old master told Boswell that Johnson at
college was a “gay, frolicsome fellow, caressed
and loved by all about him"; but Johnson
himself told another story: “Oh, sir,” he said,
“I was mad and violent. It was bitterness
which they mistook for frolic. I was miser-
ably poor and I thought to fight my way by
my literature and by my wit, so I disregarded
all power and all authority.” He was gener-
ally seen “lounging at the college gate with a
circle of young students round him, whom
he was entertaining with his wit and keeping
from their studies, if not spiriting up to re-
[143 ]
Studies of a Booklover
bellion against the college discipline.” Yet
when one of these admiring friends put a pair
of shoes at his door to replace the broken pair
through which his feet were showing, Johnson
threw them away in a passion of resentment.
And this although he had already ceased to
attend a highly valued course of lectures be-
cause his shabby dress made him, as he
thought, an object of contempt to strangers.
Johnson loved learning much, but indepen-
dence more. The youth who threw away the
shoes was the father of the man who wrote
the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield “pro-
claiming to the listening world that Patronage
should be no more.”
Johnson added but little to his mental
equipment at Oxford; indeed he said long
afterwards that he knew as much when he
went there at eighteen as he did when he was
fifty; but he acquired something better than
learning. From an early age he had been
something of a free-thinker and a careless
[144 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
talker about religion, probably more to show
his wit than for any other reason. But during
his short stay at Oxford — he was in residence
only a little more than a year — he read that
strangely powerful book, Law's Call to a Seri-
ous Life, and under its influence became
what he continued to his death, not only a
sincere believer, but a stalwart champion of re-
vealed religion. And this is the more remark-
able since, with hardly an exception, the emi-
nent men of his day, Bolingbroke, Pope,
Hume, and Voltaire, were either open infidels
or complacent and self-contented Deists. We
must not forget, of course, the Evangelical move-
ment under the fervent apostleship of Wesley
and Whitfield, but this movement was essen-
tially an appeal from the intellect to the emo-
tional faculties of men, and as such wholly
alien to the strong sense and self-restrained
nature of Johnson. His prayers were made
in his closet or written in his note-books, not
performed with unction upon the corners of the
[145 |
Studies of a Booklover
streets. The traditional forms of the Eng-
lish church gave full scope for his exercises of
devotion, and he was Tory enough to insist
upon the maintenance in all her privileges of
the national church; but beneath all forms he
recognized, as perhaps no other man did in
his day, the essential unity of religion. In
the true spirit of a sincere believer he was
accustomed to reproach himself bitterly for
his failure to live up to the principles of his
creed, but to us, looking back upon his blame-
less life and his thousand silent deeds of
charity, he seems the very embodiment of Saint
James's definition of religion.
Less is known of Johnson during the period
between his departure from Oxford and his
arrival in London than at any other time of
his life. His father's health and business
were failing together and he died in 1731 on
the verge of bankruptcy. Of his little inheri-
tance of £20, Johnson laid by eleven and
went out into the world to seek his living. He
[146 |
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
found it no easy task. He tried to turn his
education to account as a teacher in a little
school, but found it as disagreeable for him
to teach as it was for the boys to learn. He
earned a few guineas by writing and trans-
lating for a provincial bookseller. He fell in
love with and married a widow of nearly
twice his age, a fact which for some reason
has proved a source of inextinguishable mirth
to vulgar minds. It is impossible to be angry
with the born mimic, David Garrick, who in
after years used to convulse London drawing-
rooms by a caricature of the love-scenes be-
tween Johnson and the widow, which he had
witnessed with a school-boy’s apish delight in
their ludicrous side; but it is not easy to for-
give Macaulay for abusing the woman whom
Johnson loved as “a tawdry painted grand-
mother who accepted his addresses with a
readiness that did her little honor.” Not little,
but greatly to her honor was it that she had
eyes to pierce beneath the rough exterior of
[147 )
Studies of a Booklover
this poor, ugly, and miserable scholar, and to
see the strength and sincerity of his love; nor
less that she had the intelligence to recognize
in him “the most sensible man she ever saw
in her life.”
