Rousseau and Revolution

  His view of Milton was colored by his dislike of the Puritans, their politics, and their regicide. He read Milton’s prose as well as his verse, and called him “an acrimonious and surly republican.”149 The essay on Pope (which in the original edition ran to 373 pages) was the last blow struck for the classic style in English poetry, by the greatest inheritor of that style in English prose. He, who knew Greek well, supposed that Pope’s translation of the Iliad had improved upon Homer. He praised Gray’s “Elegy,” but dismissed the odes as cluttered with mythological machinery. When the ten volumes of The Lives of the Poets were published (1779-81), some readers were shocked by Johnson’s unorthodox but pontifical judgments, his insensitivity to the subtler graces of poetry, his tendency to rate and berate poets according to the moral tendency of their poems and their lives. Walpole declared, “Dr. Johnson has indubitably neither taste nor ear nor criterion of judgment but his old woman’s prejudices,”150 and laughed at “this weight on stilts,” who “seems to have read the ancients with no view but of pilfering polysyllables.”151 Why, then, are these Lives more widely and fondly read than any other product of Johnson’s pen? Perhaps because of those very prejudices and the candor of their expression. He made literary criticism a living force, and almost raised the dead with his chastisements.

  VII. RELEASE: 1781-84

  There is a secret pride in surviving our contemporaries, but we are punished with loneliness. The death of Henry Thrale (April 4, 1781) was the beginning of the end for Johnson. He served as one of four executors of the brewer’s will, but thereafter his visits to the Thrale family lessened. Long before her husband’s death Mrs. Thrale had begun to weary of the strains put upon her by Johnson’s need for attentions and attentive ears. Thrale had kept his captive bear in reasonably good behavior, but (the widow complained), “when there was nobody to restrain his [Johnson’s] dislikes it was extremely difficult to find anybody with whom he could converse without living always on the verge of a quarrel. … Such accidents occurred too often, and I was forced … to retire to Bath, where I knew Mr. Johnson would not follow me.”152

  The Morning Post made matters worse by announcing that a treaty of marriage between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale was “on tap.”153 Boswell composed a burlesque “Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale upon Their Supposed Approaching Nuptials.”154 But in 1782 Johnson was seventy-three and Mrs. Thrale was forty-one. It was not of her own will that she had married Thrale; he had often neglected her, and she had never learned to love him. Now she claimed a right to love and be loved, and to find a mate for the second half of her life. She was at an age when a woman urgently longs for some physical and understanding companionship. Even before her husband’s death she had developed a fondness for Gabriel Prozzi, who was giving music lessons to her daughters. Born in Italy, he had taken up residence in England in 1776, and was now about forty-two years old. When she first met him, at a party given by Dr. Burney, she mimicked his mannerisms as he performed at the piano. But his elegant manners, his amiable temper, and his musical accomplishments made him a relieving contrast to Johnson. Now that she was free she abandoned herself to romance. She confessed to her four surviving daughters her desire for remarriage. They were alarmed; remarriage would affect their financial expectations; marriage to a musician—worse yet, a Roman Catholic—would hurt their social standing. They pleaded with their mother to reconsider; she tried and failed. Piozzi behaved like a gentleman: he went off to Italy (April, 1783), and stayed away almost a year. When he returned (March, 1784) and found Mrs. Thrale still eager, he yielded. The daughters refused their consent, and moved to Brighton.

  On June 30 Mrs. Thrale sent Johnson an announcement that she and Piozzi were to be married. He replied (July 2, 1784):

  MADAM:

  If I interpret your letter aright, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame [reputation] and your country, may your folly do no further mischief. If the last act is yet to do, I, who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and served you, I who long thought you the first of womankind, entreat that, before your fate is irrevocable, I may once more see you.

  I was, I once was, Madam, most truly yours,

  SAM. JOHNSON155

  Mrs. Thrale resented the word “ignominious’’ as a slur on her fiancé. She answered Johnson on July 4: “Till you have changed your opinion of Mr. Piozzi let us converse no more.” She married Piozzi on July 23. All London agreed with Johnson in condemning her. On November 11 Johnson told Fanny Burney, “I never speak of her, and I desire never to hear of her more.”156

  These events must have taken a toll of Johnson’s failing vitality. He found it increasingly difficult to sleep, and resorted to opium to ease his pains and quiet his nerves. On January 16, 1782, his “doctor in ordinary,” Robert Levett, died; whose turn would it be next? Johnson had always feared death; now this and his belief in hell made his final years a mixture of heavy dinners and theological terrors. “I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned,” he told Dr. William Adams, master of Pembroke College; and when Adams asked what he meant by “damned” he cried out, “Sent to hell, sir, and punished everlastingly.”157 Boswell could not help contrasting the calm with which the unbelieving Hume had approached his end.158

