Loud clamour is
always more or less insane: but probably the insanest of all
loud clamours in the eighteenth century was this that was
raised about Johnson's Pension.
always more or less insane: but probably the insanest of all
loud clamours in the eighteenth century was this that was
raised about Johnson's Pension.
Thomas Carlyle
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 41
discerning that the Symbol of your Divinity has half become
idolatrous? This was the question, which Johnson, the
man both of clear eye and devout believing heart, must
answer,--at peril of his life. The Whig or Sceptic, on the
other hand, had a much simpler part to play. To him only
the idolatrous side of things, nowise the divine one, lay visible:
not worship, therefore, nay in the strict sense not heart-
honesty, only at most lip- and hand-honesty, is required of
him. What spiritual force is his, he can conscientiously
employ in the work of cavilling, of pulling-down what is
False. For the rest, that there is or can be any Truth of a
higher than sensual nature, has not occurred to him. The
utmost, therefore, that he as man has to aim at, is Re-
spectability, the suffrages of his fellow-men. Such suffrages
he may weigh as well as count: or count only: according as
he is a Burke or a Wilkes. But beyond these there lies
nothing divine for him; these attained, all is attained. Thus
is his whole world distinct and rounded-in; a clear goal
is set before him; a firm path, rougher or smoother; at
worst a firm region wherein to seek a path: let him gird-up
his loins, and travel on without misgivings! For the honest
Conservative, again, nothing is distinct, nothing rounded-in:
Respectability can nowise be his highest Godhead; not
one aim, but two conflicting aims to be continually reconciled
by him, has he to strive after. A difficult position, as we said;
which accordingly the most did, even in those days, but half
defend: by the surrender, namely, of their own too cumber-
some honesty or even understanding; after which the com-
pletest defence was worth little. Into this difficult position
Johnson, nevertheless, threw himself: found it indeed full
of difficulties; yet held it out manfully, as an honest-hearted,
open-sighted man, while life was in him.
Such was that same " twofold Problem " set before Samuel
Johnson. Consider all these moral difficulties; and add to
. them the fearful aggravation, which lay in that other circum-
stance, that he needed a continual appeal to the Public, must
continually produce a certain impression and conviction on
the Public; that if he did not, he ceased to have " provision
for the day that was passing over him," he could not any
longer live! How a vulgar character, once launched into this
wild element; driven onwards by Fear and Famine; without
other aim than to clutch what Provender (of Enjoyment in
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? 42 Carlyle's Essays
any kind) he could get, always if possible keeping quite clear
of the Gallows and Pillory, that is to say, minding needfully
both " person " and " character,"--would have floated hither
and thither in it; and contrived to eat some three repasts
daily, and wear some three suits yearly, and then to depart
and disappear, having consumed his last ration: all this
might be worth knowing, but were in itself a trivial knowledge.
How a noble man, resolute for the Truth, to whom Shams
and Lies were once for all an abomination, was to act in it:
here lay the mystery. By what methods, by what gifts of
eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel Johnson, now when
cast forth into that waste Chaos of Authorship, maddest
of things, a mingled Phlegethon and Fleet-ditch, with its
floating lumber, and sea-krakens, and mud-spectres,--shape
himself a voyage; of the transient driftwood, and the enduring
iron, build him a sea-worthy Life-boat, and sail therein,
undrowned, unpolluted, through the roaring "mother of
dead dogs," onwards to an eternal Landmark, and City that
hath foundations? This high question is even the one
answered in Boswell's Book; which Book we therefore, not
so falsely, have named a Heroic Poem ; for in it there lies the
whole argument of such. Glory to our brave Samuel! He
accomplished this wonderful Problem; and now through long
generations we point to him, and say: Here also was a Man;
let the world once more have assurance of a Man!
Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on that con-
fusion worse confounded of grandeur and squalor, no light
but an earthly outward one, he too must have made ship-
wreck. With his diseased body and vehement voracious
heart, how easy for him to become a carpe-diem Philosopher,
like the rest, and live and die as miserably as any Boyce
of that Brotherhood! But happily there was a higher light
for him; shining as a lamp to his path; which, in all paths,
would teach him to act and walk not as a fool, but as wise,
and in those evil days too "redeeming the time. " Under
dimmer or clearer manifestations, a Truth had been revealed
to him: I also am a Man; even in this unutterable element
of Authorship, I may live as beseems a man! That Wrong
is not only different from Right, but that it is in strict
scientific terms infinitely different; even as the gaming of
the whole world set against the losing of one's own soul, or
(as Johnson had it) a Heaven set against a Hell; that in all
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson
43
situations out of the Pit of Tophet, wherein a living Man
has stood or can stand, there is actually a Prize of quite
infinite value placed within his reach, namely a Duty for him
to do: this highest Gospel, which forms the basis and worth
of all other Gospels whatsoever, had been revealed to Samuel
Johnson; and the man had believed it, and laid it faithfully
to heart. Such knowledge of the transcendental, immeasurable
character of Duty we call the basis of all Gospels, the essence
of all Religion: he who with his whole soul knows not this,
as yet knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing.
This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those that
knew: under a certain authentic Symbol it stood forever
present to his eyes: a Symbol, indeed, waxing old as doth
a garment; yet which had guided forward, as their Banner
and celestial Pillar of Fire, innumerable saints and witnesses,
the fathers of our modern world; and for him also had still
a sacred significance. It does not appear that at any time
Johnson was what we call irreligious: but in his sorrows
and isolation, when hope died away, and only a long vista
of suffering and toil lay before him to the end, then first did
Religion shine forth in its meek, everlasting clearness; even
as the stars do in black night, which in the daytime and dusk
were hidden by inferior lights. How a true man, in the
midst of errors and uncertainties, shall work out for himself
a sure Life-truth; and adjusting the transient to the eternal,
amid the fragments of ruined Temples build up, with toil and
pain, a little Altar for himself, and worship there; how
Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire, can purify and fortify
his soul, and hold real communion with the Highest, "in
the Church of St. Clement Danes: " this too stands all un-
folded in his Biography, and is among the most touching
and memorable things there; a thing to be looked at with
pity, admiration, awe. Johnson's Religion was as the light of
life to him; without it his heart was all sick, dark and had
no guidance left.
He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that unspeakable
shoeblack-seraph Army of Authors; but can feel hereby that
he fights under a celestial flag, and will quit him like a man.
The first grand requisite, an assured heart, he therefore has:
what his outward equipments and accoutrements are, is the
next question; an important, though inferior one. His intel-
lectual stock, intrinsically viewed, is perhaps inconsiderable:
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? 44 Carlyle's Essays
the furnishings of an English School and English University;
good knowledge of the Latin tongue, a more uncertain one of
Greek: this is a rather slender stock of Education wherewith
to front the world. But then it is to be remembered that his
world was England; that such was the culture England
commonly supplied and expected. Besides, Johnson has
been a voracious reader, though a desultory one, and oftenest
in strange scholastic, too obsolete Libraries; he has also
rubbed shoulders with the press of Actual Life for some
thirty years now: views or hallucinations of innumerable
things are weltering to and fro in him. Above all, be his
weapons what they may, he has an arm that can wield them.
Nature has given him her choicest gift,--an open eye and
heart. He will look on the world, wheresoever he can catch
a glimpse of it, with eager curiosity: to the last, we find
this a striking characteristic of him; for all human interests
he has a sense; the meanest handicraftsman could interest
him, even in extreme age, by speaking of his craft: the ways
of men are all interesting to him; any human thing, that he
did not know, he wished to know. Reflection, moreover,
Meditation, was what he practised incessantly, with or with-
out his will: for the mind of the man was earnest, deep as I
well as humane. Thus would the world, such fragments of
it as he could survey, form itself, or continually tend to form
itself, into a coherent Whole; on any and on all phases of
which, his vote and voice must be well worth listening to.
As a Speaker of the Word, he will speak real words; no idle
jargon or hollow triviality will issue from him. His aim too
is clear, attainable; that of working for his wages: let him do
this honestly, and all else will follow of its own accord.
With such omens, into such a warfare, did Johnson go
forth. A rugged hungry Kerne or Gallowglass, as we called
him: yet indomitable; in whom lay the true spirit of a
Soldier. With giant's force he toils, since such is his appoint-
ment, were it but at hewing of wood and drawing of water
for old sedentary bushy-wigged Cave; distinguishes himself
by mere quantity, if there is to be no other distinction. He
can write all things; frosty Latin verses, if these are the
saleable commodity; Book - prefaces, Political Philippics,
Review Articles, Parliamentary Debates: all things he does
rapidly; still more surprising, all things he does thoroughly
and well. How he sits there, in his rough-hewn amorphous
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 45
bulk, in that upper-room at St. John's Gate, and trundles-
off sheet after sheet of those Senate-of-Lilliput Debates,
to the clamorous Printer's Devils waiting for them with
insatiable throat, down stairs; himself perhaps impransus
all the while! Admire also the greatness of Literature;
how a grain of mustard-seed cast into its Nile-waters, shall
settle in the teeming mould, and be found, one day, as a
Tree, in whose branches all the fowls of heaven may lodge.
