The Life of Samuel Johnson

“ To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone; there is too much of life in me already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. ”

“ Johnson, it may be remarked, does not answer Soame Jenyns's argument; he concentrates on it the vivifying heat of his imagination, and it shrivels under the glow. He felt no respect for a structure of theory, however ingenious and elaborate, which is built up from facts imperfectly realized. 'Life,' he says, 'must be seen before it can be known.' Because he had seen much of life, his last and greatest work. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, is more than a collection of facts: it is a book of wisdom and experience, a treatise on the conduct of life, a commentary on human destiny. ”

“ Richard Steele among them. Samuel Johnson was a friend easy to make, and difficult to lose. There was no money to be got from him, for he was altogether poor in everything but the large spirit of human kindness. Savage drew largely on him for sympathy, and had it; although Johnson was too clear-sighted to be much deceived except in judgment upon the fraudulent claims which then gave rise to division of opinion. The Life of Savage is a noble piece of truth, although it rests on faith put in a fraud. ”

“ He has not suffered the hand of partiality to colour his excellencies with too much warmth; nor has he endeavoured to throw his singularities too much into the shade. Dr. Johnson's failings may well be forgiven, for the sake of his virtues. His defects were spots in the sun. His piety, his kind affections, and the goodness of his heart, present an example worthy of imitation. His works still remain a monument of genius and of learning. Had he written nothing but what is contained in this edition, the quantity shows a life spent in study and meditation. ”

“ Naturally before receiving this last honor he had withdrawn from Parliament, and from 1856 to the end of his life he enjoyed a retired home, with a fine garden. He had plenty of time to cash the famous check for twenty thousand pounds which the first edition of the History brought him, and to invest and spend it as he pleased. On his fifty-seventh birthday he wrote in his diary, "What is much more important to my happiness than wealth, titles, and even fame, those whom I love are well and happy, and very kind and affectionate to me." ”

“ When George the Third came to the throne the schoolmaster had not found fortune—that he never found—but he had found fame, and the name of Samuel Johnson was known and loved wherever an English word was spoken or an English book read. The conditions of political life in England in the eighteenth century made it impossible for such a man as Samuel Johnson ever to be the chosen counsellor, the minister of an English king. The field of active politics was reserved for men of family, of wealth, or of the few whom powerful patronage served in lieu of birth and aided to the necessary opulence. ”

“ Johnson lived to see his labours nourish in a tenth edition. His posterity, as an ingenious French writer has said, on a similar occasion, began in his life-time.
In the beginning of 1750, soon after the Rambler was set on foot, Johnson was induced, by the arts of a vile impostor, to lend his assistance, during a temporary delusion, to a fraud not to be paralleled in the annals of literature. One Lauder, a native of Scotland, who had been a teacher in the University of Edinburgh, had conceived a mortal antipathy to the name and character of Milton. ”

“ He was a "tremendous companion," said Garrick's brother; and men of gentle nature, like Charles Fox, often shrank from his company, and perhaps exaggerated his brutality.
Johnson, who had long regarded conversation as the chief amusement, came in later years to regard it as almost the chief employment of life; and he had studied the art with the zeal of a man pursuing a favourite hobby. He had always, as he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, made it a principle to talk on all occasions as well as he could. ”

“ Johnson; but it will be difficult for those who say so to speak more highly. If I have described his manners as they were, I have been careful to show his superiority to the common forms of common life. It is surely no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he who should plant honeysuckle round Trajan’s column would not be thought to adorn, but to disgrace it.
When I have said that he was more a man of genius than of learning, I mean not to take from the one part of his character that which I willingly give to the other. The erudition of Mr. Johnson proved his genius ”

“ Johnson happily came unscathed through the ordeal which was too much for poor Savage, and could boast with perfect truth in later life that "no man, who ever lived by literature, had lived more independently than I have done." It was in so strange a school, and under such questionable teaching that Johnson formed his character of the world and of the conduct befitting its inmates. One characteristic conclusion is indicated in the opening passage of the life. ”

“ Mrs Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting to his sick room. It would seem that a full half of Johnson’s life during about sixteen years was passed under the roof of the Thrales. ”

“ Wishing to know what ideas had made Johnson popular, he turned over the pages of his Dictionary, his eight volumes of essays, his biographies, his numberless articles, his conversation so carefully collected, and he yawned. 'His truths,' says this critic, 'are too true, we already know his precepts by heart. We learn from him that life is short, and we ought to improve the few moments granted us; that a mother ought not to bring up her son as a fop; that a man ought to repent of his faults and yet avoid superstition; that in everything we ought to be active and not hurried. ”

“ Since Samuel Johnson toiled in Grub Street, London, literature has scarcely furnished a more pathetic or inspiring illustration of struggle to success than that of Bayard Taylor. Born of Quaker parentage in the little town of Kennett Square, near Philadelphia, Jan. 11, 1825, he grew to boyhood in the midst of fresh air and the hard work of farm-life. His mother, a refined and intelligent woman, who taught him to read at four, and who early discovered her child's love for books, shielded him as far as possible from picking up stones and weeding corn, and set him to rocking the baby to sleep. ”

