And Even Now
genuine merits of his friend’s work. And then suddenly--oh joy!--‘we
lighted,’ Moore records, ‘on the discovery that our host, in addition
to his sincere approbation of some of this book’s contents, had also the
motive of gratitude for standing by its author, as one of the poems was
a warm and, I need not add, well-deserved panegyric on himself. We were,
however’--the narrative has an added charm from Tom Moore’s demure care
not to offend or compromise the still-surviving Rogers--‘too far gone in
nonsense for even this eulogy, in which we both so heartily agreed, to
stop us. The opening line of the poem was, as well as I can recollect,
“When Rogers o’er this labour bent;” and Lord Byron undertook to read
it aloud;--but he found it impossible to get beyond the first two
words. Our laughter had now increased to such a pitch that nothing could
restrain it. Two or three times he began; but no sooner had the words
“When Rogers” passed his lips, than our fit burst out afresh,--till
even Mr. Rogers himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found
it impossible not to join us; and we were, at last, all three in such a
state of inextinguishable laughter, that, had the author himself been
of our party, I question much whether he could have resisted the
infection.’ The final fall and dissolution of Rogers, Rogers behaving
as badly as either of them, is all that was needed to give perfection
to this heart-warming scene. I like to think that on a certain night
in spring, year after year, three ghosts revisit that old room and
(without, I hope, inconvenience to Lord Northcliffe, who may happen
to be there) sit rocking and writhing in the grip of that old shared
rapture. Uncanny? Well, not more so than would have seemed to Byron and
Moore and Rogers the notion that more than a hundred years away from
them was some one joining in their laughter--as I do.
Alas, I cannot join in it more than gently. To imagine a scene, however
vividly, does not give us the sense of being, or even of having been,
present at it. Indeed, the greater the glow of the scene reflected, the
sharper is the pang of our realisation that we were not there, and of
our annoyance that we weren’t. Such a pang comes to me with special
force whenever my fancy posts itself outside the Temple’s gate in
Fleet Street, and there, at a late hour of the night of May 10th, 1773,
observes a gigantic old man laughing wildly, but having no one with him
to share and aggrandise his emotion. Not that he is alone; but the young
man beside him laughs only in politeness and is inwardly puzzled, even
shocked. Boswell has a keen, an exquisitely keen, scent for comedy,
for the fun that is latent in fine shades of character; but imaginative
burlesque, anything that borders on lovely nonsense, he was not formed
to savour. All the more does one revel in his account of what led up
to the moment when Johnson ‘to support himself, laid hold of one of the
posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud
that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple
Bar to Fleet Ditch.’
No evening ever had an unlikelier ending. The omens were all for gloom.
Johnson had gone to dine at General Paoli’s, but was so ill that he
had to leave before the meal was over. Later he managed to go to Mr.
Chambers’ rooms in the Temple. ‘He continued to be very ill’ there, but
gradually felt better, and ‘talked with a noble enthusiasm of keeping
up the representation of respectable families,’ and was great on ‘the
dignity and propriety of male succession.’ Among his listeners, as it
happened, was a gentleman for whom Mr. Chambers had that day drawn up
a will devising his estate to his three sisters. The news of this might
have been expected to make Johnson violent in wrath. But no, for some
reason he grew violent only in laughter, and insisted thenceforth on
calling that gentleman The Testator and chaffing him without mercy. ‘I
daresay he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won’t stay till he gets
home to his seat in the country, to produce this wonderful deed: he’ll
call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and after a suitable
preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that
he should not delay in making his will; and Here, Sir, will he say,
is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the
ablest lawyers in the kingdom; and he will read it to him. He believes
he has made this will; but he did not make it; you, Chambers, made it
for him. I hope you have had more conscience than to make him say “being
of sound understanding!” ha, ha, ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I’d
have his will turned into verse, like a ballad.’ These flights annoyed
Mr. Chambers, and are recorded by Boswell with the apology that he
wishes his readers to be ‘acquainted with the slightest occasional
characteristics of so eminent a man.’ Certainly, there is nothing
ridiculous in the fact of a man making a will. But this is the measure
of Johnson’s achievement. He had created gloriously much out of nothing
at all. There he sat, old and ailing and unencouraged by the company,
but soaring higher and higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and
still soaring and rejoicing after he had gone out into the night with
Boswell, till at last in Fleet Street his paroxysms were too much for
him and he could no more. Echoes of that huge laughter come ringing down
the ages. But is there also perhaps a note of sadness for us in them?
