Boswell's Life of Johnson
Johnson's prejudice, by applying to him the epithet of a BEAR, let me
impress upon my readers a just and happy saying of my friend Goldsmith,
who knew him well: 'Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness in his manner;
but no man alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but
his skin.'
1769: AETAT. 60.]--I came to London in the autumn, and having informed
him that I was going to be married in a few months, I wished to have as
much of his conversation as I could before engaging in a state of life
which would probably keep me more in Scotland, and prevent me seeing
him so often as when I was a single man; but I found he was at
Brighthelmstone with Mr. and Mrs. Thrale.
After his return to town, we met frequently, and I continued the
practice of making notes of his conversation, though not with so much
assiduity as I wish I had done. At this time, indeed, I had a sufficient
excuse for not being able to appropriate so much time to my Journal;
for General Paoli, after Corsica had been overpowered by the monarchy
of France, was now no longer at the head of his brave countrymen, but
having with difficulty escaped from his native island, had sought an
asylum in Great-Britain; and it was my duty, as well as my pleasure, to
attend much upon him. Such particulars of Johnson's conversation at this
period as I have committed to writing, I shall here introduce, without
any strict attention to methodical arrangement. Sometimes short notes of
different days shall be blended together, and sometimes a day may seem
important enough to be separately distinguished.
He said, he would not have Sunday kept with rigid severity and gloom,
but with a gravity and simplicity of behaviour.
I told him that David Hume had made a short collection of Scotticisms.
'I wonder, (said Johnson,) that HE should find them.'
On the 30th of September we dined together at the Mitre. I attempted
to argue for the superior happiness of the savage life, upon the usual
fanciful topicks. JOHNSON. 'Sir, there can be nothing more false. The
savages have no bodily advantages beyond those of civilised men. They
have not better health; and as to care or mental uneasiness, they are
not above it, but below it, like bears. No, Sir; you are not to talk
such paradox: let me have no more on't. It cannot entertain, far less
can it instruct. Lord Monboddo, one of your Scotch Judges, talked a
great deal of such nonsense. I suffered HIM; but I will not suffer
YOU.'--BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, does not Rousseau talk such nonsense?'
JOHNSON. 'True, Sir, but Rousseau KNOWS he is talking nonsense, and
laughs at the world for staring at him.' BOSWELL. 'How so, Sir?'
JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he
is talking nonsense. But I am AFRAID, (chuckling and laughing,) Monboddo
does NOT know that he is talking nonsense.' BOSWELL. 'Is it wrong then,
Sir, to affect singularity, in order to make people stare?' JOHNSON.
'Yes, if you do it by propagating errour: and, indeed, it is wrong in
any way. There is in human nature a general inclination to make people
stare; and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure
himself. If you wish to make people stare by doing better than others,
why, make them stare till they stare their eyes out. But consider how
easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going
into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in The
Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his
extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap.
Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the
advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run after him.'
Talking of a London life, he said, 'The happiness of London is not to be
conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there
is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from
where we now sit, than in all the rest of the kingdom.' BOSWELL. 'The
only disadvantage is the great distance at which people live from one
another.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; but that is occasioned by the largeness of
it, which is the cause of all the other advantages.' BOSWELL. 'Sometimes
I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desart.' JOHNSON.
'Sir, you have desart enough in Scotland.'
Although I had promised myself a great deal of instructive conversation
with him on the conduct of the married state, of which I had then a near
prospect, he did not say much upon that topick. Mr. Seward heard him
once say, that 'a man has a very bad chance for happiness in that
state, unless he marries a woman of very strong and fixed principles of
religion.' He maintained to me, contrary to the common notion, that a
woman would not be the worse wife for being learned; in which, from all
that I have observed of Artemisias, I humbly differed from him.
When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a second
time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, 'Not at all,
Sir. On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be concluded
that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a
second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by shewing that
she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second
time.' So ingenious a turn did he give to this delicate question. And
yet, on another occasion, he owned that he once had almost asked a
promise of Mrs. Johnson that she would not marry again, but had checked
himself. Indeed, I cannot help thinking, that in his case the request
would have been unreasonable; for if Mrs. Johnson forgot, or thought it
no injury to the memory of her first love,--the husband of her youth and
the father of her children,--to make a second marriage, why should
she be precluded from a third, should she be so inclined? In Johnson's
persevering fond appropriation of his Tetty, even after her decease,
he seems totally to have overlooked the prior claim of the honest
Birmingham trader. I presume that her having been married before had, at
times, given him some uneasiness; for I remember his observing upon
the marriage of one of our common friends, 'He has done a very foolish
thing, Sir; he has married a widow, when he might have had a maid.'
