2 March: Boreham on Samuel Johnson

A Mammoth Personality
London little knew what was in store for it when, on March 2, 1737, a young man, Samuel Johnson by name, who had recently married a widow more than twenty years older than himself, set out for the metropolis to try his luck. Carlyle called him the greatest soul in all England, a giant, invincible soul. Johnson is one of the most familiar figures in all history. Thanks mainly to Boswell's vivid and palpitating pages, "the old philosopher is among us in the rusty coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger and swallowing his tea in oceans. No human being who has been so long in his grave is so well known to us." Thus Macaulay, who adds that we have but to open Boswell's unique and immortal volume and, as if by magic, the whole of that coffee-club drama unrolls colour before us. Judge Johnson by any standard you will, he is a really Homeric figure, good as he is great.

For, in the most pitiful days of his poverty, his purse—for what it was worth—was always at the disposal of his still poorer friends. And look at this! It is one of Boswell's records thrown into dainty verse by Robert Brough:

When this goodly man was old
On a night so wet and cold,
As towards his
home he strolled,
He espied
ln the bitter London street
Lying, drenched
with rain and sleet,
A poor girl with naked feet
Who had died
In the
cruel, cruel cold,
If this sage, so worn and old,
Had by accident not
strolled
Where she lay.
He was torn by illness' wrack,
His old joints
were fit to crack,
But he bore her on his back
Safe away.

And Brough concludes the poem, a fairly long one, by describing the way in which, at the funeral at Westminster Abbey, derelicts and deadbeats Johnson had helped insisted on taking their places among the principal mourners.

Gentleness Subsisted With Rugged Exterior
Was there ever such an asylum of ne'er-do-wells as that house in Gough Square? It was, as Macaulay says, the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of social flotsam and jetsam ever brought together. They were at constant war with one another and with poor Frank, Johnson's negro servant. Sometimes they even turned savagely upon their benefactor himself, whining and complaining so persistently that Johnson was glad to shuffle off to the Mitre Tavern to evade them. He often wished that they were as responsive and appreciative as his pets. Towards these he behaved with a solicitude that almost amounted to chivalry. He insisted on going himself to buy the cat's food lest Frank, the negro, should feel himself degraded by being required to wait upon an animal, or lest, being put to the trouble, he should conceive a dislike to the poor creature! "Few men on record," says Carlyle, "have had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate nature than old Samuel: within that shaggy exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother's, soft as a little child's." And Sir Leslie Stephen avers that, of all the heroes, statesmen, philanthropists, and poets who sleep in Westminster Abbey, there are few whom, when all has been said, we can love as heartily as Samuel Johnson. Like all sensible men, the doctor dearly loved to be praised honestly, but he would have desired no tribute more eloquent than that.

He may not have been a saint of the conventional type, but he was a man of the finest devotion. He was a tremendous believer in the Bible, and in prayer. He read as many chapters of the Bible each day as would ensure his completing the entire Book once a year. He loved the Church of England Prayer Book and sometimes thought of collecting the best prayers in the language and gathering them into one comprehensive volume. But when his friends pressed him to put the design into execution, he pleaded he was unworthy of so sacred a task. Mrs. Thrale, in her "Anecdotes," says that Johnson could never recite that majestic Latin hymn, the Dies Irae, without bursting into tears. And who can forget that famous scene at the Literary Club when, one of the members, chancing to quote a verse from the 19th Psalm, Johnson instantly caught fire, snatched off his hat, and with most impressive solemnity, repeated the whole of Addison's noble paraphrase of that stately psalm?

People Live For Ever In The Lives They Inspire
Johnson's place in literature is difficult to define. In one way it cannot be regarded as a dominant place, for who reads him? He is in the extraordinary position that his reputation rests, not on anything he himself wrote, but on a book an incomparably inferior man wrote about him. Lord Rosebery used to say that, apart from one or two poems and one or two biographical sketches, Johnson never penned anything worthy of perusal. And yet, like Socrates among the philosophers, he is a most commanding and authoritative figure in English letters. In this respect he stands in striking contrast to Shakespeare. We revel in Shakespeare's writings and like to memorise them, but we never bother our heads about the man. In Johnson's case, we display the utmost avidity in regard to the person but know next to nothing of what he wrote.

A great spirit often does his best work, not in his own proper person but by means of the disciples who, arising under the magnetism of their personality, do what they themselves could never have done. Johnson appeared at a moment when the genius of English literature seemed dead. It was a time of unparalleled sterility. Yet Johnson was scarcely laid in his honoured grave when there arose a multitude of minstrels so great that when, shortly afterwards, the Poet Laureate died, the Government of the day found itself embarrassed by such a wealth of riches that it knew not whom to appoint. Johnson was a strong man whose immense energy and conviction held other minds in thrall, a man who ruled without making any conscious attempt to do so. While his work remains unread, on the highest and dustiest shelves, he himself still lives, and as long as English letters last his fingerprint will be seen on every page.

F W Boreham

Image: Samuel Johnson