Johnson’s endless sociability came of his inherent melancholy: he could
not bear to be alone; and his very mirth was but a mode of escape from
the dark thoughts within him. Of these the thought of death was the most
dreadful to him, and the most insistent. He was for ever wondering how
death would come to him, and how he would acquit himself in the extreme
moment. A later but not less devoted Anglican, meditating on his own
end, wrote in his diary that ‘to die in church appears to be a great
euthanasia, but not,’ he quaintly and touchingly added, ‘at a time
to disturb worshippers.’ Both the sentiment here expressed and the
reservation drawn would have been as characteristic of Johnson as they
were of Gladstone. But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a
great euthanasia; and I think that for Johnson to have died thus,
that night in Fleet Street, would have been a grand ending to ‘a life
radically wretched.’ Well, he was destined to outlive another decade;
and, selfishly, who can wish such a life as his, or such a Life as
Boswell’s, one jot shorter?
Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk
who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in
history or in legend as having died of laughter. Strange, too, that not
to one of all the characters in romance has such an end been allotted.
Has it ever struck you what a chance Shakespeare missed when he was
finishing the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth? Falstaff was not the
man to stand cowed and bowed while the new young king lectured him and
cast him off. Little by little, as Hal proceeded in that portentous
allocution, the humour of the situation would have mastered old Sir
John. His face, blank with surprise at first, would presently have
glowed and widened, and his whole bulk have begun to quiver. Lest he
should miss one word, he would have mastered himself. But the final
words would have been the signal for release of all the roars pent up in
him; the welkin would have rung; the roars, belike, would have gradually
subsided in dreadful rumblings of more than utterable or conquerable
mirth. Thus and thus only might his life have been rounded off with
dramatic fitness, secundum ipsius naturam. He never should have been
left to babble of green fields and die ‘an it had been any christom
child.’
Falstaff is a triumph of comedic creation because we are kept laughing
equally at and with him. Nevertheless, if I had the choice of sitting
with him at the Boar’s Head or with Johnson at the Turk’s, I shouldn’t
hesitate for an instant. The agility of Falstaff’s mind gains much of
its effect by contrast with the massiveness of his body; but in contrast
with Johnson’s equal agility is Johnson’s moral as well as physical
bulk. His sallies ‘tell’ the more startlingly because of the noble
weight of character behind them: they are the better because he makes
them. In Falstaff there isn’t this final incongruity and element of
surprise. Falstaff is but a sublimated sample of ‘the funny man.’ We
cannot, therefore, laugh so greatly with him as with Johnson. (Nor
even at him; because we are not tickled so much by the weak points of
a character whose points are all weak ones; also because we have no
reverence trying to impose restraint upon us.) Still, Falstaff has
indubitably the power to convulse us. I don’t mean we ever are convulsed
in reading Henry the Fourth. No printed page, alas, can thrill us to
extremities of laughter. These are ours only if the mirthmaker be a
living man whose jests we hear as they come fresh from his own lips. All
I claim for Falstaff is that he would be able to convulse us if he were
alive and accessible. Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can
induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of
being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by
no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme
only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery.
Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be
able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and
that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious
things, one after another, without pause. He must have invention keeping
pace with utterance. He must be inexhaustible. Only so can he exhaust
us.
I have a friend whom I would praise. There are many other of my friends
to whom I am indebted for much laughter; but I do believe that if all of
them sent in their bills to-morrow and all of them overcharged me not a
little, the total of all those totals would be less appalling than that
which looms in my own vague estimate of what I owe to Comus. Comus I
call him here in observance of the line drawn between public and private
virtue, and in full knowledge that he would of all men be the least glad
to be quite personally thanked and laurelled in the market-place for the
hours he has made memorable among his cronies. No one is so diffident as
he, no one so self-postponing. Many people have met him again and
again without faintly suspecting ‘anything much’ in him. Many of his
acquaintances--friends, too--relatives, even--have lived and died in the
belief that he was quite ordinary. Thus is he the more greatly valued by
his cronies. Thus do we pride ourselves on possessing some curious right
quality to which alone he is responsive. But it would seem that either
this asset of ours or its effect on him is intermittent. He can be dull
and null enough with us sometimes--a mere asker of questions, or drawer
of comparisons between this and that brand of cigarettes, or full
expatiator on the merits of some new patent razor. A whole hour and more
may be wasted in such humdrum and darkness. And then--something will
have happened. There has come a spark in the murk; a flame now,
presage of a radiance: Comus has begun. His face is a great part of his
equipment. A cast of it might be somewhat akin to the comic mask of the
ancients; but no cast could be worthy of it; mobility is the essence of
it. It flickers and shifts in accord to the matter of his discourse; it
contracts and it expands; is there anything its elastic can’t express?
Comus would be eloquent even were he dumb. And he is mellifluous. His