Chapter IV: Johnson's Character and Characteristics (2)

In several of these last utterances the bias is as much anti-Scotch as anti-Presbyterian. Of course Johnson, as his _Journey to the Western Islands_ amply proves, had no serious feeling against Scotchmen as Scotchmen like the settled convictions which made him dislike Presbyterians. But then, as always, the Scot had a specially "gude conceit" of himself and a clannish habit of pushing the interest of his brother Scots wherever he went, so that it was commonly thought that to let a Scot into your house or business was not only to let in one conceited fellow, but to be certain of half a dozen more to follow. The English were then still so far from their present admiring acceptance of Scotsmen as their ordinary rulers in Church and State that they had not even begun to think of them as their equals. Scotland was at that time a very poor country, and the poor relation has {148} never been a popular character anywhere. Consequently Englishmen--and who was ever more English than Johnson?--commonly saw in the newly arrived Scot a pauper and an upstart come to live upon his betters: and they revenged themselves in the manner natural to rich relations. To Johnson's tongue, too, the Scots offered the important additional temptations of being often Whigs, oftener still Presbyterians, and always the countrymen of Boswell. This last was probably the one which he found it most impossible to resist. Happily Boswell had the almost unique good sense to enjoy a good thing even at the expense of his country or himself. It is to him, or perhaps at him, that the majority of these Scotch witticisms were uttered: it is by him that nearly all of them are recorded, from the original sally which was the first sentence he heard from Johnson's lips, in reply to his "Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." "That, sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help"--to the famous reply at the Wilkes dinner, when some one said "Poor old England is lost,"--"Sir, it is not so much to be lamented that old England is lost as that the Scotch have found it."

On this topic Johnson would always let {149} himself go. Again and again the generous connoisseurship of Boswell describes not only the witticism but the joyous gusto with which it was uttered. On no subject is the great talker's amazing ingeniousness of retort more conspicuous. When Boswell most justly criticized the absurd extravagance of his famous sentence about the death of Garrick eclipsing the gaiety of nations, Johnson replied, "I could not have said more nor less. It is the truth; _eclipsed_, not _extinguished_; and his death _did_ eclipse; it was like a storm." _Boswell_. "But why nations? Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?" _Johnson_. "Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed. Besides nations may be said--if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety--which they have not." So when Johnson said the Scotch had none of the luxuries or conveniences of life before the Union, and added, "laughing," says Boswell, "with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present," "We have taught you and we'll do the same in time to all barbarous nations--to the Cherokees--and at last to the Ourang-outangs," Boswell tried to meet him by saying "We had wine before the Union." But this only got him into worse trouble. "No, sir, you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk." {150} _Boswell_. "I assure you, sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness." _Johnson_. "No, sir; there were people who died of dropsies which they contracted in trying to get drunk." This was said as they sailed along the shores of Skye; and of course the whole tour in Scotland afforded many opportunities for such jests. There was the wall at Edinburgh which by tradition was to fall upon some very learned man, but had been taken down some time before Johnson's visit: "They have been afraid it never would fall," said he. There was St. Giles's at Edinburgh, which provoked the chaffing aside to Robertson, "Come, let me see what was once a church." There were the beauties of Glasgow of which Adam Smith boasted, and provoked the famous question "Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?" There was the supposed treelessness of Scotland, on which he dwells in the _Journey_, and which once led him to question whether there was a tree between Edinburgh and the English border older than himself; and to reply to Boswell's suggestion that he ought to be whipped at every tree over 100 years old in that space, "I believe I might submit to it for a baubee!" It led also to the pleasantry in which he emphasized his conviction that the oak stick he had brought from London was stolen and not {151} merely lost when it disappeared in Mull; "Consider, sir, the value of such a _piece of timber_ here."

To-day we think of Scotland as one of the most beautiful countries in the world and go there in thousands for that reason. But that was not why Johnson went. He had little pleasure in any landscape scenery, and none in that of moors and mountains. Indeed nobody had in those days except Gray. And Gray was the last man in whose company Johnson was likely to be found differing from his contemporaries. So that though he saw much of what is finest in the noble scenery of Scotland, it hardly drew from him a single word of wonder or delight: and his only remembered allusion to it is the well-known sally hurled ten years earlier at the Scotsman in London who thought to get on safe ground for the defence of his country by speaking of her "noble wild prospects," but only drew upon himself the answer, "I believe, sir, you have a great many. Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to London!"

