Samuel Johnson

From Philosopedia

Johnson, Samuel (18 September 1709 - 13 December 1784)

• Dr. Johnson, told by James Boswell that he was from Scotland, replied, “Sir, that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” At their first meeting, Boswell had noted, “He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is disagreeable.”

• When Hannah More told Johnson of “the pleasure and the instruction she had received from his writings,” Johnson retorted, “Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having.”

• “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” Johnson said in July 1763. “It is not done well, but you are surprized to find it done at all.” In his poem “London” is a line, “And here a female Atheist talks you dead.”

• At the time of his paralytic stroke in 1783, he told novelist Fanny Burney, that he had “composed in his own mind a Latin prayer to the Almighty, that whatever the sufferings for which he must prepare himself, it would please Him, through the grace and mediation of our blessed Saviour, to spare his intellects, and let them all fall upon his body.”

• Shortly before his death Johnson told his friend William Adams about his fear of being considered one who was damned. Asked what he meant, he replied, according to Boswell, passionately and loudly, “Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.” When Adams responded that he did not believe in Hell, Johnson brought the conversation to an abrupt end, saying, “I’ll have no more on’t.” W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson (1998) speculated as to why: “The truth is that for Johnson there was a far worse alternative to damnation. It could be expressed by a remark John Wesley once made in a letter to his brother Charles (1766): ‘If I have any fear, it is not of falling into hell, but of falling into nothing.’ ” {Derek Jarrett, The New York Review of Books, 18 March 1999}

Johnson was not an ideal member of the Church of England, as described by Hartwick College's David Cody:

• Johnson was deeply but not necessarily conventionally religious: he struggled within himself most of his life to sustain his belief in God in the face of enormous pressures, disappointments, and psychological calamities. On the surface, and in much of his work, he appeared to be an orthodox, conventional, conservative adherent of revealed religion, of the Church of England, but the conventional Anglican explanations for the existence of evil in the world failed to satisfy him, and in any case his characteristic reluctance to believe without evidence, his fear of credulity, his dislike of mysteries, continually undermined his attempts to accept conventional beliefs. He was remarkable, privately, for his tolerance; maintaining that the differences between Christian sects (Protestants and Roman Catholics, for example) were trivial, and due primarily to political rather than religious differences.

• His religious difficulties began at a very early age. His mother, when he was only three, told him of "a fine place filled with happiness called Heaven" and "a sad place, called Hell." Many years later he recalled that (as one might expect) this account did not impress him very deeply: it is significant, however, that he remembered it at all. After the age of nine, and through his adolescence, he stopped going to church. One part of him remained a sceptic for the rest of his life, and, as his private journals show, even after he had regained his faith he struggled continually (and privately) with fears, guilt, and disbelief: in "The Vanity of Human Wishes," written when he was forty, he returns to a traditional religious theme as well as a personal preoccupation and insists that we cannot find genuine or permanent happiness in this world, and that we must therefore turn to religious belief and a faith in the existence of a better world after death if we are to endure our existence here. It was a belief, however, which he himself had difficulty maintaining. The happiness derived from such belief was in any case a limited one, but the only alternative to religious faith, as Johnson saw it, was a dull apathy, a stoical disengagement from life.

• He was troubled, too--a better word would be tormented--by a fear of death and by a deeper fear that he might in spite of his best efforts be so guilty, so sinful, that he merited damnation. And beneath that fear was another, even deeper--the fear that God might not exist at all, that death might bring annihilation, mere nothingness, the loss of personal identity. He struggled all his life--in the end, successfully--not so much to overcome these fears as to coexist with them. In public he was much more conventional, much more characteristically paternalistic. He maintained in print, for example, that religion was a valuable asset to society and to mankind and that Anglicanism, as the English state religion, ought therefore to be carefully protected: "Permitting men to preach any opinion contrary to the doctrine of the established church," he wrote, "tends, in a certain degree, to lessen the authority of the church, and, consequently, to lessen the influence of religion."

