SAMUEL JOHNSON.
MR. LESLIE STEPHEN'S interesting and graphic ac- count of Johnson, in Mr. John Morley's new series of "English Men of Letters,"* will make that great man's figure familiar to many who would not otherwise recognise its singular interest for the present day. Most men of letters, like most men of science, have gained their reputation by their power of entering into and understanding that which was outside of them and different from them. Johnson gained his reputation by his unrivalled power of concentrating his own forces, of defending himself against the aggression of outer influences,—and striking a light in the process. Of course John- son was a man of very strong general understanding. Had he not been so, he could not have commanded the respect he did, for those who do not in a considerable degree understand others, will never be themselves understood. Still, admit- ting freely that it both takes a man of some character as well as insight, to understand distinctly what is beyond his own sphere, and a man of some insight as well as char- acter, to teach others to understand distinctly what is within himself, it is clear that Johnson's genius lay in the latter, not in the former direction,—in maintaining himself against the encroachments of the world, and in interpreting him- self to that world, not in enlarging materially the world's sympathies and horizons, except so far as he taught them to include himself. The best things he did of any kind were all expressions of himself. His poems,—" London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes,"—many parts even of his biographies, like his "Life of Savage,"—almost all his moral essays of any value, and above everything, his brilliant conversation, were all shadows or reflections of that large and dictatorial, but in the main, benign character which he has stamped for us on all• he did. Of his companions and contemporaries, all but him- self won their fame by entering into something different from themselves,—Burke by his political sagacity, Garrick by imitating men and manners, Goldsmith by reflecting them, Reynolds by painting them, Boswell by devoting his whole soul to the faithful portraiture of Johnson. But Johnson became great by concentrating his power in himself, though in no selfish fashion, for he concentrated it even more vigorously in his un- selfish tastes,—for example, in the home which he so generously and eccentrically made for so many unattractive dependents,— than in the mere self-assertion of his impressions and his con- victions. What made Johnson loom so large in the world was this moral concentrativeness, this incapacity for ceasing to be him- self, and becoming something different in deference to either authority or influence. His character was one the surface of which was safe against rust, or any other moral encroachment by things without. And it is his capacity for not only making this visible, but for making it visible by a sort of electric-shock of surprise, which announces his genius for repelling any threatening influence, that constitutes the essence of his humour. Some of his finest sayings are concessions in form to his opponent, while in reality they reassert with far greater strength his original position. They are, in fact, fortifications of his personal paradox, instead of modifications of it,—the fortification being all the more telling because it took the form of an apparent concession. Thus when he said of the poet Gray, " He was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere,—he was dull in a new way, and that made people think him great," his concession of novelty to Gray was, in fact, an aggravation of his attack upon him. And
* Macmillan and Co.
still more effective was his attack on Gray's friend, Mason: When Boswell said that there were good passages in Mason's " Elfrida," Johnson replied that " there were now and then some good imitations of Milton's bad manner." Or take his saying of Sheridan, " Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull ; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in nature." Of course you are not prepared to find that Sheridan's improvements on " nature" were all in the direction of the dullness of which John- son had been accusing him. Johnson's humour, indeed, generally consists in using the forms of speech appropriate to giving way, just as he puts the crown on his self-assertion, as in the celebrated case of his attack on Scotch scenery, in answer to the Scotchman's praise of the " noble, wild prospects " to be found in Scotland :— " I believe, Sir, you have a great many. Norway, too, has noble, wild prospects, and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble, wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high-road that leads him to England."