So dangerous it always was to put a phrase into Johnson's mouth! So dangerous above {152} all to try to make him prefer anything to his beloved London. Perhaps no nation in the world has cared so little about its capital city as the English. When one thinks of the passionate affection lavished on Athens, Rome, Paris, even, strange as it seems to us, on Madrid, one is tempted to accuse the English of dull disloyalty to their own noble capital city. London played, at any rate till the French Revolution, a far more important part in English life than any other capital in the life of any other country. In the reign of Charles II, according to Macaulay, it was seventeen times as large as Bristol, then the second city in the Kingdom; a relative position unique in Europe. And all through our history it had led the nation in politics as well as in commerce. Yet of the best of all tributes to greatness, the praise of great men, it had received singularly little. There is Milton's noble burst of eloquence in the _Areopagitica_, but that is the praise not so much of London as of the religion and politics of London at a particular moment. Spenser's beautiful allusion in the _Prothalamion_ to "mery London my most kyndly nurse" and to the "sweet Thames" whom he invites to "run softely till I end my song" is among the few tributes of personal affection paid by our poets to the great city. And it is still true {153} to-day that the tutelary genius of London is none of the great poets: it is Samuel Johnson. At this moment, as these pages are being written, the railway stations of London are filled with picture advertisements of the attractions of the great city. And who is the central figure in the picture that deals with central London! Not Shakespeare or Milton, but Johnson. The worn, rather sad face, more familiar to Englishmen than that of any other man of letters, with the wig and brown coat to make recognition certain, is chosen as the most useful for their purpose by advertisers probably innocent of any literature, but astute enough in knowing what will attract the people.

Johnson's love of London, however, was of his own sort, quite unlike that of Charles Lamb for instance, or that of such a man as Sir Walter Besant. He cared nothing for architecture, and little for history. Still less had his feeling anything to do with the commercial greatness of London. He had a scholar's contempt for traders as people without ideas fit for rational conversation. The man who scoffed at the "boobies of Birmingham" as unworthy of notice in comparison with the gownsmen of Oxford or even the cathedral citizens of Lichfield, whose experience of commercial men made him declare that "trade could not be {154} managed by those who manage it if it had much difficulty," was not likely to have his imagination fired by talk about London as the centre of the world's commerce. What he cared about was a very different thing. He thought of London as the place in all the world where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument: but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes, and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual pleasures which to him were the only real pleasures, and which made London for him a heaven upon earth. "He who is tired of London is tired of life," he said on one occasion; and on another, when some one remarked that many people were content to live in the country, he replied, "Sir, it is in the intellectual as in the physical world; we are told by natural philosophers that a body is at rest in the place that is fit for it: they who are content to live in the country are fit for the country." He was not one of them: {155} he wanted Charing Cross and its "full tide of human existence," and thought that any one who had once experienced "the full flow of London talk" must, if he retired to the country, "either be contented to turn baby again and play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a little pond, and die for want of his usual food." He was more than once offered good country livings if he would take orders, but he knew that he would find the "insipidity and uniformity" of country life intolerable: and he stayed on to become the greatest of Londoners. There is probably to this day no book, not a professed piece of topography, which mentions the names of so many London streets, squares and churches, as Boswell's _Life of Johnson_. Many sights that Johnson saw we can still see exactly as he saw them; many, of course, have disappeared; and many are so utterly changed as to be unrecognizable. The young poet may still stand where he and Goldsmith stood in Poets' Corner and say in his heart with Johnson--

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."

But when he goes on as they did to Temple Bar, he will find that ancient monument retired into the country and certainly {156} nothing whatever to remind him of the Jacobite heads still mouldering on it, which gave occasion to Goldsmith's witty turning of his Tory friend's quotation--

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur ISTIS."

But on that holy ground the Johnsonian will hardly miss even Temple Bar. For most of Johnson's haunts and homes, the Mitre and the Cock, the Churches of St. Clement and of the Temple, his houses in Johnson's Court and Gough Square, are or were all hard by: and the memory will be far too busy to allow room for the disappointments and lamentations of the eye.