  On June 17, 1783, Johnson suffered a mild stroke—“a confusion and indistinctness in my head, which lasted, I suppose, half a minute. … My speech was taken from me. I had no pain.”159 A week later he was well enough to dine at the Club, and in July he astonished his intimates by making excursions to Rochester and Salisbury. “What a man am I,” he exclaimed to Hawkins, “who have got the better of three diseases—the palsy, the gout, and the asthma—and can now enjoy the conversation of my friends!”160 But on September 6 Mrs. Williams died, and his loneliness became intolerable. Finding the Club insufficient—for several of the old members (Goldsmith, Garrick, Beauclerk) were dead, and some of the new ones were distasteful to him—he founded (December, 1783) the “Evening Club,” which met at an alehouse in Essex Street; there any decent person, by paying threepence, might come in and hear him talk, three nights a week. He invited Reynolds to join; Sir Joshua refused. Hawkins and others thought the new club a “degradation of those powers which had given delight” to more august persons.161

  On June 3, 1784, he was well enough to journey with Boswell to Lichfield and Oxford. Returning to London, Boswell persuaded Reynolds and other friends to ask the Chancellor to provide money whereby Johnson might be enabled to take a trip to Italy for his health; Johnson said he would prefer a doubling of his pension. The Chancellor refused. On July 2 Boswell left for Scotland. He never saw Johnson again.

  The asthma that had been overcome returned, and dropsy was added. “My breath is very short,” he wrote to Boswell in November, 1784, “and the water is now increasing upon me.”162 Reynolds, Burke, Langton, Fanny Burney, and others came to bid him a last goodbye. He wrote his will; he left £ 2,000, of which £ 1,500 were bequeathed to his Negro servant.163 Several doctors treated him, refusing any fee. He begged them to lance his legs more deeply; they would not; when they were gone he plunged lancets or scissors deep into his calves, hoping to release more water and reduce the painful swelling; some water came, but also ten ounces of blood. That evening, December 13, 1784, he died. A week later he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

  He was the strangest figure in literary history, stranger even than Scarron or Pope. It is at first acquaintance hard to like him; he covered his tenderness with brutality, and the coarseness of his manners rivaled the propriety of his books. No one received so much adulation and gave so little praise. But the older we become, the more wisdom we find in his words. He surrounded his wisdom with platitudes, but he elevated platitudes to epigrams by the force or color of his speech. We might compare him with Socrates, who also talked at the slightest provocation, and is remembered
for his spoken words. Both were stimulating gadflies, but Socrates asked questions and gave no answers, Johnson asked no questions and answered all. Socrates was certain about nothing, Johnson was certain about everything. Both appealed to science to leave the stars alone and study man. Socrates faced death like a philosopher and with a smile; Johnson faced it with religious tremors rivaling his enervating pains.

  No one now idealizes him. We can understand why the English aristocracy—excepting Langton and Beauclerk—avoided him and ignored his pontificate. We realize what a John Bull he would have been in the china shop of the nobility, or amid the precious bric-a-brac of Strawberry Hill. He was not designed for beauty, but he served to frighten some of us out of cant, hypocrisy, and gush, and to make us look at ourselves with fewer delusions about the nature of man or the ecstasies of freedom. There must have been something lovable in a man to whom Reynolds and Burke and Goldsmith could listen through a thousand and one nights, and something fascinating in one who could inspire a great biography, and fill its twelve hundred pages with enduring life.

  VIII. BOSWELL MORITURUS

  When the Great Bear was dead the literary flock swarmed about him to draw some sustenance from his corpse. Boswell himself did not hurry; he worked for seven years on the Life; but he issued in 1785 his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson; it reached a third edition in one year. Hester Thrale Piozzi had gathered material about Johnson’s words and ways; now, from these Thraliana, she compiled Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of His Life (1786). The little book presented a less amiable picture of her guest than she had drawn day by day in her diary; doubtless the final letters of Johnson had left a lasting wound.

  Next in the arena—barring a dozen entries now forgotten—was The Life of Samuel Johnson, published in five sumptuous volumes by Sir John Hawkins in 1787. Hawkins had had sufficient success as an attorney to be knighted (1772), and sufficient learning to write a good History of Music (1776). He joined with Johnson in organizing the Ivy Lane Club (1749), and was one of the original members of “the Club.” He left this after an argument with Burke, which caused Johnson to dub him “an unclubbable man”; but Johnson remained his friend, often sought his advice, and appointed him one of the executors of his will. Soon after Johnson’s death a group of booksellers asked Hawkins to edit an edition of the Doctor’s works, and to introduce it with a biography. This was criticized as revealing Johnson’s faults without mercy, and Boswell later questioned its accuracy; but “the charges against it cannot be sustained in a fair hearing.”164 Nearly all the faults ascribed to Johnson by Hawkins were noted by other contemporaries.