With the money that his wife brought him
Johnson once more tried his hand at teaching
and opened a school near Lichfield. But his
second attempt was no more successful than
his first. Not more than eight boys ever at-
tended the school, and after a hopeless struggle
of a year or two, Johnson abandoned it and
went up to London to seek his fortune with
two-pence ha'penny in his pocket and an un-
finished drama in his portmanteau.
London was at that time, to a degree which
it has never since been, the intellectual and
literary center of the English-speaking world.
Indeed, if we except the brilliant literary
coterie which a few years later gathered around
Hume in Edinburgh, London may be said
to have enjoyed throughout the middle of
[148 |
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
the eighteenth century a practical monopoly
of Englishmen of wit and letters. It offered
the only field in which a man of Johnson's
tastes and abilities might rise to fame and
fortune. Of these two, fame was in that day
far easier of attainment than fortune. Ma-
caulay has drawn a memorable picture of the
depressed state of letters at the time of John-
son’s arrival in London, and of the miseries
suffered there by starving authors. As usual
with Macaulay the picture is overdrawn, but
there is no doubt that his main contention is
true. The golden age of patronage had
passed away, the age in which the writer ap-
pealed directly to a large and liberal reading
public had not yet arrived; and in the inter-
regnum, “struggling between two worlds, one
dead, one powerless to be born,” Johnson and
his fellows had a long and bitter contest with
all the ills that then assailed the scholar’s life,
“Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”
But where weaker men succumbed, Johnson's
[149 |
Studies of a Booklover
courage, industry, and strong self-command
brought him nobly through the battle.
Johnson’s emergence from the sea in which
so many of his fellows sank was, indeed, a
striking example of the survival of the fittest.
Of all the struggling men of letters in his day
no one was so well fitted to make his hands
keep his head. His native independence of
mind kept him from the snares of patronage
in which so brilliant a genius as his friend
Savage perished miserably; his proud self-
confidence prevented him from becoming the
abject slave of the book-sellers. His en-
counter with Osborne, one of the most promi-
nent publishers of the day, has become tradi-
tional. He is said to have knocked him
down with a folio Bible and to have put his
foot upon his neck in sign of triumph, but
Johnson told Boswell the story in a simpler
fashion: “Sir, he was impertinent to me, and
I beat him;” and he added later, “I have beat
many a fellow, but the rest had the wit to hold
[ 150 |
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
their tongues.” Although by no means con-
temptuous of the good things of life, he could
and often did live on as near nothing a day as
was humanly possible, and the want of a
dinner never lowered the quality or quantity
of his literary product. On the contrary, his
natural indolence seemed to need the spur of
sharp necessity. When free from care he was,
in the fine phrase of his day, “vastly idle”;
but he was at need capable of the most ex-
traordinary exertions. He wrote forty-eight
printed pages of the Life of Savage at a
sitting; he began and finished his story of
Rasselas in a single week. And he was as
versatile as he was energetic. For the Gentle-
man’s Magazine, with which he became con-
nected soon after his arrival in London, he
wrote verses in Latin, Greek, and English,
translations from French and Italian, essays,
biographical sketches, prefaces, and addresses
to the subscribers. Perhaps of all his labors
for the magazine that which attracted most
[15] ]
Studies of a Booklover
attention was his version of the debates in
Parliament. The House of Commons at that
time and for years afterwards strictly pro-
hibited any account of its proceedings; but the
enterprising publisher of the Gentleman’s
Magazine managed to bribe the doorkeepers
to admit men who reported to him the sub-
jects of discussion, the names of the speakers,
and a few scanty notes of their arguments.
Out of these materials Johnson composed,
under the title of Debates of the Senate of
Lilliput, a series of speeches which, in the
judgment of his contemporaries, surpassed the
eloquence of Demosthenes, and greatly in-
creased the sale of the magazine.
In spite of his poverty, however, as soon as
Johnson discovered that these speeches were
being received as the genuine orations de-
livered in Parliament, he ceased to compose
them, “for,” said he, “I would not be accessory
to the propagation of falsehood.” As this
fact bears witness to Johnson's tenderness of
[ 152 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
conscience, another incident is equally en-
lightening as to his political prejudices.