But of course the great characteristic of Johnson is neither love of London nor hatred of Presbyterians, nor any of the other things we have been talking about; it is the love and power of talk. We cannot estimate talk nearly as accurately as we estimate writing: so much that belongs to the word spoken is totally lost when it becomes a word recorded: the light in the eye, the brow raised in scorn or anger, the moving lips whose amusement or contempt is a picture before it is a sound, the infinitely varying weight and tone of the human voice: all that is gone or seen only {157} very darkly through the glass of description. But since the talk itself as written down and the manner of it as described are all we have to judge by: and since as long as we are alive and awake we cannot avoid judging the things and people that interest us, we inevitably form opinions about talkers as well as about writers: and the best opinion of those who know English is undoubtedly that Johnson is the greatest of all recorded talkers. The best of all is very possibly some obscure genius who _caret vate sacro_: but Johnson with the invaluable help of Boswell has beaten him and all the others. What is the essence of his superiority? Not wisdom or profundity certainly. There, of course, he would be immeasurably surpassed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of talkers. Of course his talk comes to us chiefly through the medium of a man of transcendent genius; and Plato may have transcended his master as well as other things. But on the whole all the evidence goes to show that the talk of Socrates was the force which set ideas in motion, which modified the whole subsequent moral and intellectual life of Greece and Rome, and through them of the world; in fact, that the spoken word of Socrates has played a greater {158} part in the world than any written word whatsoever, except the Gospels and the Koran, both themselves, it may be noted, the record of a spoken word greater than the written book. Beside anything of this kind Johnson sinks of course into entire insignificance. But as an artist in talk, that is a man who talked well for the pleasure of it, as an end in itself, and whose talk was heard gladly as a thing of triumph and delight, bringing with it its own justification, he probably far surpassed Socrates. If he, too, had got to his trial he probably would have been as scornful as Socrates of the judgment of popular opinion. But he never would have got there, not only because he was too conservative to deny the established divinities, but because he was so entertaining that everybody liked listening to him, whatever he denied or affirmed. Socrates, on the other hand, was evidently something of a bore, with a bore's unrelieved earnestness and inopportune persistence. His saying about "letting the talk lead us where it will," is an exact description of Johnson's practice, but nothing could be less like his own. He is always relentlessly guiding it towards a particular goal, from the path to which he will not have it for a moment diverted. Johnson, on the other hand, takes no thought whatever for the argumentative {159} morrow, never starts a subject, never sets out to prove anything. He talks as an artist paints, just for the joy of doing what he is conscious of doing well. The talk, like the picture, is its own sufficient reward.

The same sort of inferiority puts other famous talkers, Coleridge for instance, and Luther, below Johnson. They had too much purpose in their talk to be artists about it. The endless eloquence of the Highgate days, to say nothing about the greater days before Highgate, was a powerful element in that revival of a spiritual or metaphysical, as opposed to a merely sensational, philosophy which has been going on ever since. No such results can be attributed to Johnson's talk. But talk is one thing and preaching another: and the final criticism on Coleridge as a talker was given once for all in Charles Lamb's well-known answer to his friend's question: "Did you ever hear me preach, Charles?" "Never heard you do anything else." Luther again, though much more of a human being than Coleridge and apparently a livelier talker, was, after all, the leader of one of the greatest movements the world has ever seen, and like his disciple, Johnson's friend John Wesley, no doubt had no time to fold his legs, and have his talk out. Besides leaders of movements are necessarily somewhat narrow men. For {160} them there is only one thing of importance in the world, and their talk inevitably lacks variety. That, on the other hand, is one of the three great qualities in which Johnson's talk is supreme. Without often aiming at being instructive it is not only nearly always interesting but with an amazing variety of interest. The theologian, the moral philosopher, the casuist, the scholar, the politician, the economist, the lawyer, the clergyman, the schoolmaster, the author, above all the amateur of life, all find in it abundance of food for their own particular tastes. Each of them--notably for instance, the political economist--may sometimes find Johnson mistaken; not one will ever find him dull. On every subject he has something to say which makes the reader's mind move faster than before, if it be but in disagreement. Reynolds, who had heard plenty of good talkers, thought no one could ever have exceeded Johnson in the capacity of talking well on any subject that came uppermost. His mere knowledge and information were prodigious. If a stranger heard him talk about leather he would imagine him to have been bred a tanner, or if about the school philosophy, he would suppose he had spent his life in the study of Scotus and Aquinas. No doubt the variety was a long way from universality. Johnson was too {161} human for the dulness of omniscience. He had his dislikes as well as predilections. The least affected of men, he particularly disliked the then common fashion of dragging Greek and Roman history into conversation. He said that he "never desired to hear of the Punic War while he lived," and when Fox talked of Catiline he "thought of Tom Thumb." So when Boswell used an illustration from Roman manners he put him down with, "Why we know very little about the Romans."

