English Literature
manhood," as Carlyle called him, and as such, men loved and honored
him.[194]
Life of Johnson. Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709. He
was the son of a small bookseller, a poor man, but intelligent and fond of
literature, as booksellers invariably were in the good days when every town
had its bookshop. From his childhood Johnson had to struggle against
physical deformity and disease and the consequent disinclination to hard
work. He prepared for the university, partly in the schools, but largely by
omnivorous reading in his father's shop, and when he entered Oxford he had
read more classical authors than had most of the graduates. Before
finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his
poverty, and at once he began his long struggle as a hack writer to earn
his living.
At twenty-five years he married a woman old enough to be his mother,--a
genuine love match, he called it,--and with her dowry of £800 they started
a private school together, which was a dismal failure. Then, without money
or influential friends, he left his home and wife in Lichfield and tramped
to London, accompanied only by David Garrick, afterwards the famous actor,
who had been one of his pupils. Here, led by old associations, Johnson made
himself known to the booksellers, and now and then earned a penny by
writing prefaces, reviews, and translations.
It was a dog's life, indeed, that he led there with his literary brethren.
Many of the writers of the day, who are ridiculed in Pope's heartless
_Dunciad_, having no wealthy patrons to support them, lived largely in the
streets and taverns, sleeping on an ash heap or under a wharf, like rats;
glad of a crust, and happy over a single meal which enabled them to work
for a while without the reminder of hunger. A few favored ones lived in
wretched lodgings in Grub Street, which has since become a synonym for the
fortunes of struggling writers.[195] Often, Johnson tells us, he walked the
streets all night long, in dreary weather, when it was too cold to sleep,
without food or shelter. But he wrote steadily for the booksellers and for
the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and presently he became known in London and
received enough work to earn a bare living.
The works which occasioned this small success were his poem, "London," and
his _Life of the Poet Savage_, a wretched life, at best, which were perhaps
better left without a biographer. But his success was genuine, though
small, and presently the booksellers of London are coming to him to ask him
to write a dictionary of the English language. It was an enormous work,
taking nearly eight years of his time, and long before he had finished it
he had eaten up the money which he received for his labor. In the leisure
intervals of this work he wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and other
poems, and finished his classic tragedy of _Irene_.
Led by the great success of the _Spectator_, Johnson started two magazines,
_The Rambler_ (1750--1752) and _The Idler_ (1758--1760). Later the
_Rambler_ essays were published in book form and ran rapidly through ten
editions; but the financial returns were small, and Johnson spent a large
part of his earnings in charity. When his mother died, in 1759, Johnson,
although one of the best known men in London, had no money, and hurriedly
finished _Rasselas_, his only romance, in order, it is said, to pay for his
mother's burial.
It was not till 1762, when Johnson was fifty-three years old, that his
literary labors were rewarded in the usual way by royalty, and he received
from George III a yearly pension of three hundred pounds. Then began a
little sunshine in his life. With Joshua Reynolds, the artist, he founded
the famous Literary Club, of which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Gibbon, Goldsmith, and
indeed all the great literary men and politicians of the time, were
members. This is the period of Johnson's famous conversations, which were
caught in minutest detail by Boswell and given to the world. His idea of
conversation, as shown in a hundred places in Boswell, is to overcome your
adversary at any cost; to knock him down by arguments, or, when these fail,
by personal ridicule; to dogmatize on every possible question, pronounce a
few oracles, and then desist with the air of victory. Concerning the
philosopher Hume's view of death he says: "Sir, if he really thinks so, his
perceptions are disturbed, he is mad. If he does not think so, he lies."
Exit opposition. There is nothing more to be said. Curiously enough, it is
often the palpable blunders of these monologues that now attract us, as if
we were enjoying a good joke at the dictator's expense. Once a lady asked
him, "Dr. Johnson, why did you define _pastern_ as the knee of a horse?"
"Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance," thundered the great authority.
When seventy years of age, Johnson was visited by several booksellers of
the city, who were about to bring out a new edition of the English poets,
and who wanted Johnson, as the leading literary man of London, to write the
prefaces to the several volumes. The result was his _Lives of the Poets_,
as it is now known, and this is his last literary work. He died in his poor
Fleet Street house, in 1784, and was buried among England's honored poets
in Westminster Abbey.