Was it not so with these Lilliput Debates? In that small
project and act began the stupendous Fourth Estate;
whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take
in; in whose boughs are there not already fowls of strange
feather lodged? Such things, and far stranger, were done in
that wondrous old Portal, even in latter times. And then
figure Samuel dining " behind the screen," from a trencher
covertly handed-in to him, at a preconcerted nod from the
"great bushy wig;" Samuel too ragged to show face, yet
"made a happy man of" by hearing his praise spoken. If to
Johnson himself, then much more to us, may that St. John's
Gate be a place we can "never pass without veneration. " 1
1 All Johnson's places of resort and abode are venerable, and now
indeed to the many as well as to the few; for his name has become
great; and, as we must often with a kind of sad admiration recognise,
there is, even to the rudest man, no greatness so venerable as in-
tellectual, as spiritual greatness; nay properly there is no other vener-
able at all. For example, what soul-subduing magic, for the very
clown or craftsman of our England, lies in the word " Scholar "! " He
is a Scholar: " he is a man wiser than we; of a wisdom to us boundless,
infinite: who shall speak his worth! Such things, we say, fill us with
a certain pathetic admiration of defaced and obstructed yet glorious
man; archangel though in ruins,--or rather, though in rubbish of en-
cumbrances and mud-incrustations, which also are not to be perpetual.
Nevertheless, in this mad-whirling all-forgetting London, the haunts
of the mighty that were can seldom without a strange difficulty be dis-
covered. Will any man, for instance, tell us which bricks it was in
Lincoln's Inn Buildings that Ben Jonson's hand and trowel laid? No
man, it is to be feared,--and also grumbled at. With Samuel Johnson
may it prove otherwise! A Gentleman of the British Museum is said
to have made drawings of all his residences: the blessing of Old
Mortality be upon him! We ourselves, not without labour and risk,
lately discovered Gough Square, between Fleet Street and Holborn
(adjoining both to Bolt Court and to Johnson's Court); and on the
second day of search, the very House there, wherein the English Dic-
tionary was composed. It is the first or corner house on the right
hand, as you enter through the arched way from the North-west. The
actual occupant, an elderly, well-washed, decent-looking man, invited
us to enter; and courteously undertook to be cicerone; though in his
memory lay nothing but the foolishest jumble and hallucination. It
is a stout, old-fashioned, oak-balustraded house: "I have spent many
a pound and penny on it since then," said the worthy Landlord: "here,
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? 46 Carlyle's Essays
Poverty, Distress, and as yet Obscurity, are his companions:
so poor is he that his Wife must leave him, and seek shelter
among other relations; Johnson's household has accommoda-
tion for one inmate only. To all his ever-varying, ever-
recurring troubles, moreover, must be added this continual
one of ill-health, and its concomitant depressiveness: a
galling load, which would have crushed most common mortals
into desperation, is his appointed ballast and life-burden;
he "could not remember the day he had passed free from
pain. " Nevertheless, Life, as we said before, is always Life:
a healthy soul, imprison it as you will, in squalid garrets,
shabby coat, bodily sickness, or whatever else, will assert
its heaven-granted indefeasible Freedom, its right to conquer
difficulties, to do work, even to feel gladness. Johnson does
not whine over his existence, but manfully makes the most
and best of it. "He said, a man might live in a garret at
eighteenpence a-week: few people would inquire where he
lodged; and if they did, it was easy to say,' Sir, I am to be
found at such a place. ' By spending threepence in a coffee-
house, he might be for some hours every day in very good -
company; he might dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread-
and-milk for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-'
shirt day he went abroad and paid visits. " Think by whom
and of whom this was uttered, and ask then, Whether there
is more pathos in it than in a whole circulating-library of
Giaours and Harolds, or less pathos? On another occasion,
"when Dr. Johnson, one day, read his own Satire, in
which the life of a scholar is painted, with the various
obstructions thrown in his way to fortune and to fame, he
burst into a passion of tears: Mr. Thrale's family and Mr.
Scott only were present, who, in a jocose way, clapped him
on the back, and said,' What's all this, my dear sir? Why,
you and I and Hercules, you know, were all troubled with
melancholy. ' He was a very large man, and made-out the
triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough. "
you see, this Bedroom was the Doctor's study; that was the garden"
(a plot of delved ground somewhat larger than a bed-quilt), " where
he walked for exercise; these three garret Bedrooms" (where his
three Copyists sat and wrote) " were the place he kept his--Pupils in! "
Tempus edax rerum! Yet jerax also: for our friend now added, with
a wistful look, which strove to seem merely historical: "I let it all in
Lodgings, to respectable gentlemen; by the quarter or the month;
it's all one to me. "--" To me also," whispered the Ghost of Samuel, as
we went pensively our ways.
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? Boswcll's Life of Johnson 47
These were sweet tears; the sweet victorious remembrance
lay in them of toils indeed frightful, yet never flinched from,
and now triumphed over. "One day it shall delight you
also to remember labour done! "--Neither, though Johnson is
obscure and poor, need the highest enjoyment of existence,
that of heart freely communing with heart, be denied him.
Savage and he wander homeless through the streets; without
bed, yet not without friendly converse; such another con-
versation not, it is like, producible in the proudest drawing-
room of London. Nor, under the void Night, upon the hard
pavement, are their own woes the only topic: nowise; they
"will stand by their country," they there, the two " Back-
woodsmen " of the'Brick Desert!
Of all outward evils Obscurity is perhaps in itself the least.
To Johnson, as to a healthy-minded man, the fantastic
article, sold or given under the title of Fame, had little or no
value but its intrinsic one. He prized it as the means of
getting him employment and good wages; scarcely as any-
thing more. His light and guidance came from a loftier
source; of which, in honest aversion to all hypocrisy or
pretentious talk, he spoke not to men; nay perhaps, being
of a healthy mind, had never spoken to himself. We reckon
it a striking fact in Johnson's history, this carelessness of his
to Fame. Most authors speak of their "Fame" as if it
were a quite priceless matter; the grand ultimatum, and
heavenly Constantine's - Banner they had to follow, and
conquer under. --Thy "Fame "! Unhappy mortal, where
will it and thou both be in some fifty years? Shakspeare
himself has lasted but two hundred; Homer (partly by
accident) three thousand: and does not already an Eternity
encircle every Me and every Thee? Cease, then, to sit
feverishly hatching on that " Fame " of thine; and flapping
and shrieking with fierce hisses, like brood-goose on her last
egg, if man shall or dare approach it! Quarrel not with me,
hate me not, my Brother: make what thou canst of thy
egg, and welcome: God knows, I will not steal it; I believe
it to be addle. --Johnson, for his part, was no man to be killed
by a review; concerning which matter, it was said by
a benevolent person: If any author can be reviewed to
death, let it be, with all convenient despatch, done. Johnson
thankfully receives any word spoken in his favour; is nowise
disobliged by a lampoon, but will look at it, if pointed out
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? 48 Carlyle's Essays
to him, and show how it might have been done better: the
lampoon itself is indeed nothing, a soap-bubble that next
moment will become a drop of sour suds; but in the mean-
while, if it do anything, it keeps him more in the world's eye,
and the next bargain will be all the richer: "Sir, if they
should cease to talk of me, I must starve. " Sound heart and
understanding head: these fail no man, not even a Man of
Letters!
Obscurity, however, was, in Johnson's case, whether a
light or heavy evil, likely to be no lasting one. He is ani-
mated by the spirit of a true workman, resolute to do his work
well; and he does his work well; all his work, that of writing,
that of living. A man of this stamp i5 unhappily not so
common in the literary or in any other department of the
world, that he can continue always unnoticed. By slow
degrees, Johnson emerges; looming, at first, huge and dim
in the eye of an observant few; at last disclosed, in his real
proportions, to the eye of the whole world, and encircled
with a " light-nimbus " of glory, so that whoso is not blind
must and shall behold him. By slow degrees, we said; for
this also is notable; slow but sure: as his fame waxes not
by exaggerated clamour of what he seems to be, but by better
and better insight of what he is, so it will last and stand
wearing, being genuine. Thus indeed is it always, or nearly
always, with true fame. The heavenly Luminary rises amid
vapours; stargazers enough must scan it with critical tele-
scopes; it makes no blazing, the world can either look at
it, or forbear looking at it; not till after a time and times
does its celestial eternal nature become indubitable. Pleasant,
on the other hand, is the blazing of a Tarbarrel; the crowd
dance merrily round it, with loud huzzaing, universal three-
times-three, and, like Homer's peasants, "bless the useful
light:" but unhappily it so soon ends in darkness, foul
choking smoke; and is kicked into the gutters, a nameless
imbroglio of charred staves, pitch-cinders and vomissement
du diable I
But indeed, from of old, Johnson has enjoyed all, or nearly
all, that Fame can yield any man: the respect, the obedience
of those that are about him and inferior to him; of those
whose opinion alone can have any forcible impression on him.
