Selected Essays (Penguin Classics) Page 3
… the remembrance of death ought to predominate in our minds, as an habitual and settled principle, always operating, though not always perceived… [for] the great incentive to virtue is the reflection that we must die.
Yet the fact of our own eventual death, as Johnson conceded in that same paper, is a certainty from which the repetitious nature of daily life, its common round, perpetually distracts us. In the poem on Levet, Johnson employed what he had, as a grammarian, considered a flaw in the English language, to penetrate the reader afresh with the knowledge that, while virtually everything else can happen to us many times, or may not happen to us at all, we will certainly encounter death, and will encounter it only once.
On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet
Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
Well tried through many a varying year,
See LEVET to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of ev’ry friendless name the friend.
Yet still he fills affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, letter’d arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefin’d.
When fainting nature call’d for aid,
And hov’ring death prepar’d the blow,
His vig’rous remedy display’d
The power of art without the show.
In misery’s darkest caverns known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless anguish pour’d his groan,
And lonely want retir’d to die.
No summons mock’d by chill delay,
No petty gain disdain’d by pride,
The modest wants of ev’ry day
The toil of ev’ry day supplied.
His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure th’Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed.
The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Tho’ now his eightieth year was nigh.
Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.
For the first eight stanzas of this poem, Johnson is concerned with repeated actions: our daily toil in hope’s delusive mine, Levet’s toil of every day which met the needs of every day, the narrow round of his habitual exercise of his single talent. And in the penultimate stanza Johnson also alludes to the inattention engendered by the repetitive nature of our quotidian existence:
The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
But in the last stanza the verbs do not describe repeated actions. They become instead true preterites, referring to single, accomplished actions:
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.
It is a feature of ‘the anomalous preterites of verbs’ in English that these two functions of the past tense (that of referring to repeated action in the past, and also to single, accomplished past actions) are not distinguished by the suffix. Had, for instance, Johnson decided to write this poem in Latin (as he was well capable of doing), the suffixes of the verbs would clearly have distinguished the separate kinds of past event to which they refer. ‘Glided’ might have been rendered by ‘surrepebant’; ‘broke’ and ‘freed’ by ‘fregit’ and ‘liberavit’. This hypothetical Latin poem, by virtue of the more regular and intricate formation of past tenses in the Latin language, would have discriminated the two types of past event which lie behind the poem more scrupulously than does, or could, the English poem we possess. But this hypothetical Latin poem would also, I believe, be a lesser poem. For it is in the ‘strange perplexity’ (to return to Hawkins’s phrase) which every reader must, for a moment, feel as we move, without preparation or warning, from imperfect to perfect tense in the final stanza, that the poem achieves its moral impact. The irregular identity of imperfect and perfect tenses in English, deplored by Johnson the grammarian as an irregularity, is here made the vehicle for the reflection which Johnson the moralist wished to place in the foundations of our ethical existence: namely, the ‘reflection that we must die’. The tenses of our hypothetical Latin poem could register vividly and directly the different event which is death. It could shock us with it. It could not, as Johnson’s English poem does, ambush us with it. For the moral impact of this poem is more subtle, and more profound because more subtle, than that of any translation could be, except a translation into a language as casual as is English in forming its past tenses. Only in such a language could what Johnson does in this poem be duplicated. Surprised by death at the end of the poem, we are forced to acknowledge, before our habitual distractedness resumes, that we too will die, and to reflect, albeit momentarily, on whether or not death will be for us an emancipation, as it was for Levet. In the strange perplexity of that final moment, Johnson’s poem achieves its moral stature, triumphs over the solipsism which lies in wait for moral language, and administers to its reader an impetus to moral reformation. At the same time, Johnson comes close to his subject: he, too, displays ‘the power of art without the show’.
