|
He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions fashioned on his own
principles. But when a deeper philosophy was required, when he undertook to
pronounce judgment on the works of those great minds which "yield homage only to
eternal laws," his failure was ignominious. He criticized Pope's Epitaphs
excellently. But his observations on Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poems seem
to us for the most part as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer
himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever lived.
Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects can be compared only to that
strange nervous feeling which made him uneasy if he had not touched every post
between the Miter tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs
to English epitaphs is an instance. An English epitaph, he said, would disgrace
Smollett. He declared that he would not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey
with an English epitaph on Goldsmith. What reason there can be for celebrating a
British writer in Latin, which there was not for covering the Roman arches of
triumph with Greek inscriptions, or for commemorating the deeds of the heroes of
Thermopylae in Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine.
On men and manners, at least on the men and manners of a particular place and a
particular age, Johnson had certainly looked with a most observant and
discriminating eye. His remarks on the education of children, on marriage, on
the economy of families, on the rules of society, are always striking, and
generally sound. In his writings, indeed, the knowledge of life which he
possessed in an eminent degree is very imperfectly exhibited. Like those
unfortunate chiefs of the middle ages who were suffocated by their own
chain-mail and cloth of gold, his maxims perish under that load of words which
was designed for their defense and their ornament. But it is clear from the
remains of his conversation, that he had more of that homely wisdom which
nothing but experience and observation can give than any writer since the time
of Swift.
If he had been content to write as he talked, he might have left books on the
practical art of living superior to the Directions to Servants. Yet even his
remarks on society, like his remarks on literature, indicate a mind at least as
remarkable for narrowness as for strength. He was no master of the great science
of human nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the species Londoner.
Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life and of all
the shades of moral and intellectual character which were to be seen from
Islington to the Thames, and from Hyde Park Corner to Mile-End Green. But his
philosophy stopped at the first turnpike-gate. Of the rural life of England he
knew nothing; and he took it for granted that everybody who lived in the country
was either stupid or miserable. "Country gentlemen," said he, "must be unhappy;
for they have not enough to keep their lives in motion;" as if all those
peculiar habits and associations which made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the
finest views in the world to himself had been essential parts of human nature.
Of remote countries and past times he talked with wild and ignorant presumption.
"The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes," he said to Mrs. Thrale, "were a
people of brutes, a barbarous people." In conversation with Sir Adam Ferguson he
used similar language. "The boasted Athenians," he said, "were barbarians. The
mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing." The fact was
this: he saw that a Londoner who could not read was a very stupid and brutal
fellow: he saw that great refinement of taste and activity of intellect were
rarely found in a Londoner who had not read much; and, because it was by means
of books that people acquired almost all their knowledge in the society with
which he was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest and clearest
evidence, that the human mind can be cultivated by means of books alone. An
Athenian citizen might possess very few volumes; and the largest library to
which he had access might be much less valuable than Johnson's bookcase in Bolt
Court. But the Athenian might pass every morning in conversation with Socrates,
and might hear Pericles speak four or five times every month. He saw the plays
of Sophocles and Aristophanes; he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and the
paintings of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses of Aeschylus: he heard the
rhapsodist at the corner of the streets reciting the Shield of Achilles or the
Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance,
revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under a liberal and generous
discipline: he was a judge compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite
arguments. These things were in themselves an education, an education eminently
fitted, not, indeed, to form exact or profound thinkers, but to give quickness
to the perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to the expression, and
politeness to the manners. All this was overlooked. An Athenian who did not
improve his mind by reading was, in Johnson's opinion, much such a person as a
Cockney who made his mark, much such a person as black Frank before he went to
school, and far inferior to a parish clerk or a printer's devil.
Johnson's friends have allowed that he carried to a ridiculous extreme his
unjust contempt for foreigners. He pronounced the French to be a very silly
people, much behind us, stupid, ignorant creatures. And this judgment he formed
after having been at Paris about a month, during which he would not talk French,
for fear of giving the natives an advantage over him in conversation. He
pronounced them, also, to be an indelicate people, because a French footman
touched the sugar with his fingers. That ingenious and amusing traveler, M.
