CHAPTER 8. LATER GEORGIAN PROSE

Samuel Johnson-Burke-Horace Walpole-Gibbon-Gilbert White

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–84)

(For other works see pp. 330, 384)

Life. The son of a struggling Jacobite bookseller, Johnson was born above his father's shop at Lichfield. He inherited a massive frame, scrofula, with some defect in sight and hearing, and hypochondria. After schooling at Lichfield and Stourbridge, he spent two years at home, read much, and made himself a Latin scholar. Sent to Pembroke College, Oxford, he left through poverty without a degree. His father dying, he became an usher at Market Bosworth, but after months of misery went to Birmingham as hack-writer for a publisher. In 1735 he married Mrs. Porter, a mercer's widow twenty years his senior. With her small means he set up a school at Edial (Garrick a pupil there), but it failed; and in 1737 he went with Garrick to London, little in his pocket but three acts of a tragedy. He got work from Cave of the Gentleman's Magazine, and next year some repute by his poem of London, imitated from Juvenal. He supplied Cave with "Debates in Parliament," largely fictitious, and lived with Savage, a Grub Street writer, who died in 1743, and whose life Johnson wrote. He was still wretchedly poor, but his wife now rejoined him. Now, too, he got to know Levett, a paupers' doctor and a pauper himself. In 1747 Johnson issued his Plan for an English Dictionary, on which he worked for seven years, living in Gough Square. In 1749 appeared his best poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, a sincere imitation of Juvenal, and his tragedy of Irene was produced by Garrick with small success. For two years, from March 1750, the Rambler appeared twice a week, all the numbers but eight his own. It ended just before the death of his beloved wife. In 1753 he wrote numbers in the Adventurer. In these years, although he was receiving pay for the Dictionary, he still lacked enough to live on. The publication of the Dictionary in 1755 increased the fame which he had got by the Rambler, and except in the circle of Walpole and Gray, he came to be recognized as "the great Cham of literature." He was still poor, but he gave shelter to Levett and Miss Williams, blind daughter of a deceased physician. Later they were joined by Mrs. Desmoulins, a penniless daughter of Johnson's godfather, and a Miss Carmichael. The ceaseless quarrels of this "seraglio," as he called it, never subdued their benefactor's patience.

For some years he seems to have lived by work for the Literary Magazine and by the Idler, a periodical of a hundred and three numbers, all but twelve his own. He had issued proposals for an edition of Shakespeare, and worked on it slowly.

In 1759 his mother died, and in the evenings of a week he wrote Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, to pay for her funeral. In 1762 he was nominated to a pension of

£300 a year, and from this time had sufficient for his wants and charities. In 1763 Boswell made his acquaintance.

In 1764 he seconded Sir Joshua Reynolds in founding the "Literary Club," Burke and Goldsmith being also among the original members. The Shakespeare

had lingered, but stimulated by a sneer of Churchill's, Johnson brought it out in 1765. He published no list of subscribers, for he had "lost all the names. and spent all the money." He must, however, have got something from the later editions. He had been obliged in 1759 to give up his house, but now took another in Johnson's Court. About the same time began a great change in his life through a friendship made with the Thrales. Thrale was a sensible man of forty, with a house and brewery in Southwark, for which borough he afterwards sat in Parliament. Mrs. Thrale, sixteen years younger, was lively and literary, and proud to welcome the great Cham. They gave Johnson, whose health was now failing, a room in their house, and he made them long visits, returning weekly from Streatham to give a Sunday dinner to his seraglio. He also travelled, visiting Oxford, Lichfield, his old friend Taylor at Ashbourne, Brighton with the Thrales, and other places.

Although the pension laid Johnson under no obligation, he chose to write four political pamphlets between 1770 and 1775, while he also revised the Dictionary. In 1773 he was induced by Boswell to go a tour with him to Scotland and the Hebrides, no easy journey in those days. In 1775, for the first and last time, he visited the Continent, spending two months in France with the Thrales, and noting that "the great live very magnificently but the rest very miserably."

In 1777 he was engaged by the booksellers to write the Lives of the Poets, the four first volumes appearing in 1779, and the six last in 1781. The death of Thrale in this year was a heavy blow. For a time he still visited Streatham, but in 1782 Mrs. Thrale broke up her household, partly because the house was too large for her means, more because she was moving towards a marriage with Piozzi, an Italian of good lineage who taught music. As Johnson objected to the husband for his calling, his foreign birth, and his Roman religion, the friendship of twenty years was broken. Allowance must be made for a dying man. In 1782 he had felt deeply the death of Levett, and next year he had a stroke of the palsy, followed by other painful ailments. He had all the attention that skill and friendship could confer, and, much as he had feared death, he met it with calmness at the last.