JOHNSON'S WORKS. "A book," says Dr. Johnson, "should help us either to
enjoy life or to endure it." Judged by this standard, one is puzzled what
to recommend among Johnson's numerous books. The two things which belong
among the things "worthy to be remembered" are his _Dictionary_ and his
_Lives of the Poets_, though both these are valuable, not as literature,
but rather as a study of literature. The _Dictionary_, as the first
ambitious attempt at an English lexicon, is extremely valuable,
notwithstanding the fact that his derivations are often faulty, and that he
frequently exercises his humor or prejudice in his curious definitions. In
defining "oats," for example, as a grain given in England to horses and in
Scotland to the people, he indulges his prejudice against the Scotch, whom
he never understood, just as, in his definition of "pension," he takes
occasion to rap the writers who had flattered their patrons since the days
of Elizabeth; though he afterwards accepted a comfortable pension for
himself. With characteristic honesty he refused to alter his definition in
subsequent editions of the _Dictionary_.
The _Lives of the Poets_ are the simplest and most readable of his literary
works. For ten years before beginning these biographies he had given
himself up to conversation, and the ponderous style of his _Rambler_ essays
here gives way to a lighter and more natural expression. As criticisms they
are often misleading, giving praise to artificial poets, like Cowley and
Pope, and doing scant justice or abundant injustice to nobler poets like
Gray and Milton; and they are not to be compared with those found in Thomas
Warton's _History of English Poetry_, which was published in the same
generation. As biographies, however, they are excellent reading, and we owe
to them some of our best known pictures of the early English poets.
Of Johnson's poems the reader will have enough if he glance over "The
Vanity of Human Wishes." His only story, _Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia_,
is a matter of rhetoric rather than of romance, but is interesting still to
the reader who wants to hear Johnson's personal views of society,
philosophy, and religion. Any one of his _Essays_, like that on "Reading,"
or "The Pernicious Effects of Revery," will be enough to acquaint the
reader with the Johnsonese style, which was once much admired and copied by
orators, but which happily has been replaced by a more natural way of
speaking. Most of his works, it must be confessed, are rather tiresome. It
is not to his books, but rather to the picture of the man himself, as given
by Boswell, that Johnson owes his great place in our literature.
BOSWELL'S "LIFE OF JOHNSON"
In James Boswell (1740-1795) we have another extraordinary figure,--a
shallow little Scotch barrister, who trots about like a dog at the heels of
his big master, frantic at a caress and groveling at a cuff, and abundantly
contented if only he can be near him and record his oracles. All his life
long Boswell's one ambition seems to have been to shine in the reflected
glory of great men, and his chief task to record their sayings and doings.
When he came to London, at twenty-two years of age, Johnson, then at the
beginning of his great fame, was to this insatiable little glory-seeker
like a Silver Doctor to a hungry trout. He sought an introduction as a man
seeks gold, haunted every place where Johnson declaimed, until in Davies's
bookstore the supreme opportunity came. This is his record of the great
event:
I was much agitated [says Boswell] and recollecting his prejudice against
the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell him
where I come from." "From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson,"
said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."... "That,
sir" [cried Johnson], "I find is what a very great many of your countrymen
cannot help." This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down
I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come
next.
Then for several years, with a persistency that no rebuffs could abate, and
with a thick skin that no amount of ridicule could render sensitive, he
follows Johnson; forces his way into the Literary Club, where he is not
welcome, in order to be near his idol; carries him off on a visit to the
Hebrides; talks with him on every possible occasion; and, when he is not
invited to a feast, waits outside the house or tavern in order to walk home
with his master in the thick fog of the early morning. And the moment the
oracle is out of sight and in bed, Boswell patters home to record in detail
all that he has seen and heard. It is to his minute record that we owe our
only perfect picture of a great man; all his vanity as well as his
greatness, his prejudices, superstitions, and even the details of his
personal appearance:
There is the gigantic body, the huge face seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched
foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see
the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form
rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What
then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the
question, sir!"[196]
To Boswell's record we are indebted also for our knowledge of those famous
conversations, those wordy, knockdown battles, which made Johnson famous in
his time and which still move us to wonder. Here is a specimen
conversation, taken almost at random from a hundred such in Boswell's
incomparable biography. After listening to Johnson's prejudice against
Scotland, and his dogmatic utterances on Voltaire, Robertson, and twenty
others, an unfortunate theorist brings up a recent essay on the possible
future life of brutes, quoting some possible authority from the sacred
scriptures:
Johnson, who did not like to hear anything concerning a future state which
was not authorized by the regular canons of orthodoxy, discouraged this
talk; and being offended at its continuation, he watched an opportunity to
give the gentleman a blow of reprehension. So when the poor speculatist,
with a serious, metaphysical, pensive face, addressed him, "But really,
sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't know what to think of him";
Johnson, rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye, turned
quickly round and replied, "True, sir; and when we see a very _foolish