A little circle gathers round the Wise man; which gradually
enlarges as the report thereof spreads, and more can come to
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 49
see and to believe; for Wisdom is precious, and of irresistible
attraction to all. "An inspired-idiot," Goldsmith, hangs
strangely about him; though, as Hawkins says, " he loved not
? Johnson, but rather envied him for his parts; and once
entreated a friend to desist from praising him, ' for in doing
so,' said he, ' you harrow-up my very soul! '" Yet, on the
whole, there is no evil in the " gooseberry-fool; " but rather
much good; of a finer, if of a weaker, sort than Johnson's;
and all the more genuine that he himself could never become
conscious of it,--though unhappily never cease attempting to
become so: the Author of the genuine Vicar of Wakefield, nill
iie, will he, must needs fly towards such a mass of genuine
Manhood; and Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. Major,
alternately attracted and repelled. Then there is the
chivalrous Topham Beauclerk, with his sharp wit, and gallant
courtly ways: there is Bennet Langton, an orthodox gentle-
man, and worthy; though Johnson once laughed, louder
almost than mortal, at his last will and testament; and
"could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till
he got without the Temple-gate; then burst into such a fit of
laughter that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and,
in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at
the side of the foot-pavement, and sent forth peals so loud
that, in the silence of the night, his voice seemed to resound
from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch! " Lastly comes his solid-
thinking, solid-feeding Thrale, the well-beloved man; with
Thralia, a bright papilionaceous creature, whom the elephant
,Wed to play with, and wave to and fro upon his trunk. Not
to speak of a reverent Bozzy, for what need is there farther ? --
Or of the spiritual Luminaries, with tongue or pen, who made
that age remarkable; or of Highland Lairds drinking, in
fierce usquebaugh, " Your health, Toctor Shonson! "--Still
less of many such as that poor " Mr. F. Lewis," older in date,
of whose birth, death and whole terrestrial res gestce, this only,
and strange enough this actually, survives: "Sir, he lived in
london, and hung loose upon society! " Stat Parvi nominis
mbra. --
In his fifty-third year he is beneficed, by the royal bounty,
wth a Pension of three-hundred pounds.
Loud clamour is
always more or less insane: but probably the insanest of all
loud clamours in the eighteenth century was this that was
raised about Johnson's Pension. Men seem to be led by the
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? 50 Carlyle's Essays
noses: but in reality, it is by the ears,--as some ancient
slaves were, who had their ears bored; or as some modern
quadrupeds may be, whose ears are long. Very falsely was
it said, " Names do not change Things. " Names do change
Things; nay for most part they are the only substance, which
mankind can discern in Things. The whole sum that John-
son, during the remaining twenty-two years of his life, drew
from the public funds of England, would have supported
some Supreme Priest for about half as many weeks; it amounts
very nearly to the revenue of our poorest Church-Overseer for
one twelvemonth. Of secular Administrators of Provinces,
and Horse-subduers, and Game-destroyers, we shall not so
much as speak: but who were the Primates of England, and
the Primates of All England, during Johnson's days? No
man has remembered. Again, is the Primate of all England
something, or is he nothing? If something, then what but
the man who, in the supreme degree, teaches and spiritually
edifies, and leads towards Heaven by guiding wisely through
the Earth, the living souls that inhabit England? We touch
here upon deep matters; which but remotely concern us, and
might lead us into still deeper: clear, in the mean while, it is
that the true Spiritual Edifier and Soul's-Father of all Eng-
land was, and till very lately continued to be, the man named
Samuel Johnson,--whom this scot-and-lot-paying world
cackled reproachfully to see remunerated like a Supervisor of
Excise!
If Destiny had beaten hard on poor Samuel, and did never
cease to visit him too roughly, yet the last section of his Life
might be pronounced victorious, and on the whole happy.
He was not idle; but now no longer goaded-on by want; the
light which had shone irradiating the dark haunts of Poverty,
now illuminates the circles of Wealth, of a certain culture and
elegant intelligence; he who had once been admitted to
speak with Edmund Cave and Tobacco Browne, now admits
a Reynolds and a Burke to speak with him. Loving friends
are there; Listeners, even Answerers: the fruit of his long
labours lies round him in fair legible Writings, of Philosophy,
Eloquence, Morality, Philology; some excellent, all worthy
and genuine Works; for which too, a deep, earnest murmur
of thanks reaches him from all ends of his Fatherland. Nay
there are works of Goodness, of undying Mercy, which even
he has possessed the power to do: "What I gave I have;
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson
what I spent I had! " Early friends had long sunk into the
grave; yet in his soul they ever lived, fresh and clear, with
soft pious breathings towards them, not without a still hope
of one day meeting them again in purer union. Such was
Johnson's Life: the victorious Battle of a free, true Man.
Finally he died the death of the free and true: a dark cloud
of Death, solemn and not untinged with haloes of immortal
Hope, " took him away," and our eyes could no longer behold
him; but can still behold the trace and impress of his
courageous honest spirit, deep-legible in the World's Business,
wheresoever he walked and was.
To estimate the quantity of Work that Johnson performed,
how much poorer the World were had it wanted him, can, as
in all such cases, never be accurately done; cannot, till after
some longer space, be approximately done. All work is as
seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew, and
so, in endless palingenesia, lives and works. To Johnson's
Writings, good and solid, and still profitable as they are, we
have already rated his Life and Conversation as superior. By
the one and by the other, who shall compute what effects
have been produced, and are still, and into deep Time,
producing?
So much, however, we can already see: It is now some
three quarters of a century that Johnson has been the Prophet
of the English; the man by whose light the English people, in
public and in private, more than by any other man's, have
guided their existence. Higher light than that immediately
poetical one; higher virtue than an honest Prudence, he
could not then communicate; nor perhaps could they have
received: such light, such virtue, however, he did communi-
cate. How to thread this labyrinthic Time, the fallen and
falling Ruin of Times; to silence vain Scruples, hold firm to
the last the fragments of old Belief, and with earnest eye still
discern some glimpses of a true path, and go forward thereon,
"in a world where there is much to be done, and little to be
lmown:" this is what Samuel Johnson, by act and word,
taught his Nation; what his Nation received and learned of
him, more than of any other. We can view him as the pre-
server and transmitter of whatsoever was genuine in the spirit
of Toryism; which genuine spirit, it is now becoming manifest,
must again embody itself in all new forms of Society, be what
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? 52 Carlyle's Essays
they may, that are to exist, and have continuance--elsewhere
than on Paper. The last in many things, Johnson was the last
genuine Tory; the last of Englishmen who, with strong voice
and wholly-believing heart, preached the Doctrine of Standing
still; who, without selfishness or slavishness, reverenced the
existing Powers, and could assert the privileges of rank,
though himself poor, neglected and plebeian; who had heart-
devoutness with heart-hatred of cant, was orthodox-religious
with his eyes open; and in all things and everywhere spoke
out in plain English, from a soul wherein jesuitism could find
no harbour, and with the front and tone not of a diplomatist
but of a man.
The last of the Tories was Johnson: not Burke, as is often
said; Burke was essentially a Whig, and only, on reaching the
verge of the chasm towards which Whiggism from the first
was inevitably leading, recoiled; and like a man vehement
rather than earnest, a resplendent far-sighted Rhetorician
rather than a deep sure Thinker, recoiled with no measure,
convulsively, and damaging what he drove back with him.
In a world which exists by the balance of Antagonisms,
the respective merit of the Conservator and the Innovator
must ever remain debatable. Great, in the mean while, and
undoubted for both sides, is the merit of him who, in a day of
Change, walks wisely, honestly. Johnson's aim was in itself
an impossible one: this of stemming the eternal Flood of
Time; of clutching all things, and anchoring them down, and
saying, Move not! --how could it or should it, ever have suc-
cess? The strongest man can but retard the current partially
and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest retardation
may not an inestimable value lie? If England has escaped
the blood-bath of a French Revolution; and may yet, in
virtue of this delay and of the experience it has given, work
out her deliverance calmly into a new Era, let Samuel John-
son, beyond all contemporary or succeeding men, have the
praise for it. We said above that he was appointed to be
Ruler of the British Nation for a season: whoso will look
beyond the surface, into the heart of the world's movements,
may find that all Pitt Administrations, and Continental
Subsidies, and Waterloo victories, rested on the possibility of
making England, yet a little while, Toryish, Loyal to the Old;
and this again on the anterior reality, that the Wise had
found such Loyalty still practicable, and recommendable.
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 53
England had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and
Diderots; but the Johnson was peculiar to us.
If we ask now, by what endowment it mainly was that
Johnson realised such a Life for himself and others; what
quality of character the main phenomena of his Life may be
most naturally deduced from, and his other qualities most
naturally subordinated to, in our conception of him, perhaps
the answer were: The quality of Courage, of Valour; that
Johnson was a Brave Man. The Courage that can go forth,
once and away, to Chalk-Farm, and have itself shot, and
muffed out, with decency, is nowise wholly what we mean
here. Such courage we indeed esteem an exceeding small
matter; capable of coexisting with a life full of falsehood,
feebleness, poltroonery and despicability. Nay oftener it is
Cowardice rather that produces the result: for consider, Is
the Chalk-Farm Pistoleer inspired with any reasonable Belief
and Determination; or is he hounded-on by haggard inde-
finable Fear,--how he will be cut at public places, and
"plucked geese of the neighbourhood " will wag their tongues
at him a plucked goose? If he go then, and be shot without
shrieking or audible uproar, it is well for him: nevertheless
there is nothing amazing in it. Courage to manage all this
has not perhaps been denied to any man, or to any woman.
Thus, do not recruiting sergeants drum through the streets of
manufacturing towns, and collect ragged losels enough; every
one of whom, if once dressed in red, and trained a little, will
receive fire cheerfully for the small sum of one shilling per
diem, and have the soul blown out of him at last, with perfect
propriety? The Courage that dares only die is on the whole
no sublime affair; necessary indeed, yet universal; pitiful
when it begins to parade itself. On this Globe of ours there
are some thirty-six persons that manifest it, seldom with the
smallest failure, during every second of time. Nay look at
Newgate: do not the offscourings of Creation, when con-
demned to the gallows as if they were not men but vermin,
walk thither with decency, and even to the scowls and hoot-
Tigs of the whole Universe, give their stern good-night in
silence? What is to be undergone only once, we may undergo;
what must be, comes almost of its own accord. Considered as
Duellist, what a poor figure does the fiercest Irish Whiskerando
make in comparison with any English Game-cock, such as you
may buy for fifteenpence!