  Mrs. Piozzi returned to the feast with Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson (1788), all fascinating, for Johnson’s letters (except the last one to his lost lady) were far more humane than his speech. Meanwhile Boswell was laboring patiently, between lawsuits and carouses, on what he was resolved to make an incomparable biography. He had begun to make memoranda of Johnson’s conversation soon after their first meeting (1763); he planned the Life as early as 1772; so lengthy and laborious was this gestation. He rarely took notes on the spot, and he could not write shorthand; but he made it a principle to jot down, on returning to his room, his memory of what had happened or had been said. He began writing The Life of Samuel Johnson in London on July 9, 1786. He ran about the city seeking data from Johnson’s surviving friends. Edmund Malone, the Shakespearean scholar, helped him to sort out his huge chaos of notes, and buttressed his courage when Boswell, broken down by dissipation, grief, and the death of his wife, seemed about to abandon himself to women and drink. Boswell wrote in 1789: “You cannot imagine what labor, what perplexity, what vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in supplying omissions, in searching for papers buried in different masses, and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing. Many a time have I thought of giving it up.”165 He took from William Mason’s Life and Letters of Gray (1774) the idea of interspersing his hero’s letters with the story. He deliberately accumulated details, feeling that these would add up to a full and vivid picture. The fragments were woven into a chronological narrative and a consistent whole.

  Was he accurate? He claimed to be. “I am so nice in recording him that every trifle must be authentic.”166 Where we can check his report of Johnson’s words with other accounts it seems factually correct, though not verbatim. A comparison of his Notebook with the Life shows that Boswell turned his own summary of Johnson’s speech into direct quotation, which he sometimes expanded, sometimes compressed, sometimes improved,167 sometimes purified, elongating certain four-letter words to respectable proportions. Occasionally he omitted facts unfavorable to himself.168 He did not claim to have told the whole truth about Johnson,169 but when Hannah More begged him “to mitigate some of Johnson’s asperities,” he replied that he “would not cut off Johnson’s claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.”170 Actually he revealed his master’s faults as fully as others had done, but in a large perspective that reduced their prominence. He tried to show as much of the complete man as affection and decency would permit. “I am absolutely certain,” he said, “that my mode of biography, which gives not only a history of Johnson’s visible progress through the world, and of his publication, but a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared.”171

  At last it came from the press, in two large volumes, in May, 1791. It was not at once recognized as a unique treasury. Many persons resented Boswell’s reporting of their private conversation, not always admirable: Lady Diana Beauclerk was able to read how Johnson had called her a whore; Reynolds saw where Johnson had reproved him for drinking too much; Burke learned that Johnson had questioned his political integrity and had thought him capable of picking up a prostitute; Mrs. Piozzi and Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu winced. “Dr. Blagden,” wrote Horace Walpole, “says justly that it is a new kind of libel, by which you may abuse anybody by saying some dead person said so and so of somebody alive.’’172 Others found the detail excessive, many letters trivial, some pages dull. Only gradually did England realize that Boswell had achieved a masterpiece, and had given some nobility to his life.

  His father had died in 1782, leaving him Laird of Auchinleck with an income of £ 1,600 a year. He proved to be a kindly master, but he was too accustomed to city life to remain long in Auchinleck. In 1786 he was admitted to the English bar, and thereafter he spent most of his time in London. Reynolds portrayed him in that year—confident and insolent, with a nose fit to ferret out any secret. At times his wife accompanied him to London, but usually she lived at Auchinleck. There she died in 1789, aged fifty-one, worn out by the care she had given Boswell and his children. He survived her by six years—years of deepening degradation. He tried again and again to overcome his need for liquor, but failed. He died in London May 19, 1795, aged fifty-six, and his body was taken to Auchinleck for burial. His sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.

  Looking back over this eighteenth century in English literature, we perceive that it was above all a century of prose, from Addison, Swift, and Defoe to Sterne, Gibbon, and Johnson, just as the seventeenth century was an age of poetry, from Hamlet and Donne to Dryden and Paradise Lost. The rise of science and philosophy, the decline of religion and mystery, the revival of classic unities and restraints, had chilled the warmth and clogged the flow of imagination and aspiration; and the triumph of reason was the defeat of poetry, in France as well as in England. Nevertheless the vitality and versatility of England’s prose literature in the eighteenth century amply compensated for the frigid formality prevailing in its verse. Through Richardson and Fielding the novel, which had been, before them, an episodic concatenation of picaresque adventures, became a description and criticism of life, a study of manners, morals,
and character, more illuminating than the records of the historians, who lost the people in the state. And what literary influence could equal, in that age, the effect of Richardson on Prévost, Rousseau, Diderot, and Goethe?

  If the literature of England in the eighteenth century could not equal that of the seventeenth, or match the Elizabethan flight, the total life of England recovered its upward swing after the failure of national courage and policy in the Restoration. Not since the defeat of the Armada had England felt such a surge of enterprise and politics; the years from the rise of Chatham to the death of his son saw the Industrial Revolution put England far ahead of its rivals in economic inventiveness and power, and saw the English Parliament conquering continents while checking its kings. Now the immense British Empire was built, now the halls of the House of Commons rang with such eloquence as Europe had not heard since Cicero. Now, while France bankrupted itself to free America, and decapitated itself to realize its dreams, England brought all its resources of mind and will to evolve without revolution, and enter the nineteenth century, in economy and statesmanship, victorious and supreme.