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.
Mother's death: what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies
recorded there; a looking back into the Past, unspeakably
mournful, unspeakably tender.
Thomas Carlyle
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. "
Tears trickling down the granite rock: a soft well of Pity
springs within! -- Still more tragical is this other scene:
"Johnson mentioned that he could not in general accuse
himself of having been an undutiful son. 'Once, indeed;
said he,' I was disobedient: I refused to attend my father to
Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and
the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired
to atone for this fault. '"--But by what method? --What
method was now possible? Hear it; the words are again
given as his own, though here evidently by a less capable
reporter:
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? Boswcll's Life of Johnson 59
"Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure
in the morning, but I was compelled to it by conscience. Fifty
years ago, Madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial
piety. My father had been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter
market, and opening a stall there for the sale of his Books. Con-
fined by indisposition, he desired me, that day, to go and attend
the stall in his place. My pride prevented me; I gave my father
a refusal. --And now to-day I have been at Uttoxeter; I went into
the market at the time of business, uncovered my head, and stood
with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where my father's stall used
;to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was
expiatory. "
Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the
"rainy weather, and the sneers," or wonder, "of the by-
standers"? The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising
from the far distance; sad-beckoning in the "moonlight of
memory: " how he had toiled faithfully hither and thither;
patiently among the lowest of the low; been buffeted and
beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it anew--And
oh, when the wearied old man, as Bookseller, or Hawker, or
Tinker, or whatsoever it was that Fate had reduced him to,
begged help of thee for one day,--how savage, diabolic, was
that mean Vanity, which answered, No! He sleeps now;
after life's fitful fever, he sleeps well: but thou, O Merciless,
how now wilt thou still the sting of that remembrance? --
The picture of Samuel Johnson standing bareheaded in the
market there, is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint.
Repentance! Repentance! he proclaims, as with passionate
,vsobs: but only to the ear of Heaven, if Heaven will give him
audience: the earthly ear and heart, that should have heard
it, are now closed, unresponsive forever.
That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling Affectionateness,
the inmost essence of his being, must have looked forth, in
one form or another, through Johnson's whole character,
practical and intellectual, modifying both, is not to be doubted.
Yet through what singular distortions and superstitions,
moping melancholies, blind habits, whims about "entering
with the right foot," and " touching every post as he walked
along;" and all the other mad chaotic lumber of a brain that,
with sun-clear intellect, hovered forever on the verge of in-
sanity,--must that same inmost essence have looked forth;
unrecognisable to all but the most observant! Accordingly
it was not recognised; Johnson passed not for a fine nature,
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? 60 Carlyle's Essays
but for a dull, almost brutal one. Might not, for example,
the first-fruit of such a Lovingness, coupled with his quick
Insight, have been expected to be a peculiarly courteous
demeanour as man among men? In Johnson's " Politeness,"
which he often, to the wonder of some, asserted to be great,
there was indeed somewhat that needed explanation.
Nevertheless, if he insisted always on handing lady-visitors
to their carriage; though with the certainty of collecting a
mob of gazers in Fleet Street,--as might well be, the beau
having on, by way of court-dress, " his rusty brown morning
suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a little shrivelled wig
sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and
the knees of his breeches hanging loose: "--in all this we can
see the spirit of true Politeness, only shining through a strange
medium. Thus again, in his apartments, at one time, there
were unfortunately no chairs. "A gentleman who fre-
quently visited him whilst writing his Idlers, constantly
found him at his desk, sitting on one with three legs; and on
rising from it, he remarked that Johnson never forgot its
defect; but would either hold it in his hand, or place it with
great composure against some support; taking no notice of
its imperfection to his visitor,"--who meanwhile, we suppose,
sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. "It was remark-
able in Johnson," continues Miss Reynolds (Renny dear).
"that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make
any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence ?
Whether this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of some
partial notion of his respecting high-breeding, is doubtful. "
That it was, for one thing, the effect of genuine Politeness,
is nowise doubtful. Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean
Politeness, which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask
twice for soup: but the noble universal Politeness of a man
that knows the dignity of men, and feels his own; such as
may be seen in the patriarchal bearing of an Indian Sachem ,-
such as Johnson himself exhibited, when a sudden chance
brought him into dialogue with his King. To us, with our
view of the man, it nowise appears " strange " that he should
have boasted himself cunning in the laws of Politeness; nor
"stranger still," habitually attentive to practise them.