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? 54 Carlyle's Essays
The Courage we desire and prize is not the Courage to die
decently, but to live manfully. This, when by God's grace
it has been given, lies deep in the soul; like genial heat,
fosters all other virtues and gifts; without it they could not
live. In spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos,
and such campaigning as there has been, this Courage we
allude to, and call the only true one, is perhaps rarer in these
last ages than it has been in any other since the Saxon In-
vasion under Hengist. Altogether extinct it can never be
among men; otherwise the species Man were no longer for
this world: here and there, in all times, under various guises,
men are sent hither not only to demonstrate but exhibit it,
and testify, as from heart to heart, that it is still possible,
still practicable.
Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man of Letters,
was one of such; and, in good truth, "the bravest of the
brave. " What mortal could have more to war with? Yet,
as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even,
such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand
what it is to have a man's heart may find that, since the time
of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English
bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe too that he
never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so; the
more completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha
Death-dance or Sorcerer's-Sabbath of "Literary Life in
London," appals this pilgrim; he works resolutely for deliver-
ance; in still defiance steps stoutly along. The thing that is
given him to do, he can make himself do; what is to be
endured, he can endure in silence.
How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming daily his own
bitter unalleviable allotment of misery and toil, shows beside
the poor flimsy little soul of young Boswell; one day flaunting
in the ring of vanity, tarrying by the wine-cup and crying,
Aha, the wine is red; the next day deploring his downpressed,
night-shaded, quite poor estate, and thinking it unkind that
the whole movement of the Universe should go on, while his
digestive-apparatus had stopped! We reckon Johnson's
"talent of silence " to be among his great and too rare gifts.
Where there is nothing farther to be done, there shall nothing
farther be said: like his own poor blind Welshwoman, he
accomplished somewhat, and also "endured fifty years of
wretchedness with unshaken fortitude. " How grim was
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 5 5
jfe to him; a sick Prison-house and Doubting-castle! " His
Teat business," he would profess, " was to escape from him-
elf. " Yet towards all this he has taken his position and
esolution; can dismiss it all " with frigid indifference, having
ittle to hope or to fear. " Friends are stupid, and pusillani-
mous, and parsimonious; "wearied of his stay, yet offended at
is departure:" it is the manner of the world. "By popular
ielusion," remarks he with a gigantic calmness, " illiterate
liters will rise into renown:" it is portion of the History
i English Literature; a perennial thing, this same popular
Ielusion; and will--alter the character of the Language.
Closely connected with this quality of Valour, partly as
pringing from it, partly as protected by it, are the more
ecognisable qualities of Truthfulness in word and thought,
ad Honesty in action. There is a reciprocity of influence
lere: for as the realising of Truthfulness and Honesty is the
ifelight and great aim of Valour, so without Valour they
annot, in anywise, be realised. Now, in spite of all practical
ihortcomings, no one that sees into the significance of John-
ion will say that his prime object was not Truth. In con-
versation, doubtless, you may observe him, on occasion,
ighting as if for victory;--and must pardon these ebulliences
if a careless hour, which were not without temptation and
invocation. Remark likewise two things: that such prize-
irguings were ever on merely superficial debatable questions;
tnd then that they were argued generally by the fair laws
>f battle and logic-fence, by one cunning in that same. If
their purpose was excusable, their effect was harmless,
perhaps beneficial: that of taming noisy mediocrity, and
ihowing it another side of a debatable matter; to see both
ides of which was, for the first time, to see the Truth of it.
In his Writings themselves are errors enough, crabbed pre-
wssessions enough; yet these also of a quite extraneous and
iccidental nature, nowhere a wilful shutting of the eyes to-
the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heartfelt discern-
ment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider through what
confused conflicting lights and hallucinations it had to be
attained, of the highest everlasting Truth, and beginning of
all Truths: this namely, that man is ever, and even in the
age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation of God to man;
and lives, moves and has his being in Truth only; is either
true, or, in strict speech, is not at all?
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? 56 Carlyle's Essays
Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson's love of
Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Practice, as what we
have named Honesty of action. "Clear your mind of Cant;" |
clear it, throw Cant utterly away: such was his emphatic,^
repeated precept; and did not he himself faithfully conform 1
to it? The Life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside
out, and examined with microscopes by friend and foe; yet I
was there no Lie found in him. His Doings and Writings are
not shows but performances: you may weigh them in the
balance, and they will stand weight. Not a line, not aj
sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be. '
Alas! and he wrote not out of inward inspiration, but to earn
his wages: and with that grand perennial tide of " popular
delusion" flowing by; in whose waters he nevertheless!
refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too,
muddy for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred of
Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, the lowest,-
possible view of his business, which he followed with such
nobleness. Motive for writing he had none, as he often said,
but money; and yet he wrote so. Into the region of Poetic
Art he indeed never rose; there was no ideal without himl
avowing itself in his work: the nobler was that unavowed^
ideal which lay within him, and commanded saying, Work-
out thy Artisanship in the spirit of an Artist! They who
talk loudest about the dignity of Art, and fancy that they too
are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the Celestials,--let them*
consider well what manner of man this was, who felt himself
to be only a hired day-labourer. A labourer that was
worthy of his hire; that has laboured not as an eye-servant, |
but as one found faithful! Neither was Johnson in those-
days perhaps wholly a unique. Time was when, for money,
you might have ware: and needed not, in all departments,
in that of the Epic Poem, in that of the Blacking-bottle, to
rest content with the mere persuasion that you had ware.
It was a happier time. But as yet the seventh Apocalyptic
Bladder (of Puffery) had not been rent open,--to whir/
and grind, as in a West-Indian Tornado, all earthly trades j
and things into wreck, and dust, and consummation,--and I
regeneration. Be it quickly, since it must be! --
That Mercy can dwell only with Valour, is an old senti-
ment or proposition; which in Johnson again receives con-
firmation. Few men on record have had a more merciful,
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 57
tenderly aSectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called
the Bear; and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one;
being forced to it in his own defence: yet within that shaggy
exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother's, soft as a
Little child's. Nay generally, his very roaring was but the
xnger of affection: the rage of a Bear, if you will; but of a
Bear bereaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, glance at
the Church of England, or the Divine Right; and he was upon
you! These things were his Symbols of all that was good and
precious for men; his very Ark of the Covenant: whoso laid
hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of
hatred to the opponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did
Johnson grow cruel, fiercely contradictory: this is an im-
portant distinction; never to be forgotten in our censure of
his conversational outrages. But observe also with what
humanity, what openness of love, he can attach himself to
all things: to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a
cat "Hodge. " "His thoughts in the latter part of his life
were frequently employed on his deceased friends; he often
muttered these or suchlike sentences: 'Poor man! and then
he died. '" How he patiently converts his poor home into a
Lazaretto; endures, for long years, the contradiction of the
miserable and unreasonable; with him unconnected, save
that they had no other to yield them refuge! Generous old
man! Worldly possession he has little; yet of this he gives
freely; from his own hard-earned shilling, the halfpence for
the poor, that "waited his coming out," are not withheld:
the poor " waited the coming out" of one not quite so poor!
A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses: Johnson
has a rough voice; but he finds the wretched Daughter of
Vice fallen down in the streets; carries her home on his own
shoulders, and like a good Samaritan gives help to the help-
needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in
that sense, to cover a multitude of sins? No Penny-a-week
Committee-Lady, no manager of Soup-Kitchens, dancer at
Charity-Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man: but where,
in all England, could there have been found another soul so
full of Pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his? The
widow's mite, we know, was greater than all the other
gifts.
Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, throughout
manifested, that principally attracts us towards Johnson. A
li 704 E
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? 58 Carlyle's Essays
true brother of men is he; and filial lover of the Earth; who,
with little bright spots of Attachment, " where lives and works
some loved one," has beautified "this rough solitary Earth
into a peopled garden. " Lichfield, with its mostly dull and
limited inhabitants, is to the last one of the sunny islets for
him: Salve magna parens! Or read those Letters on his
Mother's death: what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies
recorded there; a looking back into the Past, unspeakably
mournful, unspeakably tender. And yet calm, sublime; for
he must now act, not look: his venerated Mother has been
taken from him; but he must now write a Rasselas to defray
her funeral! Again in this little incident, recorded in his
Book of Devotion, are not the tones of sacred Sorrow and
Greatness deeper than in many a blank-verse Tragedy;--as.
indeed, " the fifth act of a Tragedy," though unrhymed, does
"lie in every death-bed, were it a peasant's, and of straw:"
"Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday, at about ten in the
morning, I took my leave forever of my dear old friend, Catherine
Chambers, who came to live with my mother about 1724, and has
been but little parted from us since. She buried my father, my
brother and my mother. She is now fifty-eight years old.
"I desired all to withdraw; then told her that we were to part
forever; that as Christians, we should part with prayer; and tha:'
I would, if she was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She
expressed great desire to hear me; and held up her poor hands as
she lay in bed, with great fervour, while I prayed kneeling by
her. . . . ,
"I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest
pain she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in
a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes and great emotion
of tenderness, the same hopes. We kissed and parted; I humbly
hope, to meet again, and to part no more.