Works.- Besides the works mentioned above, Johnson wrote Lives of Sarpi (1738), Boerhaave (1739), Blake, Drake, Barretier (1740), Burmann, Sydenham (1742), Cheynel (1751), Cave (1754), Sir Thomas Browne (1756), Ascham (1763); also The Vision of Theodore the Hermit (1748), Character of Collins (1763); prologues on the opening of Drury Lane Theatre (1747), for the benefit of Milton's granddaughter (1750), for The Good-Natured Man (1768), and other occasional verses and miscellaneous pieces.

Character. Johnson was a man of high principle and some passion, of unswerving moral and physical courage, of genuine affection and great tenderness, of honest

pride and sturdy independence, and of strong common-sense. His devoutness he ascribed to Law's Serious Call. Rough in his manners, and dubbed "Ursa Major," he had, as Goldsmith said, "nothing of the bear but his skin," and to be poor and honest was a sufficient recommendation to him. He loved good living, but he could be long abstemious. Naturally dilatory, he wrote his best poem and most of his best prose at a white heat. He revelled in argument for its own sake, and as a boy "used always to choose the wrong side of a debate." A sturdy faith in his own calling

made him say that "the chief glory of every people arises from its authors." He was "radically wretched," but his wretchedness had little connection with his real misfortunes, and allowed intervals of great enjoyment. His mind, but for some natural and temporary bitterness, soared above neglect, poverty, and failure. Like his strange dread of death, his unhappiness was constitutional and interlaced with his vein of superstition. It follows that it was incurable. Aware of some at least of his own human weaknesses, he could tolerate, if a man's principles were but right, much laxity in his practice. Homo fuit.

Characteristics. In criticism Johnson was a man of his age, and applied to poetry

the tests of reason and common-sense. He is at his best on the school of Dryden and Pope, at his worst in his depreciation of Virgil's Eclogues (in the Adventurer), of Milton's shorter poems, and of Gray's Odes. His work on Shakespeare is intermediate, but his textual emendations of Macbeth are not acceptable. Though called a philosopher, he was such only in a popular sense. He had no metaphysics, and regarded Hume merely as an infidel. As a strong Church and King man he had little tolerance for any divergence from orthodoxy, the less that he was half aware of some difficulties in his own attitude. Thus he said, "Every man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy." In his Dictionary he would not cite the Arian Clarke, though on his deathbed he pressed Brocklesby to read him, as "fullest on the propitiatory sacrifice"; and he said that the nonconformist Watts "never wrote but for a good purpose." For political liberty in Hampden's sense he had little regard, and he called Burke "a bottomless Whig." Yet, even if his sympathy with the downtrodden majority in Ireland was partly due to his hatred of Whigs, he could take a view pleasing to neither party. At Oxford he gave as a toast: "The next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies;" and his opposition to the slave trade made the Tory Boswell glad that we had a House of Lords which would prevent its abolition. His assault on the American rising came as much from his hatred of slave-owners as from his politics. Perhaps, had he lived to see the beginnings of the French Revolution, he would have disagreed with Burke. He had many English prejudices, but here his mind was free.

To Johnson life is a sphere of duties, but gives no prospect of happiness. This view he expresses in the Rambler and Rasselas. The papers, sometimes wrongly called sermons, in fact describe the career of man as it seemed to their author. Rasselas, contemporary with Voltaire's Candide and like it in theme, differs much in tone. It is significant that the last chapter is headed "The conclusion in which nothing is concluded." Such is life, and it cannot be altered.

The Dictionary is a wonderful work for one man to have achieved. It is not historical, for philology and etymology were not yet sciences, and its quotations hardly cover two centuries. Some of his definitions have a purposely political bias, some are intentionally humorous. Its excellence lies in the notes of current usages and the choice of illustrative passages.

The Lives of the Poets show Johnson at his best. Exceptions are the life of Milton, vitiated by political bias, and the meagre and unsympathetic account of Gray. He made few minute researches, writing freely from his gathered knowledge and criticizing after his own principles. Even the life of Pope, though on Pope much has since come to light, must still be read.

The Journey to the Hebrides, less interesting than Boswell's, shows that Johnson travelled rather to study men than to admire scenery. None of his writings is more characteristic, and in none are there finer specimens of his stately prose.