INTRODUCTION 1

I

IT has been a custom for nearly one hundred years to denounce the Eighteenth Century; and one of the loudest accusers is Carlyle. He was, to be sure, more deeply interested in that period than in any other, and he devoted to it the most brilliant and elaborate of his historical studies. But he did not approve of it. Whatever he disliked was to him characteristic of the Eighteenth Century; whatever he liked was an exception to it. He calls it 'the sceptical century'; 'opulent in accumulated falsities'; 'swindling,' 'spendthrift'; 'unheroic, godless'; 'a time of quacks and quackery'; 'unbelieving'; 'mechanical'; 'prosaic '; 'selfish ́ trivial '; a decrepit, death-sick Era of Cant.' This clamor has flown from mouth to mouth, and reverberates even to the present in well-worn epithets and vain repetitions of criticism. Johnson's time is still spoken of as the Age of Doubt; the Age of Reason; the Age of Pseudo-classicism, or of Artificiality; with other nicknames of a like sort. Nicknames are perhaps never quite fair; they exaggerate, caricature, or disparage, but they never tell the whole truth, and often not the most important part of it.

During such leisure, then, as we find for the study

1 References are often given to the Life (Dr. Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson; to Misc. (Johnsonian Miscellanies, edited by Hill); to Lett. (The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Hill); and to the Lives (Johnson's Lives of the Poets, edited by Hill).

of Johnson's time, it will be better to forget the nicknames and denunciations, and to contemplate with open mind some of the great achievements of that age; nor will it be necessary to look for them far beyond Johnson's circle.

It was the time when Reynolds and Gainsborough were painting portraits full of inexhaustible beauty and charm; when Goldsmith was creating his exquisite masterpieces in genre; when Burke was expressing his noble thought in classic eloquence; when Gibbon led forth the gorgeous but fading pageant of ancient Rome. Little or none of their essential greatness do these achievements owe to mere Reason, or Doubt, or Pseudoclassicism.

More notable than these are the deeds, opinions, and character of Johnson, together with his portrait from Boswell's hand. Modern haste and prejudice have done much to warp our notions of Boswell and Johnson. A passing glance at Boswell's masterpiece, an amused impression of Macaulay's brilliant caricature, are about the sum of the common ignorance of Johnson. To most men he is a ponderous, uncouth, slovenly figure, gruff, ill-mannered, absent, unapproachable, unconsciously funny, blurting out his prejudices in unwieldy periods, and chiefly celebrated for sitting up late, drinking infinite tea, and writing an obsolete dictionary. And if aught else beside, he is a hide-bound Tory and Jacobite, hating all Whigs, Scots, French, and Americans, puffed up with insular pride, indifferent to the beauties of nature, to the arts, to all the finer things of life; venting himself in pedantic bombast and prosy moralistic abstractions, which have long since been relegated to the rubbish-heap of literature.

There is but one way to understand a great portrait, whether it be the work of pencil or pen. Sit down patiently and open-mindedly before it; return to it from time to time; consider it familiarly, as if it were

in the flesh-as if, for example, you were yourself living in Johnson's time; imagine yourself in his place, or him in yours. Then the merely grotesque and whimsical traits begin to fade, the superficial and illusory veil is slowly withdrawn, as a living man comes forth to meet us, full of life, strength, charm, and even of kindness and affection. He may indeed become what he has already been for many-the advisor, consoler, and intimate friend. There lives, for example, in a large American city, a busy man of affairs, who has essentially educated himself through years of deepening familiarity with Boswell's Life of Johnson. Since early manhood he has found for his scant leisure no other literary companion so responsive. At the age of thirty-one Stevenson wrote to a friend that he was reading Boswell 'daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read Boswell now until the day I die.'1 Sir Leslie Stephen said: 'I had the good fortune when a boy, to read what is to me, I must confess, the most purely delightful of all books— I mean Boswell's Life of Johnson. I read it from cover to cover, backward and forward, over and over, through and through, till I nearly knew it by heart.'" 'On his deathbed,' says his biographer, he suffered little pain. He could see a friend almost every day. He was surrounded by the tenderest love and devotion, and he still could read.' Here follows a considerable list of authors. Then, when other books failed, he fell back upon the old, old story. Need I name it? He told his nurse that his enjoyment of books had begun, and would end with Boswell's Life of Johnson.' 3

II

It is commonly said, after Macaulay, that Johnson lives only in Boswell, while his own books are dead,

1 Letters 2. 133.

2 Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, p. 39.
Ibid., p. 486.

of.

as they deserve to be; that had it not been for Boswell, Johnson would be now comparatively unheard Johnson's works are overshadowed by his conversations in the Life, but had the Life never been written, yet such is the vigor and sanity of his writings that they must have found many readers who now know Johnson only as revealed by his devoted friend. At any rate they furnish the best commentary on Boswell's portrayal, and in many essential ways supplement it. Without them one's acquaintance is imperfect. Even Boswell, who knew Johnson's conversation better than any one else could, was a devoted student of his works; and an unprejudiced reader must find in them as great a Johnson as Boswell has shown us, expressed with as much clearness, originality, and power, and often with greater eloquence.

6

In some sense every great man is greater than his works, and genius humbles itself to every form of expression it employs. But Johnson's genius humbled itself more than that of most writers, both in his books and his conversation. At the conclusion of The Rambler he wrote: Though in every long work there are some joyous intervals of self-applause, when the attention is recreated by unexpected facility, and the imagination soothed by incidental excellencies; yet that toil with which performance struggles after the idea is so irksome and disgusting, and so frequent is the necessity of resting below the perfection we imagined within our reach, that seldom any man obtains more from his endeavors than a painful conviction of his defects, and a continual resuscitation of desires which he feels himself unable to gratify.' Johnson chose no one great literary form in which to excel; he wrote but little verse, nor was that his best work. He did not write for the love of it. 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.'' 'You may have pleasure from writing after it is over, if

1
1 Life 3. 19.

you have written well; but you don't go willingly to it again.'' His actual writing was not the uncontrollable exuberance of pent-up feeling or conviction. It was done partly to earn his living, partly from sense of necessity that he should cast into some permanent form the exceptional gifts that he had received from nature. His superiority to his works no doubt owed something to his natural laziness. He praised others for long and careful elaboration of their works; his own were written with incredible speed, and often went to the press without his perusal. But disappointing as they were to him, they are an opening, however confined, through which the full stature of the man is discernible.

Johnson was the man of letters, a literary Jack-ofall-trades-reviewer, poet, dramatist, essayist, lexicographer, narrator, critic, biographer, letter-writer, composer of prayers for himself, and of dedications, prologues, and epitaphs for others; and if he did not succeed equally in all ways, yet each species of his composition is a facet of the whole mind of the man, adding something to the lustre of his genius.

1 Life 4. 219.

2 His most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion' (Life 1. 71). Malone makes this note: 'He told Dr. Burney that he never wrote any of his works that were printed twice over. Dr. Burney's wonder at seeing several pages of his Lives of the Poets in manuscript, with scarce a blot or erasure, drew this observation from him.' To this Dr. Hill has added the following note: "He wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage at a sitting" (Life 1. 166), and a hundred lines of the Vanity of Human Wishes in a day" (ibid. 2. 15). The Ramblers "were written in haste as the moment pressed, without even being read over by him before they were printed " (1. 203). In the second edition, however, he made corrections. "He composed Rasselas in the evenings of one week" (1. 341). "The False Alarm was written between eight o'clock on Wednesday night and twelve o'clock on Thursday night" (Piozzi's Anecdotes, p. 41). "The Patriot," he says, "was called for on a Friday, was written on a Saturday (2. 288).