? Boswell's Life of Johnson 41
discerning that the Symbol of your Divinity has half become
idolatrous? This was the question, which Johnson, the
man both of clear eye and devout believing heart, must
answer,--at peril of his life. The Whig or Sceptic, on the
other hand, had a much simpler part to play. To him only
the idolatrous side of things, nowise the divine one, lay visible:
not worship, therefore, nay in the strict sense not heart-
honesty, only at most lip- and hand-honesty, is required of
him. What spiritual force is his, he can conscientiously
employ in the work of cavilling, of pulling-down what is
False. For the rest, that there is or can be any Truth of a
higher than sensual nature, has not occurred to him. The
utmost, therefore, that he as man has to aim at, is Re-
spectability, the suffrages of his fellow-men. Such suffrages
he may weigh as well as count: or count only: according as
he is a Burke or a Wilkes. But beyond these there lies
nothing divine for him; these attained, all is attained. Thus
is his whole world distinct and rounded-in; a clear goal
is set before him; a firm path, rougher or smoother; at
worst a firm region wherein to seek a path: let him gird-up
his loins, and travel on without misgivings! For the honest
Conservative, again, nothing is distinct, nothing rounded-in:
Respectability can nowise be his highest Godhead; not
one aim, but two conflicting aims to be continually reconciled
by him, has he to strive after. A difficult position, as we said;
which accordingly the most did, even in those days, but half
defend: by the surrender, namely, of their own too cumber-
some honesty or even understanding; after which the com-
pletest defence was worth little. Into this difficult position
Johnson, nevertheless, threw himself: found it indeed full
of difficulties; yet held it out manfully, as an honest-hearted,
open-sighted man, while life was in him.
Such was that same " twofold Problem " set before Samuel
Johnson. Consider all these moral difficulties; and add to
. them the fearful aggravation, which lay in that other circum-
stance, that he needed a continual appeal to the Public, must
continually produce a certain impression and conviction on
the Public; that if he did not, he ceased to have " provision
for the day that was passing over him," he could not any
longer live! How a vulgar character, once launched into this
wild element; driven onwards by Fear and Famine; without
other aim than to clutch what Provender (of Enjoyment in
II 7? 4 D
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? 42 Carlyle's Essays
any kind) he could get, always if possible keeping quite clear
of the Gallows and Pillory, that is to say, minding needfully
both " person " and " character,"--would have floated hither
and thither in it; and contrived to eat some three repasts
daily, and wear some three suits yearly, and then to depart
and disappear, having consumed his last ration: all this
might be worth knowing, but were in itself a trivial knowledge.
How a noble man, resolute for the Truth, to whom Shams
and Lies were once for all an abomination, was to act in it:
here lay the mystery. By what methods, by what gifts of
eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel Johnson, now when
cast forth into that waste Chaos of Authorship, maddest
of things, a mingled Phlegethon and Fleet-ditch, with its
floating lumber, and sea-krakens, and mud-spectres,--shape
himself a voyage; of the transient driftwood, and the enduring
iron, build him a sea-worthy Life-boat, and sail therein,
undrowned, unpolluted, through the roaring "mother of
dead dogs," onwards to an eternal Landmark, and City that
hath foundations? This high question is even the one
answered in Boswell's Book; which Book we therefore, not
so falsely, have named a Heroic Poem ; for in it there lies the
whole argument of such. Glory to our brave Samuel! He
accomplished this wonderful Problem; and now through long
generations we point to him, and say: Here also was a Man;
let the world once more have assurance of a Man!
Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on that con-
fusion worse confounded of grandeur and squalor, no light
but an earthly outward one, he too must have made ship-
wreck. With his diseased body and vehement voracious
heart, how easy for him to become a carpe-diem Philosopher,
like the rest, and live and die as miserably as any Boyce
of that Brotherhood! But happily there was a higher light
for him; shining as a lamp to his path; which, in all paths,
would teach him to act and walk not as a fool, but as wise,
and in those evil days too "redeeming the time. " Under
dimmer or clearer manifestations, a Truth had been revealed
to him: I also am a Man; even in this unutterable element
of Authorship, I may live as beseems a man! That Wrong
is not only different from Right, but that it is in strict
scientific terms infinitely different; even as the gaming of
the whole world set against the losing of one's own soul, or
(as Johnson had it) a Heaven set against a Hell; that in all
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson
43
situations out of the Pit of Tophet, wherein a living Man
has stood or can stand, there is actually a Prize of quite
infinite value placed within his reach, namely a Duty for him
to do: this highest Gospel, which forms the basis and worth
of all other Gospels whatsoever, had been revealed to Samuel
Johnson; and the man had believed it, and laid it faithfully
to heart. Such knowledge of the transcendental, immeasurable
character of Duty we call the basis of all Gospels, the essence
of all Religion: he who with his whole soul knows not this,
as yet knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing.
This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those that
knew: under a certain authentic Symbol it stood forever
present to his eyes: a Symbol, indeed, waxing old as doth
a garment; yet which had guided forward, as their Banner
and celestial Pillar of Fire, innumerable saints and witnesses,
the fathers of our modern world; and for him also had still
a sacred significance. It does not appear that at any time
Johnson was what we call irreligious: but in his sorrows
and isolation, when hope died away, and only a long vista
of suffering and toil lay before him to the end, then first did
Religion shine forth in its meek, everlasting clearness; even
as the stars do in black night, which in the daytime and dusk
were hidden by inferior lights. How a true man, in the
midst of errors and uncertainties, shall work out for himself
a sure Life-truth; and adjusting the transient to the eternal,
amid the fragments of ruined Temples build up, with toil and
pain, a little Altar for himself, and worship there; how
Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire, can purify and fortify
his soul, and hold real communion with the Highest, "in
the Church of St. Clement Danes: " this too stands all un-
folded in his Biography, and is among the most touching
and memorable things there; a thing to be looked at with
pity, admiration, awe. Johnson's Religion was as the light of
life to him; without it his heart was all sick, dark and had
no guidance left.
He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that unspeakable
shoeblack-seraph Army of Authors; but can feel hereby that
he fights under a celestial flag, and will quit him like a man.
The first grand requisite, an assured heart, he therefore has:
what his outward equipments and accoutrements are, is the
next question; an important, though inferior one. His intel-
lectual stock, intrinsically viewed, is perhaps inconsiderable:
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? 44 Carlyle's Essays
the furnishings of an English School and English University;
good knowledge of the Latin tongue, a more uncertain one of
Greek: this is a rather slender stock of Education wherewith
to front the world. But then it is to be remembered that his
world was England; that such was the culture England
commonly supplied and expected. Besides, Johnson has
been a voracious reader, though a desultory one, and oftenest
in strange scholastic, too obsolete Libraries; he has also
rubbed shoulders with the press of Actual Life for some
thirty years now: views or hallucinations of innumerable
things are weltering to and fro in him. Above all, be his
weapons what they may, he has an arm that can wield them.
Nature has given him her choicest gift,--an open eye and
heart. He will look on the world, wheresoever he can catch
a glimpse of it, with eager curiosity: to the last, we find
this a striking characteristic of him; for all human interests
he has a sense; the meanest handicraftsman could interest
him, even in extreme age, by speaking of his craft: the ways
of men are all interesting to him; any human thing, that he
did not know, he wished to know. Reflection, moreover,
Meditation, was what he practised incessantly, with or with-
out his will: for the mind of the man was earnest, deep as I
well as humane. Thus would the world, such fragments of
it as he could survey, form itself, or continually tend to form
itself, into a coherent Whole; on any and on all phases of
which, his vote and voice must be well worth listening to.
As a Speaker of the Word, he will speak real words; no idle
jargon or hollow triviality will issue from him. His aim too
is clear, attainable; that of working for his wages: let him do
this honestly, and all else will follow of its own accord.
With such omens, into such a warfare, did Johnson go
forth. A rugged hungry Kerne or Gallowglass, as we called
him: yet indomitable; in whom lay the true spirit of a
Soldier. With giant's force he toils, since such is his appoint-
ment, were it but at hewing of wood and drawing of water
for old sedentary bushy-wigged Cave; distinguishes himself
by mere quantity, if there is to be no other distinction. He
can write all things; frosty Latin verses, if these are the
saleable commodity; Book - prefaces, Political Philippics,
Review Articles, Parliamentary Debates: all things he does
rapidly; still more surprising, all things he does thoroughly
and well. How he sits there, in his rough-hewn amorphous
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 45
bulk, in that upper-room at St. John's Gate, and trundles-
off sheet after sheet of those Senate-of-Lilliput Debates,
to the clamorous Printer's Devils waiting for them with
insatiable throat, down stairs; himself perhaps impransus
all the while! Admire also the greatness of Literature;
how a grain of mustard-seed cast into its Nile-waters, shall
settle in the teeming mould, and be found, one day, as a
Tree, in whose branches all the fowls of heaven may lodge.