Simond, has defended his countrymen very successfully against Johnson's
accusations, and has pointed out some English practices which, to an impartial
spectator, would seem at least as inconsistent with physical cleanliness and
social decorum as those which Johnson so bitterly reprehended. To the sage, as
Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred to doubt that there must be
something eternally and immutably good in the usages to which he had been
accustomed. In fact, Johnson's remarks on society beyond the bills of mortality,
are generally of much the same kind with those of honest Tom Dawson, the English
footman in Dr. Moore's Zeluco. "Suppose the King of France has no sons, but only
a daughter, then, when the king dies, this here daughter, according to that
there law, cannot be made queen, but the next near relative, provided he is a
man, is made king, and not the last king's daughter, which, to be sure, is very
unjust. The French footguards are dressed in blue, and all the marching
regiments in white, which has a very foolish appearance for soldiers; and as for
blue regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the artillery."
Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a state of society completely
new to him; and a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies seems on that
occasion to have crossed his mind for the first time. He confessed, in the last
paragraph of his journey, that his thoughts on national manners were the
thoughts of one who had seen but little, of one who had passed his time almost
wholly in cities. This feeling, however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that
to the last he entertained a fixed contempt for all those modes of life and
those studies which tend to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a
particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign travel and of history he spoke
with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. "What does a man learn by
traveling? Is Beauclerk the better for traveling? What did Lord Charlemont learn
in his travels, except that there was a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?"
History was, in his opinion, to use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old
almanac; historians could, as he conceived, claim no higher dignity than that of
almanac-makers; and his favorite historians were those who, like Lord Hailes,
aspired to no higher dignity. He always spoke with contempt of Robertson. Hume
he would not even read. He affronted one of his friends for talking to him about
Catiline's conspiracy, and declared that he never desired to hear of the Punic
war again as long as he lived.
Assuredly one fact which does not directly affect our own interests, considered
in itself, is no better worth knowing than another fact. The fact that there is
a snake in a pyramid, or the fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps, are in
themselves as unprofitable to us as the fact that there is a green blind in a
particular house in Threadneedle Street, or the fact that a Mr. Smith comes into
the city every morning on the top of one of the Blackwall stages. But it is
certain that those who will not crack the shell of history will never get at the
kernel. Johnson, with hasty arrogance, pronounced the kernel worthless, because
he saw no value in the shell. The real use of traveling to distant countries and
of studying the annals of past times is to preserve men from the contraction of
mind which those can hardly escape whose whole communion is with one generation
and one neighborhood, who arrive at conclusions by means of an induction not
sufficiently copious, and who therefore constantly confound exceptions with
rules, and accidents with essential properties. In short, the real use of
traveling and of studying history is to keep men from being what Tom Dawson was
in fiction, and Samuel Johnson in reality.
Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell's
books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his
writings in matter, and far superior to them in manners. When he talked, he
clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he
took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became
systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned language, in a
language which nobody hears front his mother or his nurse, in a language in
which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in
which nobody ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the
dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were
simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his
sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs.
Thrale are the original of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the
translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. "When we were taken
upstairs," says he in one of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed
on which one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the journey as
follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our
entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated
aloud. "The Rehearsal," he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to keep it
sweet" then, after a pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it from
putrefaction."
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner,
though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be willing to part
with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit
easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be
sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive. And such is the
mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and
have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out.
It is well known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those
strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the
inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms
which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek
and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalized, must be
considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king's English. His
constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it
became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of
expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas
expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his harsh inversions so widely
different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit,
and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers, all these
peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants,
till the public have become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily, and very justly, "If you were to write a
fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like
whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson.
Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty
town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same
pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic
eloquence, betrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as
finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia
describes her reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as
these: "I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find,
instead of the leisure and tranquility which a rural life always promises, and,
if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of care, and a
tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion
agitated." The gentle Tranquilla informs us, that she "had not passed the
earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph;
but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the
gratulations of applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the
great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the
obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love."
Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace.
The reader may well cry out with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman
has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler."1
We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and we must
close it. We would fain part in good humor from the hero, from the biographer,
and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least
this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Boswell's book
again. As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands
the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those
heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of
Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the
beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his
trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as
familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the
gigantic body, the hugh massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown
coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey 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 "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!"
and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in
his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion. To receive from his
contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received
only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are
known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most
transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings,
which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those
peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he
probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the
English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
1 It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very
close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20). The resemblance may
possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism.
Previous |
Critical And Historical Essays, Volume II
| Next
Critical And Historical Essays, Volume II, Thomas Babbington Macaulay,
1843 |
|
Add/Correct a Link