Dr. Johnson and His Circle

The name of Samuel Johnson is, of course, not the greatest in English prose, but even to-day, when he has been dead more than a century and a quarter, it is still the most familiar. We live in an age of newspapers. Where all can read, the newspaper press, taken as a whole, will be a fairly accurate reflection of what is in the mind of a people. Nothing will be mentioned frequently in newspapers which is not of some interest to a large number of readers; and whatever is frequently mentioned there cannot fail to become widely known. Tried by this test, Johnson's name must be admitted to be very widely known and of almost universal interest. No man of letters--perhaps scarcely even Shakespeare himself--is so often quoted in the columns of the daily press. His is a name that may {8} be safely introduced into any written or spoken discussion, without fear of the stare of unrecognizing ignorance; and the only danger to which those who quote him expose themselves is that of the yawn of over-familiarity. Even in his own lifetime his reputation extended far beyond the limited circle of literature or scholarship. Actresses delighted in his conversation; soldiers were proud to entertain him in their barracks; innkeepers boasted of his having slept in their inns. His celebrity was such that he himself once said there was hardly a day in which the newspapers did not mention his name; and a year after his death Boswell could venture to write publicly of him that his "character, religious, moral, political and literary, nay his figure and manner, are, I believe, more generally known than those of almost any man." But what was, in his own day, partly a respect paid to the maker of the famous Dictionary and partly a curiosity about "the great Oddity," as the Edensor innkeeper called him, has in the course of the nineteenth century become a great deal more.

He is still for us the great scholar and the strongly marked individuality, but he has gradually attained a kind of apotheosis, a kind of semi-legendary position, almost rivalling that of the great John Bull himself, as the {9} embodiment of the essential features of the English character. We never think of the typical Englishman being like Shakespeare or Milton. In the first place, we know very little about Shakespeare, and not very much about Milton; and so we are thrown back on their works, and our mental picture of them takes on a dim and shadowy grandeur, very unlike what we see when we look within into our familiar and commonplace selves. Nor do Englishmen often plume themselves on their aesthetic or imaginative gifts. The achievements of Wren, or Purcell, or Keats may arouse in them admiration and pride, but never a sense of kinship. When they recognize themselves in the national literature, it is not Hamlet, or Lear, or Clarissa, or Ravenswood that holds up the mirror; but Falstaff, or The Bastard, or Tom Jones, or Jeanie Deans, or perhaps Gabriel Oak: plain people, all of them, whatever their differences, with a certain quiet and downright quality which Englishmen are apt to think the peculiar birthright of the people of this island. It is that quality which was the central thing in the mind of Johnson, and it is to his possession of it, and to our unique knowledge of it through Boswell, that more than anything else he owes this position of the typical Englishman among our men of letters. We can all imagine that {10} under other conditions, and with an added store of brains and character, we might each have been Doctor Johnson. Before we could fancy ourselves Shelley or Keats the self that we know would have to be not developed but destroyed. But in Johnson we see our own magnified and glorified selves.

It has sometimes been asserted to be the function of the man of letters to say what others can feel or think but only he can express. Whatever may be thought of such a definition of literature, it is certain that Johnson discharged this particular function with almost unique success. And he continues to do so still, especially in certain fields. Whenever we feel strongly the point of view of common sense we almost expect to be able to find some trenchant phrase of Johnson's with which to express it. If it cannot be found it is often invented. A few years ago, a lover of Johnson walking along a London street passed by the side of a cabmen's shelter. Two cabmen were getting their dinner ready, and the Johnsonian was amused and pleased to hear one say to the other: "After all, as Doctor Johnson says, a man may travel all over the world without seeing anything better than his dinner." The saying was new to him and probably apocryphal, though the sentiment is one which can well be imagined {11} as coming from the great man's mouth. But whether apocryphal or authentic, the remark well illustrates both the extent and the particular nature of Johnson's fame. You would not find a cabman ascribing to Milton or Pope a shrewd saying that he had heard and liked. Is there any man but Johnson in all our literary history whom he would be likely to call in on such an occasion? That is the measure of Johnson's universality of appeal. And the secret of it lies, to use his own phrase, not used of himself of course, in the "bottom of sense," which is the primary quality in all he wrote and said, and is not altogether absent from his ingrained prejudices, or even from the perversities of opinion which his love of argument and opposition so constantly led him to adopt. Whether right or wrong there is always something broadly and fundamentally human about him which appeals to all and especially to the plain man. Every one feels at home at once with a man who replies to doubts about the freedom of the will with the plain man's answer: "Sir, we know our will's free, and there's an end on't," and if he adds to it an argument which the plain man would not have thought of, it is still one which the plain man and everyone else can understand. "You are surer that you can lift up your finger or not as you please, than you are of any {12} conclusion from a deduction of reasoning." Moreover we all think we are more honest than our neighbours and are at once drawn to the man who was less of a humbug than any man who ever lived. "Clear your mind of cant" is perhaps the central text of Johnson, on which he enlarged a hundred times. "When a butcher tells you his heart bleeds for his country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling." No one who has ever attended an election meeting fails to welcome that saying, or the answer to Boswell's fears that if he were in Parliament he would be unhappy if things went wrong, "That's cant, sir. . . . Public affairs vex no man." "Have they not vexed yourself a little, sir? Have you not been vexed at all by the turbulence of this reign and by that absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?" "Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not vexed."