Was it not so with these Lilliput Debates? In that small
project and act began the stupendous Fourth Estate;
whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take
in; in whose boughs are there not already fowls of strange
feather lodged? Such things, and far stranger, were done in
that wondrous old Portal, even in latter times. And then
figure Samuel dining " behind the screen," from a trencher
covertly handed-in to him, at a preconcerted nod from the
"great bushy wig;" Samuel too ragged to show face, yet
"made a happy man of" by hearing his praise spoken. If to
Johnson himself, then much more to us, may that St. John's
Gate be a place we can "never pass without veneration. " 1
1 All Johnson's places of resort and abode are venerable, and now
indeed to the many as well as to the few; for his name has become
great; and, as we must often with a kind of sad admiration recognise,
there is, even to the rudest man, no greatness so venerable as in-
tellectual, as spiritual greatness; nay properly there is no other vener-
able at all. For example, what soul-subduing magic, for the very
clown or craftsman of our England, lies in the word " Scholar "! " He
is a Scholar: " he is a man wiser than we; of a wisdom to us boundless,
infinite: who shall speak his worth! Such things, we say, fill us with
a certain pathetic admiration of defaced and obstructed yet glorious
man; archangel though in ruins,--or rather, though in rubbish of en-
cumbrances and mud-incrustations, which also are not to be perpetual.
Nevertheless, in this mad-whirling all-forgetting London, the haunts
of the mighty that were can seldom without a strange difficulty be dis-
covered. Will any man, for instance, tell us which bricks it was in
Lincoln's Inn Buildings that Ben Jonson's hand and trowel laid? No
man, it is to be feared,--and also grumbled at. With Samuel Johnson
may it prove otherwise! A Gentleman of the British Museum is said
to have made drawings of all his residences: the blessing of Old
Mortality be upon him! We ourselves, not without labour and risk,
lately discovered Gough Square, between Fleet Street and Holborn
(adjoining both to Bolt Court and to Johnson's Court); and on the
second day of search, the very House there, wherein the English Dic-
tionary was composed. It is the first or corner house on the right
hand, as you enter through the arched way from the North-west. The
actual occupant, an elderly, well-washed, decent-looking man, invited
us to enter; and courteously undertook to be cicerone; though in his
memory lay nothing but the foolishest jumble and hallucination. It
is a stout, old-fashioned, oak-balustraded house: "I have spent many
a pound and penny on it since then," said the worthy Landlord: "here,
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? 46 Carlyle's Essays
Poverty, Distress, and as yet Obscurity, are his companions:
so poor is he that his Wife must leave him, and seek shelter
among other relations; Johnson's household has accommoda-
tion for one inmate only. To all his ever-varying, ever-
recurring troubles, moreover, must be added this continual
one of ill-health, and its concomitant depressiveness: a
galling load, which would have crushed most common mortals
into desperation, is his appointed ballast and life-burden;
he "could not remember the day he had passed free from
pain. " Nevertheless, Life, as we said before, is always Life:
a healthy soul, imprison it as you will, in squalid garrets,
shabby coat, bodily sickness, or whatever else, will assert
its heaven-granted indefeasible Freedom, its right to conquer
difficulties, to do work, even to feel gladness. Johnson does
not whine over his existence, but manfully makes the most
and best of it. "He said, a man might live in a garret at
eighteenpence a-week: few people would inquire where he
lodged; and if they did, it was easy to say,' Sir, I am to be
found at such a place. ' By spending threepence in a coffee-
house, he might be for some hours every day in very good -
company; he might dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread-
and-milk for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-'
shirt day he went abroad and paid visits. " Think by whom
and of whom this was uttered, and ask then, Whether there
is more pathos in it than in a whole circulating-library of
Giaours and Harolds, or less pathos? On another occasion,
"when Dr. Johnson, one day, read his own Satire, in
which the life of a scholar is painted, with the various
obstructions thrown in his way to fortune and to fame, he
burst into a passion of tears: Mr. Thrale's family and Mr.
Scott only were present, who, in a jocose way, clapped him
on the back, and said,' What's all this, my dear sir? Why,
you and I and Hercules, you know, were all troubled with
melancholy. ' He was a very large man, and made-out the
triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough. "
you see, this Bedroom was the Doctor's study; that was the garden"
(a plot of delved ground somewhat larger than a bed-quilt), " where
he walked for exercise; these three garret Bedrooms" (where his
three Copyists sat and wrote) " were the place he kept his--Pupils in! "
Tempus edax rerum! Yet jerax also: for our friend now added, with
a wistful look, which strove to seem merely historical: "I let it all in
Lodgings, to respectable gentlemen; by the quarter or the month;
it's all one to me. "--" To me also," whispered the Ghost of Samuel, as
we went pensively our ways.
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? Boswcll's Life of Johnson 47
These were sweet tears; the sweet victorious remembrance
lay in them of toils indeed frightful, yet never flinched from,
and now triumphed over. "One day it shall delight you
also to remember labour done! "--Neither, though Johnson is
obscure and poor, need the highest enjoyment of existence,
that of heart freely communing with heart, be denied him.
Savage and he wander homeless through the streets; without
bed, yet not without friendly converse; such another con-
versation not, it is like, producible in the proudest drawing-
room of London. Nor, under the void Night, upon the hard
pavement, are their own woes the only topic: nowise; they
"will stand by their country," they there, the two " Back-
woodsmen " of the'Brick Desert!
Of all outward evils Obscurity is perhaps in itself the least.
To Johnson, as to a healthy-minded man, the fantastic
article, sold or given under the title of Fame, had little or no
value but its intrinsic one. He prized it as the means of
getting him employment and good wages; scarcely as any-
thing more. His light and guidance came from a loftier
source; of which, in honest aversion to all hypocrisy or
pretentious talk, he spoke not to men; nay perhaps, being
of a healthy mind, had never spoken to himself. We reckon
it a striking fact in Johnson's history, this carelessness of his
to Fame. Most authors speak of their "Fame" as if it
were a quite priceless matter; the grand ultimatum, and
heavenly Constantine's - Banner they had to follow, and
conquer under. --Thy "Fame "! Unhappy mortal, where
will it and thou both be in some fifty years? Shakspeare
himself has lasted but two hundred; Homer (partly by
accident) three thousand: and does not already an Eternity
encircle every Me and every Thee? Cease, then, to sit
feverishly hatching on that " Fame " of thine; and flapping
and shrieking with fierce hisses, like brood-goose on her last
egg, if man shall or dare approach it! Quarrel not with me,
hate me not, my Brother: make what thou canst of thy
egg, and welcome: God knows, I will not steal it; I believe
it to be addle. --Johnson, for his part, was no man to be killed
by a review; concerning which matter, it was said by
a benevolent person: If any author can be reviewed to
death, let it be, with all convenient despatch, done. Johnson
thankfully receives any word spoken in his favour; is nowise
disobliged by a lampoon, but will look at it, if pointed out
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? 48 Carlyle's Essays
to him, and show how it might have been done better: the
lampoon itself is indeed nothing, a soap-bubble that next
moment will become a drop of sour suds; but in the mean-
while, if it do anything, it keeps him more in the world's eye,
and the next bargain will be all the richer: "Sir, if they
should cease to talk of me, I must starve. " Sound heart and
understanding head: these fail no man, not even a Man of
Letters!
Obscurity, however, was, in Johnson's case, whether a
light or heavy evil, likely to be no lasting one. He is ani-
mated by the spirit of a true workman, resolute to do his work
well; and he does his work well; all his work, that of writing,
that of living. A man of this stamp i5 unhappily not so
common in the literary or in any other department of the
world, that he can continue always unnoticed. By slow
degrees, Johnson emerges; looming, at first, huge and dim
in the eye of an observant few; at last disclosed, in his real
proportions, to the eye of the whole world, and encircled
with a " light-nimbus " of glory, so that whoso is not blind
must and shall behold him. By slow degrees, we said; for
this also is notable; slow but sure: as his fame waxes not
by exaggerated clamour of what he seems to be, but by better
and better insight of what he is, so it will last and stand
wearing, being genuine. Thus indeed is it always, or nearly
always, with true fame. The heavenly Luminary rises amid
vapours; stargazers enough must scan it with critical tele-
scopes; it makes no blazing, the world can either look at
it, or forbear looking at it; not till after a time and times
does its celestial eternal nature become indubitable. Pleasant,
on the other hand, is the blazing of a Tarbarrel; the crowd
dance merrily round it, with loud huzzaing, universal three-
times-three, and, like Homer's peasants, "bless the useful
light:" but unhappily it so soon ends in darkness, foul
choking smoke; and is kicked into the gutters, a nameless
imbroglio of charred staves, pitch-cinders and vomissement
du diable I
But indeed, from of old, Johnson has enjoyed all, or nearly
all, that Fame can yield any man: the respect, the obedience
of those that are about him and inferior to him; of those
whose opinion alone can have any forcible impression on him.