When praised for the impartiality with which
he had distributed reason and eloquence, he
answered: “That is not quite true. I saved
appearances tolerably well; but I took care
that the Whig dogs should not have the best
of it.”
It was fortunate for Johnson in more ways
than one that at the crisis of his life he boldly
plunged into the world of London. Had he
remained in the provinces he would have
rotted in obscurity or collapsed under the de-
pressing influence of an environment to which
he was in no way adapted. On the other hand,
had circumstances permitted him to live like
Gray in the dignified seclusion of a college
fellowship, he would probably have done even
less work than Gray and in the end gone
melancholy mad. He had not the slightest
taste for country life, and ridiculed with
boisterous scorn the supposed delights of soli-
[153 ]
Studies of a Booklover
tude. Possibly on account of his deficient
eyesight he had no appreciation whatever of
the beauties of nature; one prospect, he said,
resembles another very closely, and one blade
of grass is exactly like another. The demon
of melancholy, “a horrible hypochondria, with
perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impa-
tience, with dejection, gloom, and despair
which made existence misery,” was not to
be exorcised by solitary walks in country
fields. What Johnson needed was not only
work, but society, close contact with all sorts
and conditions of men, friendships, enmities,
whatever could draw him out of himself and
make him forget. All this he found in Lon-
don. No man of his time knew so well the
great city, and all the varieties of life contained
within its walls. He slept with beggars, or
wandered houseless through the streets at
night with a brother poet; he slanged a
bargeman, laughed and jested with Garrick's
actresses, or talked “with profound respect,
[154 )
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
but still in a firm, manly manner, with his
sonorous voice,” to Majesty itself. “I look
upon a day as lost,” he said, “in which I do not
make a new acquaintance.” The fact that
he never lost a friend except by death shows
that he was as tenacious of old friendships as
he was eager to acquire new. He had, in fact,
a very genius for friendship, and the circle
that gathered round him in his later years
included not only poets, scholars, and men
of letters, but the most prominent painters,
actors, musicians, doctors, and statesmen in
England.
Johnson's attitude toward the great city
where he suffered so much and gained so
much is not to be judged from his poem,
London. The bitterness of that early satire is
due in part to the tone of the author from whom
it is imitated, in part, perhaps, to the temper of
Savage to whom it was addressed. But even
in this early work it may be noted that while
the abuse of the town is vivid and direct, —
[155 |
Studies of a Booklover
“Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead, ”
the contrasting praises of the country are
absolutely commonplace and artificial, per-
haps the only insincere lines that Johnson ever
wrote. We can well imagine with what ridi-
cule he would in later years have chastised a
presumptuous friend who urged him to fulfil
the prophecy of Thales and, abandoning the
follies of the town, “fly for refuge to the wilds
of Kent.” London was no stony-hearted step-
mother to Johnson, but an Alma Mater dearer
even than his own mother university. He
preferred Fleet Street to the finest prospect in
the Highlands; declared that the full tide of
human existence was realized in all its magni-
tude at Charing Cross, and summed up the
feeling of thousands of lovers of the town be-
fore and since his day in the words, “When a
man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”
[156]
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
It would take too long to trace the evolution
of Johnson from the unknown correspondent
of the Gentleman’s Magazine to the dicta-
torship of letters where Boswell found him;
but a few of the landmarks of his career may
be noted. His London in 1738 brought him
ten guineas and the praise of Pope. His Life
of Savage in 1744 attracted considerable atten-
tion, not only from the interest of its subject,
but from the vividness of its characterization
and the profound gravity of its morality. It
is written in Johnson’s heaviest and most poly-
syllabic style; but it is worth reading even
today for its dexterous blending of moral criti-
cism and Christian charity. Indeed, it is at
times almost amusing to see how far John-
son's warm heart leads him to go in defence
of a friend, even when that friend was so
thorough-paced a blackguard as the unfor-
tunate Savage.