But this curious power of Johnson's of strengthening himself in his position the moment it was threatened, was the secret of a great deal that was morally grand in him, as well as of a great deal of his humour. His great saying to Boswell, on which Carlyle lays so much stress, that he should clear his mind of cant, and not affect a depression about public affairs which he did not really feel, was, in fact, a protest against the demands which con- ventionalism makes on men's sincerity. Distinctly aware, as he was, that the state of public affairs seldom or never made him really un- happy, he resented the habit of speaking as if it did, as an act of treachery to his own self-respect. So nothing irritated him like a sentimental eulogy on " a state of nature," because it demanded from him an admission that one of the strongest and soundest of his own instincts was utterly untrustworthy. When somebody had told him with admiration of the soliloquy of an officer who lived in the wilds of America,—" Here am I free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of nature, with the Indian woman by my side, and this gun, with which I can procure food when I want it ! What more can be desired for human happiness ? "—Johnson, well aware that what he, and indeed what every sane man, valued most was the product of intellectual labour and civilisation, retorted, " Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff. It is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, Here am I, with this cow and this grass ; what being can enjoy greater felicity ?" Nor would Johnson ever allow himself to be betrayed into pretending to approve what he hated, simply because such approval would have fitted in with other prejudices and tastes that were very deep in him. High Tory as he was, when any one defended slavery he would burst out into vehement attacks. On one occasion, says Mr. Stephen, he gave as a toast to some " very grave men" at Oxford, " Here's to the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies ;" and he was accustomed to ask, " How is it that we always have the loudest yelps for liberty amongst the drivers of negroes ?" Indeed, the hearty old man would have been a most valuable ally during the American Civil War of seventeen years back, when English society got quite sentimental about slave-drivers who were yelping their loudest for liberty to drive slaves.
But no matter what the subject was, nor what was to be the logical or analogical consequence of his confession of his own belief,—whether he were to be called cold-hearted for confessing (perhaps mistakenly) that he should not eat one bit of plum- pudding the less if an acquaintance of his were found guilty of a crime and condemned to die,—or were to be branded as grossly inconsistent for admiring such a " bottomless Whig" as Burke,—or were to be taxed with ridiculing Garrick one day as a mere trick-playing monkey, and defending him vigorously the next when attacked by some one else,—Johnson was always de- termined to be himself, and always was himself. He was himself in collecting round him so strange a household of companions, who would have been miserable but for his generosity, and were to some extent miserable, and the causes of misery, in spite of his generosity, and in remaining true to them in spite of their taunts and complaints against him. He was himself, in spurning the patronage of Chesterfield when he found out its utter insincerity ; himself, in his strange acts of occasional penance ; in his loudly and even scornfully avowed value for his dinner,—and for a good dinner ; himself, in his strange and tender acts of humanity to the lower animals ; himself, in his knock-down blows to his conversational companions ; himself, in his curious superstitions, and in his not leas curious scepticisms. For a long time he disbelieved, as Mr Stephen notes, the earthquake which destroyed Lisbon, though he believed in the Cock Lane Ghost. But whatever he did or declined to do, whatever he believed or rejected, he was always the first to avow it, and to assert himself as not only not ashamed, but eager to avow it, even though it were an act which he thought a blot on his own past life. It was this in- domitable self-respect and dignity, in the highest sense, which gave not only much of the freshness and force to his conversation, but the grandeur to his life. His devotion to his wife and to his wife's memory,—she was said by those who knew her to have been an affected woman, who painted herself, and took on her all the airs and graces of an elderly beauty, though she was fifteen years older than he was,—his courage in carrying home a half-dying woman of bad character whom he found in the streets, and did his best to care and to reform,—his incessant, though rough benevolence to his poor dependents, and indeed almost all the traits of his remarkable character, bespeak a man who was never ashamed of himself when he thought himself right, and was never ashamed to be publicly ashamed of himself, when he thought himself wrong. It was this quality, almost as much as his great wit and strength of conversa- tion, which made him the literary dictator of his time,—and it is in this quality that our own day needs his example most. A day in which men are almost ashamed to be odd, and quite ashamed to be inconsistent, in which a singular life, even if the result of intelligent and intelligible purpose, is almost regarded as a sign of insanity, and in which society imposes its conventional assump- tions and insincerities on almost every one of us, is certainly a day when it will do more than usual good to revive the memory of that dangerous and yet tender literary bear who stood out amongst the men even of his day as one who, whatever else he was, was always true to himself, and that too in the most trying time of all, even when he had not been faithful to himself,—a man who was more afraid of his conscience than of all the world's opinion —and who towers above our own generation, just because he had the courage to be what so few of us are,—proudly independent of the opinion in the midst of which he lived.
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