A little circle gathers round the Wise man; which gradually
enlarges as the report thereof spreads, and more can come to
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 49
see and to believe; for Wisdom is precious, and of irresistible
attraction to all. "An inspired-idiot," Goldsmith, hangs
strangely about him; though, as Hawkins says, " he loved not
? Johnson, but rather envied him for his parts; and once
entreated a friend to desist from praising him, ' for in doing
so,' said he, ' you harrow-up my very soul! '" Yet, on the
whole, there is no evil in the " gooseberry-fool; " but rather
much good; of a finer, if of a weaker, sort than Johnson's;
and all the more genuine that he himself could never become
conscious of it,--though unhappily never cease attempting to
become so: the Author of the genuine Vicar of Wakefield, nill
iie, will he, must needs fly towards such a mass of genuine
Manhood; and Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. Major,
alternately attracted and repelled. Then there is the
chivalrous Topham Beauclerk, with his sharp wit, and gallant
courtly ways: there is Bennet Langton, an orthodox gentle-
man, and worthy; though Johnson once laughed, louder
almost than mortal, at his last will and testament; and
"could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till
he got without the Temple-gate; then burst into such a fit of
laughter that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and,
in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at
the side of the foot-pavement, and sent forth peals so loud
that, in the silence of the night, his voice seemed to resound
from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch! " Lastly comes his solid-
thinking, solid-feeding Thrale, the well-beloved man; with
Thralia, a bright papilionaceous creature, whom the elephant
,Wed to play with, and wave to and fro upon his trunk. Not
to speak of a reverent Bozzy, for what need is there farther ? --
Or of the spiritual Luminaries, with tongue or pen, who made
that age remarkable; or of Highland Lairds drinking, in
fierce usquebaugh, " Your health, Toctor Shonson! "--Still
less of many such as that poor " Mr. F. Lewis," older in date,
of whose birth, death and whole terrestrial res gestce, this only,
and strange enough this actually, survives: "Sir, he lived in
london, and hung loose upon society! " Stat Parvi nominis
mbra. --
In his fifty-third year he is beneficed, by the royal bounty,
wth a Pension of three-hundred pounds.
Loud clamour is
always more or less insane: but probably the insanest of all
loud clamours in the eighteenth century was this that was
raised about Johnson's Pension. Men seem to be led by the
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? 50 Carlyle's Essays
noses: but in reality, it is by the ears,--as some ancient
slaves were, who had their ears bored; or as some modern
quadrupeds may be, whose ears are long. Very falsely was
it said, " Names do not change Things. " Names do change
Things; nay for most part they are the only substance, which
mankind can discern in Things. The whole sum that John-
son, during the remaining twenty-two years of his life, drew
from the public funds of England, would have supported
some Supreme Priest for about half as many weeks; it amounts
very nearly to the revenue of our poorest Church-Overseer for
one twelvemonth. Of secular Administrators of Provinces,
and Horse-subduers, and Game-destroyers, we shall not so
much as speak: but who were the Primates of England, and
the Primates of All England, during Johnson's days? No
man has remembered. Again, is the Primate of all England
something, or is he nothing? If something, then what but
the man who, in the supreme degree, teaches and spiritually
edifies, and leads towards Heaven by guiding wisely through
the Earth, the living souls that inhabit England? We touch
here upon deep matters; which but remotely concern us, and
might lead us into still deeper: clear, in the mean while, it is
that the true Spiritual Edifier and Soul's-Father of all Eng-
land was, and till very lately continued to be, the man named
Samuel Johnson,--whom this scot-and-lot-paying world
cackled reproachfully to see remunerated like a Supervisor of
Excise!
If Destiny had beaten hard on poor Samuel, and did never
cease to visit him too roughly, yet the last section of his Life
might be pronounced victorious, and on the whole happy.
He was not idle; but now no longer goaded-on by want; the
light which had shone irradiating the dark haunts of Poverty,
now illuminates the circles of Wealth, of a certain culture and
elegant intelligence; he who had once been admitted to
speak with Edmund Cave and Tobacco Browne, now admits
a Reynolds and a Burke to speak with him. Loving friends
are there; Listeners, even Answerers: the fruit of his long
labours lies round him in fair legible Writings, of Philosophy,
Eloquence, Morality, Philology; some excellent, all worthy
and genuine Works; for which too, a deep, earnest murmur
of thanks reaches him from all ends of his Fatherland. Nay
there are works of Goodness, of undying Mercy, which even
he has possessed the power to do: "What I gave I have;
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson
what I spent I had! " Early friends had long sunk into the
grave; yet in his soul they ever lived, fresh and clear, with
soft pious breathings towards them, not without a still hope
of one day meeting them again in purer union. Such was
Johnson's Life: the victorious Battle of a free, true Man.
Finally he died the death of the free and true: a dark cloud
of Death, solemn and not untinged with haloes of immortal
Hope, " took him away," and our eyes could no longer behold
him; but can still behold the trace and impress of his
courageous honest spirit, deep-legible in the World's Business,
wheresoever he walked and was.
To estimate the quantity of Work that Johnson performed,
how much poorer the World were had it wanted him, can, as
in all such cases, never be accurately done; cannot, till after
some longer space, be approximately done. All work is as
seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew, and
so, in endless palingenesia, lives and works. To Johnson's
Writings, good and solid, and still profitable as they are, we
have already rated his Life and Conversation as superior. By
the one and by the other, who shall compute what effects
have been produced, and are still, and into deep Time,
producing?
So much, however, we can already see: It is now some
three quarters of a century that Johnson has been the Prophet
of the English; the man by whose light the English people, in
public and in private, more than by any other man's, have
guided their existence. Higher light than that immediately
poetical one; higher virtue than an honest Prudence, he
could not then communicate; nor perhaps could they have
received: such light, such virtue, however, he did communi-
cate. How to thread this labyrinthic Time, the fallen and
falling Ruin of Times; to silence vain Scruples, hold firm to
the last the fragments of old Belief, and with earnest eye still
discern some glimpses of a true path, and go forward thereon,
"in a world where there is much to be done, and little to be
lmown:" this is what Samuel Johnson, by act and word,
taught his Nation; what his Nation received and learned of
him, more than of any other. We can view him as the pre-
server and transmitter of whatsoever was genuine in the spirit
of Toryism; which genuine spirit, it is now becoming manifest,
must again embody itself in all new forms of Society, be what
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? 52 Carlyle's Essays
they may, that are to exist, and have continuance--elsewhere
than on Paper. The last in many things, Johnson was the last
genuine Tory; the last of Englishmen who, with strong voice
and wholly-believing heart, preached the Doctrine of Standing
still; who, without selfishness or slavishness, reverenced the
existing Powers, and could assert the privileges of rank,
though himself poor, neglected and plebeian; who had heart-
devoutness with heart-hatred of cant, was orthodox-religious
with his eyes open; and in all things and everywhere spoke
out in plain English, from a soul wherein jesuitism could find
no harbour, and with the front and tone not of a diplomatist
but of a man.
The last of the Tories was Johnson: not Burke, as is often
said; Burke was essentially a Whig, and only, on reaching the
verge of the chasm towards which Whiggism from the first
was inevitably leading, recoiled; and like a man vehement
rather than earnest, a resplendent far-sighted Rhetorician
rather than a deep sure Thinker, recoiled with no measure,
convulsively, and damaging what he drove back with him.
In a world which exists by the balance of Antagonisms,
the respective merit of the Conservator and the Innovator
must ever remain debatable. Great, in the mean while, and
undoubted for both sides, is the merit of him who, in a day of
Change, walks wisely, honestly. Johnson's aim was in itself
an impossible one: this of stemming the eternal Flood of
Time; of clutching all things, and anchoring them down, and
saying, Move not! --how could it or should it, ever have suc-
cess? The strongest man can but retard the current partially
and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest retardation
may not an inestimable value lie? If England has escaped
the blood-bath of a French Revolution; and may yet, in
virtue of this delay and of the experience it has given, work
out her deliverance calmly into a new Era, let Samuel John-
son, beyond all contemporary or succeeding men, have the
praise for it. We said above that he was appointed to be
Ruler of the British Nation for a season: whoso will look
beyond the surface, into the heart of the world's movements,
may find that all Pitt Administrations, and Continental
Subsidies, and Waterloo victories, rested on the possibility of
making England, yet a little while, Toryish, Loyal to the Old;
and this again on the anterior reality, that the Wise had
found such Loyalty still practicable, and recommendable.
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 53
England had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and
Diderots; but the Johnson was peculiar to us.
If we ask now, by what endowment it mainly was that
Johnson realised such a Life for himself and others; what
quality of character the main phenomena of his Life may be
most naturally deduced from, and his other qualities most
naturally subordinated to, in our conception of him, perhaps
the answer were: The quality of Courage, of Valour; that
Johnson was a Brave Man. The Courage that can go forth,
once and away, to Chalk-Farm, and have itself shot, and
muffed out, with decency, is nowise wholly what we mean
here. Such courage we indeed esteem an exceeding small
matter; capable of coexisting with a life full of falsehood,
feebleness, poltroonery and despicability. Nay oftener it is
Cowardice rather that produces the result: for consider, Is
the Chalk-Farm Pistoleer inspired with any reasonable Belief
and Determination; or is he hounded-on by haggard inde-
finable Fear,--how he will be cut at public places, and
"plucked geese of the neighbourhood " will wag their tongues
at him a plucked goose? If he go then, and be shot without
shrieking or audible uproar, it is well for him: nevertheless
there is nothing amazing in it. Courage to manage all this
has not perhaps been denied to any man, or to any woman.
Thus, do not recruiting sergeants drum through the streets of
manufacturing towns, and collect ragged losels enough; every
one of whom, if once dressed in red, and trained a little, will
receive fire cheerfully for the small sum of one shilling per
diem, and have the soul blown out of him at last, with perfect
propriety? The Courage that dares only die is on the whole
no sublime affair; necessary indeed, yet universal; pitiful
when it begins to parade itself. On this Globe of ours there
are some thirty-six persons that manifest it, seldom with the
smallest failure, during every second of time. Nay look at
Newgate: do not the offscourings of Creation, when con-
demned to the gallows as if they were not men but vermin,
walk thither with decency, and even to the scowls and hoot-
Tigs of the whole Universe, give their stern good-night in
silence? What is to be undergone only once, we may undergo;
what must be, comes almost of its own accord. Considered as
Duellist, what a poor figure does the fiercest Irish Whiskerando
make in comparison with any English Game-cock, such as you
may buy for fifteenpence!