“ Johnson owed his very life to air and exercise, given him when his organs of respiration could scarcely play, in the year 1766, yet he ever persisted in the notion that neither of them had anything to do with health. “People live as long,” said he, “in Pepper Alley as on Salisbury Plain; and they live so much happier, that an inhabitant of the first would, if he turned cottager, starve his understanding for want of conversation, and perish in a state of mental inferiority.” ”

“ His asthma tormented him day and night, and dropsical symptoms made their appearance. His wrath was excited in no measured terms against the re-marriage of his old friend Mrs Thrale, the news of which he heard this summer. The whole dispute seems, to-day, entirely uncalled-for, but the marriage aroused some of Johnson’s strongest prejudices. He wrote inconsiderately on the subject, but we must remember that he was at the time afflicted in body and mentally haunted by dread of impending change. Throughout all his troubles he had clung vehemently to life. ”

“ Johnson's guess into futurity; and to guess is the utmost that man can do: Shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it.
Mrs. Johnson left a daughter, Lucy Porter, by her first husband. She had contracted a friendship with Mrs. Anne Williams, the daughter of Zachary Williams, a physician of eminence in South Wales, who had devoted more than thirty years of a long life to the study of the longitude, and was thought to have made great advances towards that important discovery. ”

“ Not only in politics, but also and more significantly in religion, Samuel Johnson stands out as a sturdy believer.
This seems the more noteworthy when we consider the conditions of his life. There is hardly one among the great men of history who can be called so distinctively “a man of letters,” undoubtedly none who has won as high a position and as large a contemporary influence by sheer strength of pen. ”

“ This rule, the present biographer promises, shall guide his pen throughout the following narrative.
It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited so much attention; and, when the press has teemed with anecdotes, apophthegms, essays, and publications of every kind, what occasion now for a new tract on the same thread-bare subject? The plain truth shall be the answer. The proprietors of Johnson's works thought the life, which they prefixed to their former edition, too unwieldy for republication. ”

“ At the time of instituting the club in Ivy lane, Johnson had projected the Rambler. The title was most probably suggested by the Wanderer; a poem which he mentions, with the warmest praise, in the life of Savage. With the same spirit of independence with which he wished to live, it was now his pride to write. He communicated his plan to none of his friends: he desired no assistance, relying entirely on his own fund, and the protection of the divine being, which he implored in a solemn form of prayer, composed by himself for the occasion. ”

“ At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse ”

“ During the summer months, the principal passion and employment of Sam's life is to visit, in this vehicle, the most eminent seats of the nobility and gentry in different parts of the kingdom, with his wife and some select friends. By these periodical excursions Sam gratifies many important purposes. He assists the several pregnancies of his wife; he shows his chaise to the best advantage; he indulges his insatiable curiosity for finery, which, since he has turned gentleman, has grown upon him to an extraordinary degree ”

“ But as we advance forward into the crowds of life, innumerable delights solicit our inclinations, and innumerable cares distract our attention; the time of youth is passed in noisy frolicks; manhood is led on from hope to hope, and from project to project; the dissoluteness of pleasure, the inebriation of success, the ardour of expectation, and the vehemence of competition, chain down the mind alike to the present scene, nor is it remembered how soon this mist of trifles must be scattered, and the bubbles that float upon the rivulet of life be lost for ever in the gulph of eternity. ”

“ It was written at a white heat, as indeed Johnson wrote all his best work. Its strong Stoical morality, its profound and melancholy illustrations of the old and ever new sentiment, Vanitas Vanitatum, make it perhaps the most impressive poem of the kind in the language. The lines on the scholar's fate show that the iron had entered his soul in the interval. Should the scholar succeed beyond expectation in his labours and escape melancholy and disease, yet, he says,—
Yet hope not life from grief and danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed on thee ”

“ But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands in Saint James's Square, and had lain with fifty pounds' 15 weight of iron on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty. ”

“ Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets” were written to serve as Introductions to a trade edition of the works of poets whom the booksellers selected for republication. Sometimes, therefore, they dealt briefly with men in whom the public at large has long ceased to be interested. Richard Savage would be of this number if Johnson’s account of his life had not secured for him lasting remembrance. Johnson’s Life of Savage in this volume has not less interest than the Lives of Addison and Swift, between which it is set, although Savage himself has no right at all to be remembered in such company. ”

“ We are now accustomed to the notion of great art as the product of a flawed life. But in the eighteenth century, an age largely devoted to the idea of discreet biography which concealed or minimized the subject's weaknesses, a man like Johnson presented formidable problems to the biographer and his readers. Although Courtenay merely versified material which other writers had discussed in much more detail, his poem is important because it synthesizes the conflicting attitudes towards Johnson which prevailed immediately after his death. ”