By 1747 Johnson had acquired sufficient
reputation to justify a syndicate of booksellers
[ 157 )
Studies of a Booklover
in contracting with him for the production of
an English Dictionary, at that time a great
desideratum in the language. On this work
he spent in all eight years, and its appearance
may be said to have laid the capstone on his
reputation. As a great lexicographer, — the
title by which he was so often known in the
eighteenth century, - Johnson was disquali-
fied first by his profound ignorance of all
other Germanic languages and even of the
earlier stages of his own tongue, and secondly
by his constitutional disinclination toward la-
borious and minute research. On the other
hand, his definitions were for the most part
excellent, although at times, when his partisan-
ship got the better of his judgment and he
defined excise as “a hateful tax levied upon
commodities and adjudged by wretches hired
by those to whom excise is paid,” or a pen-
sion as “pay given to a State hireling for
treason to his country,” they were calculated
rather to make the cynic laugh and the judi-
[158]
The Personality of Dr. Johnson
cious grieve. Sometimes, indeed, a flash of
Johnson's sturdy good humor and native wit
breaks through the cloud of definitions and
illustrations like a ray of sunshine, as where
he defines Grub Street as a place “much
inhabited by writers of small histories, dic-
3.
tionaries, and temporary poems,” or a lexi-
cographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a
harmless drudge.”
Johnson received the respectable sum of
nearly $8,000 for his work, equivalent in
purchasing power to perhaps three times the
amount to-day. Out of this, however, he had
to pay all the expenses of preparing the book
for the press, and long before the work was
done he had spent all that he was to receive
for it. His procrastination delayed the book
several years beyond the date for which it was
originally announced and completely exhausted
the publishers’ patience. “Thank God, I
have done with him,” said Miller, the head of
the syndicate, when the last sheets came in.
[159 |
Studies of a Booklover
“I am glad,” said Johnson, when this was re-
ported to him, “that he thanks God for any-
thing.” It is characteristic both of the man
and the times that within a year after the ap-
pearance of his great work Johnson was ar-
rested for debt and had to be bailed out by his
friend, Samuel Richardson.
The composition of the dictionary by no
means engrossed Johnson’s attention during
the eight years that he was engaged upon it.
In 1748 he composed his best known poem,
The Vanity of Human Wishes, for which he
received the trifling sum of fifteen guineas.
In the following year, the tragedy of Irene,
which he had brought up to London with him
and which had so far gone the rounds of the
theatres in vain, was produced by his old
pupil, David Garrick, now the manager of
Drury Lane.
The production could hardly be called
successful. The play began amid cat-calls
and whistling, and when the catastrophe was
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reached and the unfortunate heroine with the
bowstring about her neck opened her lips for
her dying speech, the audience broke into loud
howls of “Murder! Murder!” and drove her
silent from the stage. The friendly influence
of Garrick, however, succeeded in keeping the
stiff and lifeless play upon the stage for nine
nights, and Johnson received the handsome
profit of £300 or thereabouts, from what was,
as a matter of fact, the least valuable of all his
contributions to literature. The truth is that
with all his talents Johnson utterly lacked
dramatic power. His individuality was too
strongly developed for him to put himself in
another man’s place. Goldsmith hit the nail
on the head when he remarked to Johnson:
“Why, sir, if you were to write a fable, you
would make all the little fishes talk like whales.”
The author's great reputation induced some
friends to read and even to speak well of the
play; one, Pot, went so far as to say that it
was the finest tragedy of modern times; which
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gem of criticism being reported to Johnson
elicited the frank and crushing verdict, “If
Pot says so, Pot lies.”
From 1750 to 1752 Johnson was occupied
with the composition of the Rambler, one of
the countless eighteenth century imitations of
the inimitable Spectator. The style shows
Johnson almost at his worst, and his occasional
attempts at pleasantry remind one painfully
of the gambols of a hippopotamus. But its
stately orthodoxy and its solemn moralizings
on Johnson’s favorite theme, the vanity of
human wishes, exactly suited the taste of the
age, and it is not too much to say that his con-
temporary reputation as the greatest of Eng-
lish moralists dated from the appearance of
the Rambler.