Wide as the country he could cover was, he is always coming back to his favourite topic, which can only be described as life; how it is lived and how it ought to be; life as a spectacle and life as a moral and social problem. That by itself makes a sufficiently varied field for talk. But real as his variety was, it is still not the most remarkable thing about his talk. Where he surpassed all men was in the readiness with which he could put what he possessed to use. Speaking of the extraordinary quickness with which he "flew upon" any argument, Boswell once said to Sir Joshua, "he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with the sword; he is through your body in an instant." Sometimes he condescended to achieve this by mere rudeness, as once when, being hard pressed in an argument about the passions, he said, "Sir, {162} there is one passion I advise you to be careful of. When you have drunk that glass don't drink another." But the notion, which one hears occasionally expressed, that his principal argumentative weapon was rudeness is an entire mistake. Every impartial reader of Boswell will admit that the rudeness of his retorts where it exists is entirely swallowed up and forgotten in their aptness, ingenuity and wit. He was rude sometimes, no doubt; as, for instance, to the unfortunate young man who went to him for advice as to whether he should marry, and got for an answer, "Sir, I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding." But, human nature being what it is, sympathy for the victim is in such cases commonly extinguished in delighted admiration of the punishment. That will be still more whole-hearted when the victim is obviously a bore, like the gentleman who annoyed Johnson by persisting in spite of discouragement in an argument about the future life of brutes, till at last he gave the fatal opportunity by asking, "with a serious metaphysical pensive face," "But, really, sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't know what to think of him;" to which Johnson, "rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye," replied, "True, sir, and when we see a very foolish {163} fellow, we don't know what to think of _him_." Conversation would be a weariness of the flesh if one might never answer a fool according to his folly: and such answers are not to be called rude when the rudeness, if such there be, is only one ingredient in a compound of which the principal parts are humour and felicity. And, of course, even this measure of rudeness is only present occasionally, while the amazing exactness of felicity seldom fails. Who does not envy the readiness of mind which instantly provided him with the exact analogy which he used to crush Boswell's plea for the Methodist undergraduates expelled from Oxford in 1768? "But was it not hard, sir, to expel them, for I am told they were good beings?" "I believe they might be good beings: but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden." Note that, as usual with Johnson,--and that is the astonishing thing--the illustration, however far-fetched, is not merely humorous but exactly to the point. Plenty of men can compose such retorts at leisure: the unique Johnsonian gift was that he had them at his instant command. Or take one other illustration; a compliment this time, and one of the swiftest as well as happiest on record. Mrs. Siddons came to see him the {164} year before he died, and when she entered his room there was no chair for her. Another man would have been embarrassed by such a circumstance combined with such a visitor. Not so Johnson, who turned the difficulty into a triumph by simply saying with a smile, "Madam, you who so often occasion a want of seats to other people, will the more readily excuse the want of one yourself."

The third great quality of Johnson's talk is its style. His command of language was such as that he seems never to have been at a loss; never to have fumbled, or hesitated, or fallen back upon the second best word; he saw instantly the point he wanted to make, and was instantly ready with the best words in which to make it. It was said of him that all his talk could be written down and printed without a correction. That would, indeed, be double-edged praise to give to most men: but with Johnson it is absolutely true without being in the least damaging. For his talk is always talk, not writing or preaching; and it is always his own. That dictum of Horace which he and Wilkes discussed at the famous dinner at Dilly's, _Difficile est proprie communia dicere_, gives the exact praise of Johnson as a talker. There are few things more difficult than to put the truths of common sense in {165} such a way as to make them your own. To do so is one of the privileges of the masters of style. Few people have had more of it than Johnson. His prose, spoken or written, is altogether wanting in some of the greatest elements of style: it has no music, no mystery, no gift of suggestion, very little of the higher sort of imagination, nothing at all of what we have been taught to call the Celtic side of the English mind. But in this particular power of making the old new, and the commonplace individual, Johnson is among the great masters. And he shows it in his talk even more than in his writings. All that he says has that supreme mark of style; it cannot be translated without loss. The only indisputable proof of an author possessing style is his being unquotable except in his own words. If a paraphrase will do he may have learning, wisdom, profundity, what you will, but style he has not. Style is the expression of an individual, appearing once and only once in the world; it is Keats or Carlyle or Swinburne: it never has been and never will be anybody else.