In Idler No. 41 Johnson, recently smitten by the death of his mother, had already reflected on the paradoxes arising from our distracted awareness of the inevitability of death:
That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect… Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.42
The purpose of moral writing is forcibly to awaken us from this condition of impotent awareness. It is therefore a kind of assault upon us – in just the way that Johnson reported to Boswell that he himself had been assaulted and awakened, when a young man, from an unexpected quarter. The ‘religious progress’ of the young Johnson had, it seems, been fitful and uneven:
I fell into an inattention to religion, or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Holy Life’, expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational enquiry.43
When Johnson says that Law was an ‘overmatch’ for him, he draws a metaphor from wrestling, which hints to us that the benefit which flowed from Johnson’s reading of Law’s Serious Call arose precisely from the energy of its attack upon the dullness of his spiritual apprehension. Such writing is like ethical sandpaper. By means of literary surprise it out-manoeuvres expectation, and re-sensitizes us to the moral realities from which the carapace of quotidian life will effectively separate us unless it is vigorously challenged. It is a kind of writing which Johnson himself could achieve in The Rambler, as the conclusion of the second essay shows:
But, though it should happen that an author is capable of excelling, yet his merit may pass without notice, huddled in the variety of things, and thrown into the general miscellany of life. He that endeavours after fame by writing, solicits the regard of a multitude fluctuati
ng in pleasures, or immersed in business, without time for intellectual amusements; he appeals to judges prepossessed by passions, or corrupted by prejudices, which preclude their approbation of any new performance. Some are too indolent to read any thing, till its reputation is established; others too envious to promote that fame, which gives them pain by its increase. What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put their reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imagine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased: and he that finds his way to reputation, through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit.44
The paragraph opens with the proposition that fame is elusive, and then goes on to offer a series of particular reasons why this is so. At this point, then, Johnson seems to be offering consolation to the obscure. However, the final limb of the concluding sentence springs the mine: ‘and he that finds his way to reputation, through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit’. The shift in perspective, from consoling the obscure to mortifying the proud, is abrupt and complete, and arises from Johnson’s astute perception of the further implication hidden within the instances explaining the elusiveness of fame: for what is balm to the overlooked may be wormwood to the celebrated. The startling pivot jolts the complacent, and reminds us that the conditions of our moral life are more surprising and reticulated than we slackly suppose them to be. As a result, all readers should be unsettled by this writing: the lowly should feel less securely tethered to their lowliness, the eminent more precarious in their elevation. In Adventurer No. III Johnson revealingly misremembers one of Robert South’s sermons.45 South had proposed that men would find ‘a Continuall un-intermitted Pleasure’ intolerable. Johnson characteristically substitutes idleness for South’s pleasure. Notwithstanding – indeed, perhaps because of – all his temptations to sloth, Johnson recognized that for men work was a condition of happiness. The resistances of his own moral style create for his reader an opportunity of healthily laborious struggle, in which they may find Johnson an overmatch for them, just as William Law had been for Johnson. For, as Arthur Murphy understood, ‘Johnson is always profound, and of course gives the fatigue of thinking.’46
The Rambler did not sell well (though unless we recall that it was widely reprinted in provincial newspapers we are likely seriously to underestimate the contemporary readership of these essays).47 This may have been due to the unexpected seriousness of its moral appeal. However, there is also evidence to suggest that Johnson’s style was difficult for some readers, even repugnant for others. Like any literary manner, it could be guyed. ‘The ludicrous imitators of Johnson’s style are innumerable,’ as Boswell pointed out.48 Bonnell Thornton’s parody shows that imitation could be done with affection.49 A sharper emotion, however, seems to have prompted Horace Walpole’s strictures on Johnson’s style. The Journey to the Western Islands he dismissed as verbose: ‘What a heap of words to express very little! and though it is the least cumbrous of any style he ever used, how far from easy and natural!’50 But the much more cumbrous style of The Rambler inspired Walpole to a freak of satiric imagination. Writing to the Countess of Ossory on 1 February 1779, he began by distancing himself from the popular mania for David Garrick, before moving on to Johnson himself:
… I have always thought that he [Garrick] was just the counterpart of Shakespeare; this, the first of writers, and an indifferent actor; that, the first of actors, and a woeful author. Posterity would believe me, who will see only his writings; and who will see those of another modern idol, far less deservedly enshrined, Dr. Johnson. I have been saying this morning, that the latter deals so much in triple tautology, or the fault of repeating the same sense in three different phrases, that I believe it would be possible, taking the ground-work for all three, to make one of his ‘Ramblers’ into three different papers, that should all have exactly the same purport and meaning, but in different phrases. It would be a good trick for somebody to produce one and read it; a second would say, “Bless me, I have this very paper in my pocket, but in quite another diction”; and so a third…51
If one recollects the conclusion of Rambler 2 quoted above, it is easy to see what prompted this Walpolean fantasy. The very premise of Johnson’s moral essays, that men more often require to be reminded than informed, perhaps by itself drives their author towards an iterative style.52 Moreover, it may be that Johnson himself after a while found the character of the ‘Rambler’ constricting. If, when he first forged that character, it offered release by allowing him to give voice to the fund of information and reflection which he had accumulated as a result of earlier study and the labours of the Dictionary, it was also a character he found it increasingly hard to shake off. Certainly towards the end of his life Johnson was troubled by thoughts of the path not taken:
Johnson, however, had a noble ambition floating in his mind, and had, undoubtedly, often speculated on the possibility of his supereminent powers being rewarded in this great and liberal country by the highest honours of the state. Sir William Scott informs me, that upon the death of the late Lord Lichfield, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he said to Johnson, ‘What a pity it is, Sir, that you did not follow the profession of the law. You might have been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, and attained to the dignity of the peerage; and now that the title of Lichfield, your native city, is extinct, you might have had it..’ Johnson, upon this, seemed much agitated; and, in an angry tone, exclaimed, ‘Why will you vex me by suggesting this, when it is too late?’53
This reluctance to contemplate possibilities not grasped surely accompanies a measure of restiveness – an agitation even – concerning the life that has been lived. Certainly the literary personae that Johnson created for himself in The Idler and The Adventurer seem partly to have been chosen to contrast with that of The Rambler by trimming back some of the moral seriousness associated with Johnson’s first set of periodical essays. And as The Rambler itself progressed, it sometimes seems as if the author is attempting to increase the tonal range and formal variety of the papers. In addition to the moral disquisitions, we have a series of moral case studies (sometimes amounting almost to a compressed novel, as in the story of ‘Misella’ in Ramblers 170 and 171), stories continued over some distance, as with Ramblers 132 and 194, and also the contes set in the Orient and even Greenland.
But to step away from the character of the ‘Rambler’ was for Johnson a difficult task. Once he was dead, and when the advent of the French Revolution had turned Johnson from a recently deceased author to the embodiment of a resistant Englishness and a bulwark against the democratical principles then ravaging France, it was impossible for that character to be laid aside. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the second edition of the Life of Johnson, published after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Boswell presented his dead friend to a new group of readers in precisely these terms:
His strong, clear, and animated enforcement of religion, morality, loyalty, and subordination, while it delights and improves the wise and the good, will, I trust, prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has been lately imported from France, under the false name of Philosophy, and with a malignant industry has been employed against the peace, good order, and happiness of society, in our free and prosperous country; but thanks be to GOD, without producing the pernicious effects which were hoped for by its propagators.54
This Johnson seems distant from the exuberant political ventriloquist of A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, or the mordant author of the essays critical of the government’s conduct of the Seven Years’ War, or the bleak satire of the suppressed Idler 22. Therefore, one of the principles of selection
in the present volume has been in a modest way to begin to restore what has come to be comparatively neglected. I have thus included alongside the moral ‘Rambler’ some evidence of Johnson’s other literary characters, from both earlier and later in his career, and sought thereby to place before today’s readers evidence of Johnson’s diversity, as well as of his centrality.
Oxford, 2001
NOTES
1. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, corr. J. D. Fleeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 1394–95.
2. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 247.
3. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 445.
4. Joseph Towers, An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 382.
5. Arthur Murphy, Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 69.
6. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 427.