The last number of this periodical had
already been written when Johnson lost his
wife. He was profoundly affected by her
death; “remember me in your prayers,” he
wrote to an old friend in the first bitterness
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The Personality of Dr. Johnson
of his grief, “for vain is the help of man.”
And his sorrow was no transient emotion; to
the end of his life he observed the day on
which his Tetty died as a day of mourning
and of solemn devotion to her memory. The
prayers written down in his diary on these
days wake, even at this distance of time, in
the most careless reader that sense of fellow-
ship in suffering which the old poet knew:
Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tan-
gunt.
Mrs. Johnson’s death would have left her
husband alone in the world had he not already
begun to gather about him a household of
poor, distressed creatures — blind Miss Wil-
liams, old Mrs. Desmoulins and her daughter,
Polly Carmichael, Dr. Levet, whose brutal
manners put even Johnson to the blush, and
the negro servant, Frank, whose office of
valet must, from all we know of his master’s
dress and personal appearance, have been an
absolute sinecure. Not one of these had any
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claim upon Johnson but that of wretchedness
and poverty, yet he turned over his house to
them, listened humbly to their quarrels and
reproaches, and plunged himself into debt to
meet their wants. He even went out himself
to purchase fish and oysters for his favorite
cat, Hodge, lest if he should assign this task
to any of his dependents, the cat might be
disliked as a source of trouble and mistreated
in his absence. It was well said of the rough
old man that he had nothing of the bear about
him but his skin.
In 1756 Johnson began the famous edition
of Shakespeare over which he dawdled for the
next ten years. He received money from
hundreds of subscribers for the projected work,
spent it, and did nothing till stung to action
by a contemporary satire which roundly
charged him with dishonesty. It is rather the
fashion nowadays to sneer at Johnson's criti-
cisms of Shakespeare, but when the proper
allowance is made for Johnson’s time and
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The Personality of Dr. Johnson
temper, it is hard to find a saner piece of criti-
cism in the English language than the preface
to this edition, or more sensible advice than
that which he gives there to the young student:
“Notes are often necessary, but they are
necessary evils. Let him that is yet unac-
quainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and
who desires to feel the highest pleasure that
the drama can give, read every play from the
first scene to the last, with utter negligence of
all his commentators. When his fancy is
once on the wing, let it not stop at correction
or explanation. When his attention is strongly
engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to
the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him
read on through brightness and obscurity,
through integrity and corruption; let him pre-
serve his comprehension of the dialogue and
his interest in the fable. And when the pleas-
ures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt
exactness and read the commentators.”
The Idler, a series of weekly essays, ap-
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peared in the Universal Chronicle for the years
1758-1760. We find in these essays the link
which joins the stiff and somewhat pompous
style of the Rambler to the more familiar and
pleasing tone of the Lives of the Poets. In
some of the papers, at least, we seem to hear
Johnson talking as he might have talked at the
club. The sketch of Dick Minim, the per-
fect type of a neo-classic critic, has several
humorous touches of self-portraiture; and
Johnson's open-mindedness is shown by his
admitting a paper by his friend Langton, con-
taining a kindly, but rather pointed, reproof
of his own growing preference of projects to
performances.
Johnson's mother died in the beginning of
1759. As usual he was in distress for money
and had to borrow six guineas of a printer to
make up a sum which he sent down to her in
her illness. Unable to be with her in her last
moments, he wrote her perhaps the most
tender and touching letter which a son ever
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The Personality of Dr. Johnson
sent to his mother, and to provide for her
funeral expenses and pay the little debts she
left behind, he broke the spell which idleness
was weaving around him and wrote in hot
haste his story of Rasselas. This work has
been absurdly criticised as a novel; as a matter
of fact it is nothing of the kind. Johnson's
Abyssinians make no pretence to reality; they
are ideal creatures in an imaginary country,
and the purpose of the book is neither to por-
tray manners nor to delineate character, but
to teach a moral lesson, and to denounce the
favorite dogma of the day, that this is the best
of all possible worlds. If there was one thing
of which Johnson was firmly persuaded, it
was that this dogma was a piece of cant, and
cant was the object of his most vigorous de-
nunciations. The note of the book is struck
in the words of Imlac, the wise counselor of
Rasselas: “Human life is everywhere a state
in which much is to be endured, and little to
be enjoyed.”