Its presence in Johnson is painfully brought home to any one who tries to quote his good things without the assistance of a very accurate verbal memory. Even when he says such a thing as "This is wretched stuff, sir," the words manage to have style because {166} they express his convictions in a way which is his, and no one else's. This is taking it at its lowest, of course; when we go a little further and take a sentence like the famous remark about Ossian, "Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever if he would abandon his mind to it," the sting in the word "abandon" is the sort of thing which other people devise at their desks, but which Johnson has ready on his lips for immediate use. So again, he seems to have been able not only to find the most telling word in a moment, but to put his thought in the most telling shape. Many people then and since disliked and disapproved of Bolingbroke. But has there ever, then or at any other time, been a man who could find such language for his disapproval as Johnson? "Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death." It is at once as devastating as a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a smaller way, is his criticism of a smaller man. Dr. Adams, talking of Newton, Bishop of Bristol, whom Johnson disliked, once said, "I believe his _Dissertations on the Prophecies_ is his great {167} work," Johnson's instant answer was, "Why, sir, it is Tom's great work; but how far it is great, or how much of it is Tom's, are other questions." How mercilessly perfect! A thousand years of preparation could not have put it more shortly or more effectively. It both does the business in hand and gives expression to himself; nor is there in it a superfluous syllable; all of which is, again, another way of saying that it has style. And he did not need the stimulus of personal feeling to give him this energy of speech. The same gift is seen when he "_communia dicit_," when he is uttering some general reflection, the common wisdom of mankind. Molière said, "Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve." Johnson might have used the same words with a slightly different meaning. He excelled all men in recoining the gold of common sense in his own mind. All the world has said "humanum est errare": but the saying is newborn when Johnson clinches an argument with, "No, sir; a fallible being will fail somewhere." So on a hundred other commonplaces of discussion one may find him, all through Boswell's pages, adding that unanalysable something of himself in word or thought which makes the ancient dry bones stir again to life. "It is better to live rich than to die rich"; "no man is a hypocrite in his {168} pleasures"; "it is the business of a wise man to be happy"; "he that runs against time has an antagonist not subject to casualties"; "the great excellence of a writer is to put into his book as much as his book will hold"; "there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money"; "no woman is the worse for sense and knowledge"; but "supposing a wife to be of a studious or argumentative turn it would be very troublesome; for instance--if a woman should continually dwell upon the subject of the Arian heresy"; "a man should keep his friendship always in repair"; "to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life"; "every man is to take existence on the terms on which it is given to him"; "the man who talks to unburden his mind is the man to delight you"; "No, sir, let fanciful men do as they will, depend upon it it is difficult to disturb the system of life."

The man who thinks, as Taine thought, that sayings of this sort are mere commonplaces, will never understand Johnson: he may give up the attempt at once. The true commonplace is like the money of a spendthrift heir: his guineas come and go without his ever thinking for a moment where they came from or whither they go. But Johnson's commonplaces had been consciously earned and were {169} deliberately spent; he had made them himself, and when he handed them on to others he handed himself on with them. Taine may perhaps be excused; for it may require some knowledge of English to be sure of detecting the personal flavour Johnson gave to his generalizations: but the Englishman who misses it shows that he has mistaken the ornaments of literature for its essence and exposes himself to the same criticism as a man who cannot recognize a genius unless he is eccentric. Johnson could break out in conversation as well as in his books into a noble eloquence all his own; such a phrase as "poisoning the sources of eternal truth," rises spontaneously to his lips when his indignation is aroused. His free language disdained to be confined within any park palings of pedantry. Some of his most characteristic utterances owe their flavour to combining the language of the schools with the language of the tavern: as when he said of that strange inmate of his house, Miss Carmichael, "Poll is a stupid slut. I had some hopes of her at first: but when I talked to her tightly and closely I could make nothing of her; she was wiggle waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical." He was the very antipodes of a retailer of other men's thoughts in other men's words: {170} every chapter of Boswell brings its evidence of Johnsonian eloquence, of Johnsonian quaintness, raciness, and abundance, of the surprising flights of his fancy, of the inexhaustible ingenuity of his arguments and illustrations. No talk the world has ever heard is less like the talk of a commonplace man. Yet the supreme quality of it is not the ingenuity or the oddness or the wit: it is the thing Taine missed, the sovereign sanity of the Johnsonian common sense. Bagehot once said that it was the business of the English Prime Minister to have more common sense than any man. Johnson is the Prime Minister of literature; or perhaps, rather, of life. Not indeed for a time of revolution. For that we should have to go to some one less unwilling to "disturb the system of life." But for ordinary times, and in the vast majority of matters all times are ordinary, Johnson is the man. The Prime Minister is not the whole of the body politic, of course: and there are purposes for which we need people with more turn than Johnson for starting and pressing new ideas: but these will come best from below the gangway; and they will be none the worse in the end for having had to undergo the formidable criticism of a Prime Minister whose first article of faith is that the King's government must be carried on. The {171} slow-moving centrality of Johnson's mind, not to be diverted by any far-looking whimsies from the daily problem of how life was to be lived, is not the least important of the qualities that have given him his unique position in the respect and affection of the English race.