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? 54 Carlyle's Essays
The Courage we desire and prize is not the Courage to die
decently, but to live manfully. This, when by God's grace
it has been given, lies deep in the soul; like genial heat,
fosters all other virtues and gifts; without it they could not
live. In spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos,
and such campaigning as there has been, this Courage we
allude to, and call the only true one, is perhaps rarer in these
last ages than it has been in any other since the Saxon In-
vasion under Hengist. Altogether extinct it can never be
among men; otherwise the species Man were no longer for
this world: here and there, in all times, under various guises,
men are sent hither not only to demonstrate but exhibit it,
and testify, as from heart to heart, that it is still possible,
still practicable.
Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man of Letters,
was one of such; and, in good truth, "the bravest of the
brave. " What mortal could have more to war with? Yet,
as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even,
such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand
what it is to have a man's heart may find that, since the time
of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English
bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe too that he
never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so; the
more completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha
Death-dance or Sorcerer's-Sabbath of "Literary Life in
London," appals this pilgrim; he works resolutely for deliver-
ance; in still defiance steps stoutly along. The thing that is
given him to do, he can make himself do; what is to be
endured, he can endure in silence.
How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming daily his own
bitter unalleviable allotment of misery and toil, shows beside
the poor flimsy little soul of young Boswell; one day flaunting
in the ring of vanity, tarrying by the wine-cup and crying,
Aha, the wine is red; the next day deploring his downpressed,
night-shaded, quite poor estate, and thinking it unkind that
the whole movement of the Universe should go on, while his
digestive-apparatus had stopped! We reckon Johnson's
"talent of silence " to be among his great and too rare gifts.
Where there is nothing farther to be done, there shall nothing
farther be said: like his own poor blind Welshwoman, he
accomplished somewhat, and also "endured fifty years of
wretchedness with unshaken fortitude. " How grim was
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 5 5
jfe to him; a sick Prison-house and Doubting-castle! " His
Teat business," he would profess, " was to escape from him-
elf. " Yet towards all this he has taken his position and
esolution; can dismiss it all " with frigid indifference, having
ittle to hope or to fear. " Friends are stupid, and pusillani-
mous, and parsimonious; "wearied of his stay, yet offended at
is departure:" it is the manner of the world. "By popular
ielusion," remarks he with a gigantic calmness, " illiterate
liters will rise into renown:" it is portion of the History
i English Literature; a perennial thing, this same popular
Ielusion; and will--alter the character of the Language.
Closely connected with this quality of Valour, partly as
pringing from it, partly as protected by it, are the more
ecognisable qualities of Truthfulness in word and thought,
ad Honesty in action. There is a reciprocity of influence
lere: for as the realising of Truthfulness and Honesty is the
ifelight and great aim of Valour, so without Valour they
annot, in anywise, be realised. Now, in spite of all practical
ihortcomings, no one that sees into the significance of John-
ion will say that his prime object was not Truth. In con-
versation, doubtless, you may observe him, on occasion,
ighting as if for victory;--and must pardon these ebulliences
if a careless hour, which were not without temptation and
invocation. Remark likewise two things: that such prize-
irguings were ever on merely superficial debatable questions;
tnd then that they were argued generally by the fair laws
>f battle and logic-fence, by one cunning in that same. If
their purpose was excusable, their effect was harmless,
perhaps beneficial: that of taming noisy mediocrity, and
ihowing it another side of a debatable matter; to see both
ides of which was, for the first time, to see the Truth of it.
In his Writings themselves are errors enough, crabbed pre-
wssessions enough; yet these also of a quite extraneous and
iccidental nature, nowhere a wilful shutting of the eyes to-
the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heartfelt discern-
ment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider through what
confused conflicting lights and hallucinations it had to be
attained, of the highest everlasting Truth, and beginning of
all Truths: this namely, that man is ever, and even in the
age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation of God to man;
and lives, moves and has his being in Truth only; is either
true, or, in strict speech, is not at all?
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? 56 Carlyle's Essays
Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson's love of
Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Practice, as what we
have named Honesty of action. "Clear your mind of Cant;" |
clear it, throw Cant utterly away: such was his emphatic,^
repeated precept; and did not he himself faithfully conform 1
to it? The Life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside
out, and examined with microscopes by friend and foe; yet I
was there no Lie found in him. His Doings and Writings are
not shows but performances: you may weigh them in the
balance, and they will stand weight. Not a line, not aj
sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be. '
Alas! and he wrote not out of inward inspiration, but to earn
his wages: and with that grand perennial tide of " popular
delusion" flowing by; in whose waters he nevertheless!
refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too,
muddy for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred of
Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, the lowest,-
possible view of his business, which he followed with such
nobleness. Motive for writing he had none, as he often said,
but money; and yet he wrote so. Into the region of Poetic
Art he indeed never rose; there was no ideal without himl
avowing itself in his work: the nobler was that unavowed^
ideal which lay within him, and commanded saying, Work-
out thy Artisanship in the spirit of an Artist! They who
talk loudest about the dignity of Art, and fancy that they too
are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the Celestials,--let them*
consider well what manner of man this was, who felt himself
to be only a hired day-labourer. A labourer that was
worthy of his hire; that has laboured not as an eye-servant, |
but as one found faithful! Neither was Johnson in those-
days perhaps wholly a unique. Time was when, for money,
you might have ware: and needed not, in all departments,
in that of the Epic Poem, in that of the Blacking-bottle, to
rest content with the mere persuasion that you had ware.
It was a happier time. But as yet the seventh Apocalyptic
Bladder (of Puffery) had not been rent open,--to whir/
and grind, as in a West-Indian Tornado, all earthly trades j
and things into wreck, and dust, and consummation,--and I
regeneration. Be it quickly, since it must be! --
That Mercy can dwell only with Valour, is an old senti-
ment or proposition; which in Johnson again receives con-
firmation. Few men on record have had a more merciful,
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 57
tenderly aSectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called
the Bear; and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one;
being forced to it in his own defence: yet within that shaggy
exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother's, soft as a
Little child's. Nay generally, his very roaring was but the
xnger of affection: the rage of a Bear, if you will; but of a
Bear bereaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, glance at
the Church of England, or the Divine Right; and he was upon
you! These things were his Symbols of all that was good and
precious for men; his very Ark of the Covenant: whoso laid
hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of
hatred to the opponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did
Johnson grow cruel, fiercely contradictory: this is an im-
portant distinction; never to be forgotten in our censure of
his conversational outrages. But observe also with what
humanity, what openness of love, he can attach himself to
all things: to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a
cat "Hodge. " "His thoughts in the latter part of his life
were frequently employed on his deceased friends; he often
muttered these or suchlike sentences: 'Poor man! and then
he died. '" How he patiently converts his poor home into a
Lazaretto; endures, for long years, the contradiction of the
miserable and unreasonable; with him unconnected, save
that they had no other to yield them refuge! Generous old
man! Worldly possession he has little; yet of this he gives
freely; from his own hard-earned shilling, the halfpence for
the poor, that "waited his coming out," are not withheld:
the poor " waited the coming out" of one not quite so poor!
A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses: Johnson
has a rough voice; but he finds the wretched Daughter of
Vice fallen down in the streets; carries her home on his own
shoulders, and like a good Samaritan gives help to the help-
needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in
that sense, to cover a multitude of sins? No Penny-a-week
Committee-Lady, no manager of Soup-Kitchens, dancer at
Charity-Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man: but where,
in all England, could there have been found another soul so
full of Pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his? The
widow's mite, we know, was greater than all the other
gifts.
Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, throughout
manifested, that principally attracts us towards Johnson. A
li 704 E
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? 58 Carlyle's Essays
true brother of men is he; and filial lover of the Earth; who,
with little bright spots of Attachment, " where lives and works
some loved one," has beautified "this rough solitary Earth
into a peopled garden. " Lichfield, with its mostly dull and
limited inhabitants, is to the last one of the sunny islets for
him: Salve magna parens! Or read those Letters on his
Mother's death: what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies
recorded there; a looking back into the Past, unspeakably
mournful, unspeakably tender. And yet calm, sublime; for
he must now act, not look: his venerated Mother has been
taken from him; but he must now write a Rasselas to defray
her funeral! Again in this little incident, recorded in his
Book of Devotion, are not the tones of sacred Sorrow and
Greatness deeper than in many a blank-verse Tragedy;--as.
indeed, " the fifth act of a Tragedy," though unrhymed, does
"lie in every death-bed, were it a peasant's, and of straw:"
"Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday, at about ten in the
morning, I took my leave forever of my dear old friend, Catherine
Chambers, who came to live with my mother about 1724, and has
been but little parted from us since. She buried my father, my
brother and my mother. She is now fifty-eight years old.
"I desired all to withdraw; then told her that we were to part
forever; that as Christians, we should part with prayer; and tha:'
I would, if she was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She
expressed great desire to hear me; and held up her poor hands as
she lay in bed, with great fervour, while I prayed kneeling by
her. . . . ,
"I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest
pain she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in
a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes and great emotion
of tenderness, the same hopes. We kissed and parted; I humbly
hope, to meet again, and to part no more.