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In 1762 George III, who had newly come
to the throne, was graciously pleased to grant
Johnson a pension of £300 a year, one of the few
public acts of His Majesty which were fortunate
enough then and afterwards to meet with almost
universal approbation. After some hesitation,
not unnatural in the author of that definition of
a pension already cited, Johnson accepted the
favor. In youth he had been an ardent Jacobite,
and it has even been conjectured, though prob-
ably without a shadow of truth, that he left Lon-
don in 1745 to join Prince Charlie's invasion
of England. But by 1762 the Jacobite cause
was merely the shadow of a name; George III
was, at least, a true-born Englishman, and
Johnson's strong common sense naturally pre-
ferred so substantial a reality as three hundred
a year to the empty pleasure of cursing the
House of Hanover and drinking King James's
health.
On the receipt of his pension, Johnson
practically struck work. He had yet more
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The Personality of Dr. Johnson
than twenty years to live, but with the excep-
tion of the Lives of the Poets, a work which cost
him little more time than was involved in the
actual labor of composition, it is doubtful
whether he devoted more than a few months
of this period to the practice of literature. But
if he wrote little he talked much. In the year
after the receipt of his pension he joined the
famous club which met for weekly suppers at
the Turk's Head Inn. In the same year he
first met Boswell. And here we may well
leave him; the rest of his acts and his words,
are they not written in the book of the prince
of biographers?
The charm of Boswell’s book lies in its
lifelike presentation of Johnson's personality;
from its pages the fascination which Johnson
exercised over his contemporaries rises afresh
to cast its spell over us. In what does the
secret of the charm consist? Partly, no doubt,
in the strong common sense of the man. We
are all more or less victims to cant; in one
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form or another we all pay tribute to the or-
ganized hypocrisy of society. But none the
less we love the man who rises superior to the
conventions, exposes their hollowness, and
laughs at the supposed necessity of their obli-
gations. Again, the quick wit and bluff
heartiness of Johnson are not without their
share in his attraction. His wit was not al-
ways of the most refined. His passages at
arms resemble cudgel play rather than a fen-
cing match. But after all the quarter-staff is
to us of the English-speaking race a kindlier
weapon than the rapier. And Johnson was a
past master in the noble art of giving hard
knocks. “There is no arguing with Johnson,”
said one victim, rubbing, we may imagine,
his broken head, “for if his pistol misses fire,
he knocks you down with the butt.” And if
his bluffness was sometimes overpowering to
his contemporaries, it is a source of unfailing
amusement to a later generation. “He hugs
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The Personality of Dr. Johnson
you like a bear,” said Burke, “and shakes
laughter out of you.”
But if this were all, Johnson would be merely
a comic figure, a sort of literary Sancho Panza.
The secret of his charm lies deeper; there is a
trace in him of Don Quixote as well. Like
that noble and most pathetic figure, Johnson
was the champion of a failing order, of a cause
already lost, although he knew it not. In
literature, in politics, and in religion, Johnson
stood on the brink of a revolution, and strove
to save his world from plunging into what
seemed to him a bottomless abyss. So great
was his influence over the English world of his
day that he actually succeeded in delaying
the advent of that revolution. To avert it
was beyond human power, but there is some-
thing irresistibly appealing in the sight of a
brave man fighting a losing battle.
Finally, I think, the fascination of Johnson
is due to that delight which human nature
always experiences in discovering a treasure
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hidden beneath a repelling exterior. There
is much about Johnson that is repellant —
not merely the scarred face, the uncouth man-
ners, and the slovenly dress, but the narrow-
ness, the dogmatism, the arrogance, passing
at times almost into brutality. But all this is
on the surface, the hard crust through which we
must break to reach the hidden ore. And the
ore is rich in the noblest qualities of manhood
— courage, courtesy, wisdom, and love.
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