|
This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, by the magnificent
Dorset, almost the only noble versifier in the Court of Charles the Second who
possessed talents for composition which were independent of the aid of a
coronet. Montague owed his elevation to the favor of Dorset, and imitated
through the whole course of his life the liberality to which he was himself so
greatly indebted. The Tory leaders, Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied
with the chiefs of the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But
soon after the accession of the House of Hanover a change took place. The
supreme power passed to a man who cared little for poetry or eloquence. The
importance of the House of Commons was constantly on the increase. The
Government was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary support much
of that patronage which had been employed in fostering literary merit; and
Walpole was by no means inclined to divert any part of the fund of corruption to
purposes which he considered as idle. He had eminent talents for governments and
for debate. But he had paid little attention to books, and felt little respect
for authors. One of the coarse jokes of his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury
Williams, was far more pleasing to him than Thomson's Seasons or Richardson's
Pamela. He had observed that some of the distinguished writers whom the favor of
Halifax had turned into statesmen had been mere encumbrances to their party,
dawdlers in office and mutes in Parliament. During the whole course of his
administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single man of genius. The
best writers of the age gave all their support to the Opposition, and
contributed to excite that discontent which, after plunging the nation into a
foolish and unjust war, overthrew the Minister to make room for men less able
and equally immoral. The Opposition could reward its eulogists with little more
than promises and caresses. St. James's would give nothing: Leicester House had
nothing to give.
Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary career, a writer had
little to hope from the patronage of powerful individuals. The patronage of the
public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid
by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of considerable talents and
unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day which was
passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered
ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvest was over, and the
period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be
summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a
scarecrow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified
to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench
prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and
they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their
aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To
lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out
of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted
by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub
Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind
St. Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a
glass-house in December, to die in an hospital, and to be buried in a parish
vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years
earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the
Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted
with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have
found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in
Paternoster Row.
As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of life has its
peculiar temptations. The literary character, assuredly, has always had its
share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these faults were now
superadded the faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is
precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of severe distress.
All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended with those of the
author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less
ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it
was almost certain to be abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full
third night or a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged,
unwashed poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the images
of which his mind had been haunted while he was sleeping amidst the cinders and
eating potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon
qualified him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life of Savage, of
Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and
waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or
wearing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking
Champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an
eating-house in Porridge island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not
afford to taste; they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and frugal life
with the same aversion which an old gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a
stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities of civilized
communities. They were as untamable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom,
as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to the offices of social man
than the unicorn could be trained to serve and abide by the crib. It was well if
they did not, like beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which
ministered to their necessities. To assist them was impossible; and the most
benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving relief which was
dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon as it had been received. If a sum
was bestowed on the wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might have
supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of
sensuality, and, before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was again
pestering all his acquaintance for two pence to get a plate of shin of beef at a
subterraneous cook shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses,
those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns. All order was
destroyed; all business was suspended. The most good-natured host began to
repent of his eagerness to serve a man of genius in distress when he heard his
guest roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning.
A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had been raised above poverty by
the active patronage which, in his youth, both the great political parties had
extended to his Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed, to the
best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the reward of mere literary
merit. One or two of the many poets who attached themselves to the Opposition,
Thomson in particular and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the
means of subsistence from their political friends. Richardson, like a man of
sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him, which his novels, admirable as they
are, would scarcely have done, But nothing could be more deplorable than the
state even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for subsistence on their
writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and Thomson, were certainly four of the
most distinguished persons that England produced during the eighteenth century.
It is well known that they were all four arrested for debt. Into calamities and
difficulties such as these Johnson plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that
time, till he was three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting
him; little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate information which we
possess respecting his proceedings and habits towards the close of his life. He
emerged at length from cock-lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of
the polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pension sufficient for
his wants had been conferred on him: and he came forth to astonish a generation
with which he had almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; but he had seen them as a
beggar. He now came among them as a companion. The demand for amusement and
instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually increasing.
The price of literary labor had risen; and those rising men of letters with whom
Johnson was henceforth to associate, were for the most part persons widely
different from those who had walked about with him all night in the streets for
want of a lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam
Smith, Beattie, Sir William Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most
distinguished writers of what may be called the second generation of the
Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace the
stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson first came up to
London, was common among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the
pressure of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted into the most
respectable society on an equal footing. They were men of quite a different
species from the dependants of Curll and Osborne.
Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past age, the last survivor
of the genuine race of Grub Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors
whose abject misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible
matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From nature he had received an uncouth
figure, a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper. The manner in which
the earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to his demeanor, and
even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilized
beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his
hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his
equally strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant
rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the
opinion of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a
complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we
possessed full information concerning those who shared his early hardships, we
should probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the
most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged.
He ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at St.
John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate as it was
natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed
the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits
of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not
to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he
tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead,
and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But
when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in
fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly
malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence which he
showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally
gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of
fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of
booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that
bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most
toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through
all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully
up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power,
he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his heart was
undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanor in society should be harsh and
despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but
munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh word inflicts upon a
delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of suffering which he could
scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl
from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of
wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their
peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded
vanity seemed to him ridiculous: and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even
for the pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp
misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think
that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He
was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for
grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were,
in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter
in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because The Good-natured
Man had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not good,
he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced
the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. People whose hearts had
been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that
could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by
the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her
lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the
wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have
sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental grievances
was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary
intercourse of society. He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand
could make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what
harm does it do to a man to call him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed,
to Mrs. Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness
has been well defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not
because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him
than to people who had never known what it was to live for four pence halfpenny
a day.
The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great powers
with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of his mind, we
should place him almost as high as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if
by the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below Boswell himself.
Where he was not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some
domineering passion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a
subject, he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to
skepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be
imposed upon by fallacies in argument, or by exaggerated statements of fact. But
if, while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some
childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well-managed nursery,
came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled away
under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had
lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at
its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when
he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole seacoast, and whose
might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions
of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon.
Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity the evidence for all
stories which were merely odd. But when they were not only odd but miraculous,
his severity relaxed. He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the
most credulous people begin to be skeptical. It is curious to observe, both in
his writings and in his conversation, the contrast between the disdainful manner
in which he rejects unauthenticated anecdotes, even when they are consistent
with the general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he mentions
the wildest stories relating to the invisible world. A man who told him of a
water-spout, or a meteoric stone, generally had the lie direct given him for his
pains. A man who told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully accomplished
was sure of a courteous hearing. "Johnson," observed Hogarth, "like King David,
says in his haste that all men are liars." "His incredulity," says Mrs. Thrale,
"amounted almost to disease." She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who gave
him an account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a poor Quaker who related
some strange circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the siege of
Gibraltar. "It is not so. It cannot be true. Don't tell that story again. You
cannot think how poor a figure you make in telling it." He once said,
half-testingly, we suppose, that for six months he refused to credit the fact of
the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still believed the extent of the calamity
to be greatly exaggerated. Yet he related with a grave face how old Mr. Cave of
St. John's Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost was something of a shadowy
being. He went himself on a ghost-hunt to Cock Lane, and was angry with John
Wesley for not following up another scent of the same kind with proper spirit
and perseverance. He rejects the Celtic genealogies and poems without the least
hesitation; yet he declares himself willing to believe the stories of the second
sight. If he had examined the claims of the Highland seers with half the
severity with which he sifted the evidence for the genuineness of Fingal, he
would, we suspect, have come away from Scotland with a mind fully made up. In
his Lives of the Poets, we find that he is unwilling to give credit to the
accounts of Lord Roscommon's early proficiency in his studies: but he tells with
great solemnity an absurd romance about some intelligence preternaturally
impressed on the mind of that nobleman. He avows himself to be in great doubt
about the truth of the story, and ends by warning his readers not wholly to
slight such impressions.
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and
enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all
bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke
like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of
the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble scheme of
government, tending to promote the happiness and to elevate the moral nature of
man. The horror which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale,
plum-porridge, mince-pies, and dancing-bears, excited his contempt. To the
arguments urged by some very worthy people against showy dress he replied with
admirable sense and spirit, "Let us not be found, when our Master calls us,
stripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our
souls and tongues. Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat
will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." Yet he was himself
under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho,
and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths
altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity. He has gravely
noted down in his diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee on
Good Friday. In Scotland, he thought it his duty to pass several months without
joining in public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been
ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbors was
somewhat singular. "Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man. I am afraid
he has not been in the inside of a church for many years: but he never passes a
church without pulling off his hat; this shows he has good principles." Spain
and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled assassins.
Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after
Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord,
might be an unprincipled villain, whose religious mummeries only aggravated his
guilt. But a man who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally
consecrated must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson
could easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat
as sinful, deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends of
revelation. But with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man
who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea
and butterless buns.
Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of patriotism. Nobody saw more
clearly the error of those who regarded liberty, not as a means, but as an end,
and who proposed to themselves, as the object of their pursuit, the prosperity
of the State: as distinct from the prosperity of the individuals who compose the
State. His calm and settled opinion seems to have been that forms of government
have little or no influence on the happiness of society. This opinion, erroneous
as it is, ought at least to have preserved him from all intemperance on
political questions. It did not, however, preserve him from the lowest,
fiercest, and most absurd extravagances of party spirit, from rants which, in
everything but the diction, resembled those of Squire Western. He was, as a
politician, half ice and half fire. On the side of his intellect he was a mere
Pococurante, far too apathetic about public affairs, far too skeptical as to the
good or evil tendency of any form of polity. His passions, on the contrary, were
violent even to slaying against all who leaned to Whiggish principles. The
well-known lines which he inserted in Goldsmith's Traveler express what seems to
have been his deliberate judgment:
How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which kings or laws can
cause or cure!
He had previously put expressions very similar into the mouth of Rasselas. It is
amusing to contrast these passages with the torrents of raving abuse which he
poured forth against the Long Parliament and the American Congress. In one of
the conversations reported by Boswell this inconsistency displays itself in the
most ludicrous manner.
"Sir Adam Ferguson," says Boswell, "suggested that luxury corrupts a people, and
destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON: 'Sir, that is all visionary. I would
not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another.
It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. Sir, the danger of the
abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented passing
his life as he pleases?' SIR ADAM: 'But, sir, in the British constitution it is
surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as to preserve a
balance against the Crown.' JOHNSON: 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why
all this childish jealousy of the power of the Crown? The Crown has not power
enough.'"
One of the old philosophers, Lord Bacon tells us, used to say that life and
death were just the same to him. "Why, then," said an objector, "do you not kill
yourself?" The philosopher answered, "Because it is just the same." If the
difference between two forms of government be not worth half a guinea, it is not
easy to see how Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or how the Crown can have
too little power. If the happiness of individuals is not affected by political
abuses, zeal for liberty is doubtless ridiculous. But zeal for monarchy must he
equally so. No person could have been more quick-sighted than Johnson to such a
contradiction as this in the logic of an antagonist.
The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, in his own time, regarded with
superstitious veneration, and, in our time, are generally treated with
indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments of a strong but enslaved
understanding. The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted fence
of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits, he displayed a vigor
and an activity which ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that
confined him.
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume
his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature. The
same inconsistency may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages. Those
writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in arguing on their wretched
data, that a modern reader is perpetually at a loss to comprehend how such minds
came by such data. Not a flaw in the superstructure of the theory which they are
rearing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are blind to the obvious unsoundness
of the foundation. It is the same with some eminent lawyers. Their legal
arguments are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and
the most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being
once admitted, the statute-book and the reports being once assumed as the
foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to be perfect masters of
logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates on which their whole system
rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that
system which they have passed their lives in studying, these very men often talk
the language of savages or of children. Those who have listened to a man of this
class in his own court, and who have witnessed the skill with which he analyses
and digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents which
at first sight seem contradictory, scarcely know him again when, a few hours
later, they hear him speaking on the other side of Westminster Hall in his
capacity of legislator. They can scarcely believe that the paltry quirks which
are faintly heard through a storm of coughing, and which do not impose on the
plainest country gentleman, can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous
intellect which had excited their admiration under the same roof, and on the
same day.
Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator. He
never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole code of
criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent
or an authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn from the
nature of things. He took it for granted that the kind of poetry which
flourished in his own time, which he had been accustomed to hear praised from
his childhood, and which he had himself written with success, was the best kind
of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it down as an
undeniable proposition that during the latter part of the seventeenth century,
and the earlier part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant
progress of improvement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope, had been, according
to him, the great reformers. He judged of all works of the imagination by the
standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to
have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the Aeneid a
greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he well might have thought so; for he
preferred Pope's Iliad to Homer's. He pronounced that, after Hoole's translation
of Tasso, Fairfax's would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine
old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of
Percy's fondness for them. Of the great original works of imagination which
appeared during his time, Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration. He
could see little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tristram
Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of Indolence he vouchsafed only a line of cold
commendation, of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed on the
Creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray was, in his
dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt
for the trash of Macpherson was indeed just; but it was, we suspect, just by
chance. He despised the Fingal for the very reason which led many men of genius
to admire it. He despised it, not because it was essentially commonplace, but
because it had a superficial air of originality.
Previous |
Critical And Historical Essays, Volume II
| Next
Critical And Historical Essays, Volume II, Thomas Babbington Macaulay,
1843 |
|
Add/Correct a Link