2

tained. 'I have the old feudal notions,' he said.' He loved Oxford, and the medieval church, and old castles, and every suggestion of an ancient society with its rich inheritance of all that pertains to the art of living. With all his conservatism and conformity Johnson was a radical of radicals, and a democrat of democrats. He showed exquisite sense of propriety in an unexpected interview with the king, and by his conduct gave an unconscious illustration of Chesterfield's expert advice for such an occasion. On the other hand he sacrificed neither dignity nor individuality when he talked with the thieves and prostitutes of London. He knocked down an impudent bookseller, and 'beat many a fellow.' He lived in the world, and took, in some degree, the color of the world as it moved along.' His remark to Sir Adam Fergusson, just quoted, shows his sympathy with a people's just resistance to real tyranny. 'If the abuse be enormous,' said he, Nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.'

93

Johnson was that peculiar servant of democratic society called a man of letters, panurgic and indefatigable. His final criterion of literary values was the judgment of the people. His works-whether Parliamentary Debates, Dictionary, Essays, tracts or biography-had as their peculiar function the increase of popular intelligence in literature, politics, and morality. No man who ever lived by literature has lived more independently than I have done,' said he, referring to the period of his life before he received his pension; and the story of his championship for the independence of all literary men has its culmination in the famous letter to Chester

2 Were you to converse with a King, you ought to be as easy and unembarrassed as with your own valet de chambre: but yet every look, word, and action, should imply the utmost respect' (Chesterfield, Letters to his Son 3. 203; cf. Life 2. 40).

3 Life 1. 424.

field. It signifies, for better or worse, the end of patronage, and of the servile prostitution of literature to the corrupt taste of a spurious elite.

A true aristocrat is sometimes defined as one who in his conversation can set people of any rank at ease, without sacrifice of his own nature or bearing. Is this not as good a definition of the true democrat? At any rate it is a satisfactory definition of a gentleman, and, beneath all his whims and temperamental disfigurements, such a gentleman was Johnson.

XIII

The subject which Johnson liked best at the University was metaphysics. Many years later, as he was walking with Boswell, they touched upon the subject of Berkeley's idealism. Boswell remarked that it could not be refuted. 'I refute it thus,' said Johnson, kicking a large stone so hard that he rebounded from it.' At another time he called Berkeleyanism a 'reverie.' His mind was not naturally speculative. If he was at one time fascinated with metaphysics, it was through his habit of losing himself for hours in idle dreams and abstractions, from which he awoke to punish himself with merciless flagellations of conscience. Such preoccupation he never took for real philosophic thought, and deplored the many days of his life which it had subtracted from the earnest business of living.

His philosophical attitude was but a shadow of his attitude in religion. If he rejected Berkeley, it does not follow that he was a materialist, as is sometimes alleged. Berkeley's system was so purely ideal that it stood next door to skepticism, and led logically and immediately to the philosophical distrust of Hume." Metaphysical doubt and religious doubt united in Hume, and Johnson looked upon the two as concomi1 Life 1. 471.

2 Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century 1. 42, 3.

tant. At least they would become such in his own case, if he were to admit either to a place in his mind. He therefore leaned away from the spiritual temptations which metaphysics held out to him, and especially abjured Berkeleyanism from an instinct of the dangers to his faith which it would involve.

Rasselas, more clearly than any other of Johnson's writings, illustrates his consistent attitude towards theories of living and of moral philosophy, particularly such as he felt were gaining too much vogue at his own time. The doctrines of optimism, primitive simplicity, the life according to nature, are summoned and dismissed as mere theories, untested and unrelated to the stern reality of life in the world. The whole review is occasionally precipitated into a brief and solemn sentence so charged with sanity and wisdom that it cannot be forgotten. When scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand to parley, but fly to business.' 'Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion; commit yourself again to the current of the world.' 'It seems to me that while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live.'

XIV

With all his sense of the realities of life, Johnson was in some respects a mystic. He never for a moment was unconscious of the mysteries that surround the earthly life. They haunted him. Contemplation of birth, death, immortality, stirred him with unutterable emotion. Even in so slight a trait as his fondness for the old romances his love of mystery appears, and the inference that he was superstitious and believed in ghosts is but a coarse and clumsy interpretation of his mysticism. His eagerness to test alleged cases of second sight, and his part in the notorious Cock Lane affair, show a kind of skepticism in such matters that was a sufficient

safeguard from vagaries of superstition. He was 'glad to have every evidence of the spiritual world';' and of its manifestation he said: 'All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.' 2 Out of his agony at the death of his wife he prays that she may be allowed to have some care of him: Grant that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration, whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams, or in any other manner agreeable to thy Government.' But in this there is neither the fear nor the selfishness which are the marks of superstition. Such faith was a part of Johnson's religion.

98

In his religious faith appears the noblest side of Johnson's nature. All that he says or does refers itself ultimately to that. His reverence, his loyalty, and his affection are its three determining traits. It was unwavering, mystic, not shrunken with any astringent tenet or personal interpretation.

Boswell, with no intention of reproach, called him a dignified Methodist, and there was gossip to the effect that he died a member of that sect. This signifies nothing more than the breadth of his religion. Sectarianism was to him neither lovely nor desirable. With all his conservative fidelity to the Church of England, he seems to have felt the real significance of Methodism, and of its rise during his time. In the English Church there was too much conventionality, too secure intellectualism. To Johnson the democrat it was clearly guilty of neglecting its humbler children. He therefore sympathized with Methodism in its popular ministrations. He appreciated its appeal to the emotions which the preaching of the English Church, so little touched with them itself, had come to neglect in its hearers.

On the other hand Johnson felt the tellectual substructure in Methodism. Oxford are like the cow-'a very good 1 Life 4. 298.

2 Ibid. 3. 235.

absence of inMethodists at animal in the

Misc. 1. 11.

field: but we turn her out of a garden.'1 But in his own life he represents the reconciliation of both elements in faith-intellect and emotion. He is superior to the mere rationalist of his or any other time in the profound feeling of his religion; but his religious emotion is supported by the constancy and clearness of his faith.

He could not have lived when he did and escape the temptations of religious doubt; at every turn there is evidence that his battle with unbelief was fierce and incessant, and that it was carried on, not only on his own behalf, but with a sense of championship for his own generation and for generations to come. At his death Sir Joshua Reynolds, a good man, but not an ' enthusiast,' said of Johnson that, so far from denying Christ, he had been, in his age, his greatest champion.'

2

The intensity of his feeling, and the emphasis of his words at every recurrence of the subject, indicate its supreme importance for him.

His terror at the thought or suggestion of death in any form is but the manifestation of his doubt. This fear seems to have turned partly upon his dread of final judgment and his distrust of his own merits. But he was also haunted continually by his uncertainty of the conditions that lie beyond this life. It is not surprising, then, that at the moments when he is most intensely concerned with the unalterable fact of death, his religious faith emerges in its purest and most beautiful form. We shall look for it most profitably in the letters to his dying mother, in his account of his farewell to her old servant, Catherine Chambers; but chiefly it shines forth in those last moments of his, when he advanced toward his mortal change with the same courage that had made his hard life heroic, and with a new peace that marked his final triumph over the enemies of his noble spirit.

1 Life 2. 187.

2 Leslie and Taylor, Life of Reynolds 2. 459.