Cody adds that Johnson did not like the French philosophes:

• Johnson's works are the productions of a mind which was profoundly pessimistic and innately melancholy: he was desperately conservative in religion and politics because he believed that only the maintenance of order protected individuals and whole human societies from despair; and that authority and tradition were not ends in themselves but rather means of upholding and sustaining order. He despised the French philosophes , remarking, of Voltaire and Rousseau, that "It is too difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them." When his reason conflicted with his fear of disorder, that fear often won out, and manifested itself in an outburst of temper or a refusal to pursue the subject further. When Boswell suggested that it was impossible to refute Bishop Berkeley's assertion that matter did not exist, Johnson reacted in characteristic fashion: "I shall never forget," wrote Boswell, "the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus .'" A friend wrote that "His religion . . . made his extraordinary talents of Mind continually at War with each other," but when he came upon scientific evidence which suggested that the biblical account of the creation of the earth could not be taken literally, he rejected it out of hand. In what ways do you suppose the course of his life give rise to, and how do his various works reflect, his conservative belief in the necessity of order, and in the dangers of disorder?

Nor, wrote Boswell, did he like the views of David Hume:

• I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume's persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. Johnson: "Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right." I said, I had no reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. Johnson: "It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very probable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth."

Dr. Johnson, as everyone called him and as he still is known, was the son of a bookseller who became a consummate lexicographer, the author in 1747 of the Dictionary of the English Language, upon which he had worked for eight years. He started a moralistic periodical, The Rambler (1750), wrote a prose tale of Abyssinia, Rasselas (1759), became a social figure in the Literary Club, and was given a crown pension that enabled him to figure as an arbiter of letters. In 1773 he accompanied his biographer James Boswell on a tour of Scotland. Although his literary reputation did not exceed that of his conversationalism, Dr. Johnson was a major figure of his age.

Samuel Johnson: A Life

Harold Bloom, reviewing David Nokes's Samuel Johnson, A Life (2009), wrote:

As a critic of Shakespeare, Johnson stressed the empirical persuasiveness of the dramatist’s portrayal of human nature. In that spirit, the reader learns to judge fresh biographers of Johnson himself for their skill in limning the great critic’s personality and character. By that standard Samuel Johnson, a workmanlike book by the British scholar David Nokes, joins itself to an admirable sequence that includes studies by Robert DeMaria, Walter Jackson Bate, Lawrence Lipking and Peter Martin. Each of these brought a particular warmth and individual insight to the reception of Johnson, and Nokes complements them by his sense of the critic as a Londoner, almost the archetypal citizen of that endless city.

Nokes is particularly moving and informative on Johnson’s relation to his Jamaican manservant, Frank Barber, a freedman who essentially became Johnson’s son, though without formal adoption. A childless widower, Johnson willed Barber his estate and effects, hoping that the young man could prosper without him.

I myself, as I age, go on reading Johnson, seeking the consolations of wisdom. Though an excellent poet and storyteller, aside from his critical power, Johnson now matters most as a wisdom writer. His test for literary criticism was its success at “improving opinion into knowledge,” and the knowledge he sought was wisdom. His own writing became increasingly aphoristic, in the mode of Ecclesiastes. My favorite Johnsonian aphorism is supremely subtle in its irony: “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.”

Like all biographers of Johnson, Nokes is appreciatively wary of Boswell, who after all was a genius at self-advertisement. Lovers of Johnson can be forgiven for wanting him without Boswell, wherever possible, while knowing most readers will hear of Johnson only through Boswell. I myself qualify as a common reader of Johnson, not a Johnsonian scholar, and Nokes is now part of a select company to whom I am indebted.

(See a 2009 review by Andrew O'Hagan of four books about Johnson: Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Belknap Press/Harvard University); Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (Belknap Press/Harvard University); Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Basic Books); and David Nokes's Samuel Johnson: A Life (Henry Holt).)