We drank tea with Mrs. Williams. I had last year the pleasure of seeing
Mrs. Thrale at Dr. Johnson's one morning, and had conversation enough
with her to admire her talents, and to shew her that I was as Johnsonian
as herself. Dr. Johnson had probably been kind enough to speak well of
me, for this evening he delivered me a very polite card from Mr. Thrale
and her, inviting me to Streatham.
On the 6th of October I complied with this obliging invitation, and
found, at an elegant villa, six miles from town, every circumstance that
can make society pleasing. Johnson, though quite at home, was yet looked
up to with an awe, tempered by affection, and seemed to be equally the
care of his host and hostess. I rejoiced at seeing him so happy.
He played off his wit against Scotland with a good humoured pleasantry,
which gave me, though no bigot to national prejudices, an opportunity
for a little contest with him. I having said that England was obliged
to us for gardeners, almost all their good gardeners being Scotchmen.
JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, that is because gardening is much more necessary
amongst you than with us, which makes so many of your people learn
it. It is ALL gardening with you. Things which grow wild here, must be
cultivated with great care in Scotland. Pray now (throwing himself back
in his chair, and laughing,) are you ever able to bring the SLOE to
perfection?'
I boasted that we had the honour of being the first to abolish the
unhospitable, troublesome, and ungracious custom of giving vails to
servants. JOHNSON. 'Sir, you abolished vails, because you were too poor
to be able to give them.'
Mrs. Thrale disputed with him on the merit of Prior. He attacked him
powerfully; said he wrote of love like a man who had never felt it:
his love verses were college verses; and he repeated the song 'Alexis
shunn'd his fellow swains,' &c., in so ludicrous a manner, as to make
us all wonder how any one could have been pleased with such fantastical
stuff. Mrs. Thrale stood to her gun with great courage, in defence of
amorous ditties, which Johnson despised, till he at last silenced her
by saying, 'My dear Lady, talk no more of this. Nonsense can be defended
but by nonsense.'
Mrs. Thrale then praised Garrick's talent for light gay poetry; and, as
a specimen, repeated his song in Florizel and Perdita, and dwelt with
peculiar pleasure on this line:
'I'd smile with the simple, and feed with the poor.'
JOHNSON. 'Nay, my dear Lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with
the simple;--What folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that
can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise, and feed with the
rich.' I repeated this sally to Garrick, and wondered to find his
sensibility as a writer not a little irritated by it. To sooth him, I
observed, that Johnson spared none of us; and I quoted the passage in
Horace, in which he compares one who attacks his friends for the sake of
a laugh, to a pushing ox, that is marked by a bunch of hay put upon his
horns: 'foenum habet in cornu.' 'Ay, (said Garrick vehemently,) he has a
whole MOW of it.'
He would not allow much merit to Whitefield's oratory. 'His popularity,
Sir, (said be,) is chiefly owing to the peculiarity of his manner. He
would be followed by crowds were he to wear a night-cap in the pulpit,
or were he to preach from a tree.'
On the evening of October 10, I presented Dr. Johnson to General Paoli.
I had greatly wished that two men, for whom I had the highest esteem,
should meet. They met with a manly ease, mutually conscious of their
own abilities, and of the abilities of each other. The General spoke
Italian, and Dr. Johnson English, and understood one another very well,
with a little aid of interpretation from me, in which I compared myself
to an isthmus which joins two great continents. Upon Johnson's approach,
the General said, 'From what I have read of your works, Sir, and from
what Mr. Boswell has told me of you, I have long held you in great
veneration.' The General talked of languages being formed on the
particular notions and manners of a people, without knowing which, we
cannot know the language. We may know the direct signification of single
words; but by these no beauty of expression, no sally of genius, no wit
is conveyed to the mind. All this must be by allusion to other ideas.
'Sir, (said Johnson,) you talk of language, as if you had never done
any thing else but study it, instead of governing a nation.' The
General said, 'Questo e un troppo gran complimento;' this is too great
a compliment. Johnson answered, 'I should have thought so, Sir, if I
had not heard you talk.' The General asked him, what he thought of the
spirit of infidelity which was so prevalent. JOHNSON. 'Sir, this gloom
of infidelity, I hope, is only a transient cloud passing through the
hemisphere, which will soon be dissipated, and the sun break forth with
his usual splendour.' 'You think then, (said the General,) that they
will change their principles like their clothes.' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, if
they bestow no more thought on principles than on dress, it must be so.'
The General said, that 'a great part of the fashionable infidelity was
owing to a desire of shewing courage. Men who have no opportunities of
shewing it as to things in this life, take death and futurity as objects
on which to display it.' JOHNSON. 'That is mighty foolish affectation.
Fear is one of the passions of human nature, of which it is impossible