More legibly is this influence of the Loving heart to be
traced in his intellectual character. What, indeed, is the
beginning of intellect, the first inducement to the exercise
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 61
;hereof, but attraction towards somewhat, affection for it?
fhus too, who ever saw, or will see, any true talent, not to
speak of genius, the foundation of which is not goodness,
ove? From Johnson's strength of Affection, we deduce
nany of his intellectual peculiarities; especially that
threatening array of perversions, known under the name of
'Johnson's Prejudices. " Looking well into the root from
which these sprang, we have long ceased to view them with
iostility, can pardon and reverently pity them. Consider
<<rith what force early-imbibed opinions must have clung
to a soul of this Affection. Those evil-famed Prejudices of
bis, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Englandism, hatred of the
Scotch, belief in Witches, and suchlike, what were they but
the ordinary beliefs of well-doing, well-meaning provincial
Englishmen in that day? First gathered by his Father's
dearth; round the kind " country fires " of native Stafford-
shire; they grew with his growth and strengthened with his
strength: they were hallowed by fondest sacred recollections;
to part with them was parting with his heart's blood. If the
man who has no strength of Affection, strength of Belief,
have no strength of Prejudice, let him thank Heaven for it,
but to himself take small thanks.
Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble Johnson could
not work himself loose from these adhesions; that he could
only purify them, and wear them with some nobleness. Yet
let us understand how they grew out from the very centre of
his being: nay moreover, how they came to cohere in him
Vith what formed the business and worth of his Life, the
sum of his whole Spiritual Endeavour. For it is on the same
ground that he became throughout an Edifier and Repairer,
not, as the others of his make were, a Puller-down; that in
an age of universal Scepticism, England was still to produce
its Believer. Mark too his candour even here; while a Dr.
Adams, with placid surprise, asks, "Have we not evidence
enough of the soul's immortality? " Johnson answers, "I
wish for more. "
But the truth is, in Prejudice, as in all things, Johnson was
the product of England; one of those good yeomen whose
limbs were made in England: alas, the last of such Invin-
cibles, their day being now done! His culture is wholly
English; that not of a Thinker but of a "Scholar:" his
interests are wholly English; he sees and knows nothing but
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? 62 Carlyle's Essays
England; he is the John Bull of Spiritual Europe: let him
live, love him, as he was and could not but be! Pitiable it
is, no doubt, that a Samuel Johnson must confute Hume's
irreligious Philosophy by some " story from a Clergyman of
the Bishoprick of Durham; " should see nothing in the great
Frederick but "Voltaire's lackey;" in Voltaire himself but
a man acerrimi ingenii, paucarum liter arum; in Rousseau
but one worthy to be hanged; and in the universal, long-
prepared, inevitable Tendency of European Thought but a
green-sick milkmaid's crotchet of, for variety's sake, " milk-
ing the Bull. " Our good, dear John! Observe too what h
is that he sees in the city of Paris: no feeblest glimpse of
those D'Alemberts and Diderots, or of the strange question-
able work they did; solely some Benedictine Priests, to talk
kitchen-latin with them about Editiones Principes. "Monsheer
N ongtongpaw I"'? --Our dear, foolish John: yet is there a
lion's heart within him! --Pitiable all these things were, we say:
yet nowise inexcusable; nay, as basis or as foil to much else
that was in Johnson, almost venerable. Ought we not, in-
deed, to honour England, and English Institutions and Wav
of Life, that they could still equip such a man; could furnish
him in heart and head to be a Samuel Johnson, and yet to
love them, and unyieldingly fight for them? What truth
and living vigour must such Institutions once have had.
when, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, there was
still enough left in them for this!
It is worthy of note that, in our little British Isle, the two
grand Antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied,
under their very highest concentration, in two men produced
simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and
David Hume, as was observed, were children nearly of the
same year: through life they were spectators of the same
Life-movement; often inhabitants of the same city. Greater
contrast, in all things, between two great men, could not be.
Hume, well-bom, competently provided for, whole in bodv
and mind, of his own determination forces a way into Litera-
ture: Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is forced
into it " with the bayonet of necessity at his back. " And
what a part did they severally play there! As Johnson
became the father of all succeeding Tories; so was Hume the
father of all succeeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was
but an accident, as worthy to be named Prejudice as any of
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 63
Johnson's. Again, if Johnson's culture was exclusively Eng-
lish; Hume's, in Scotland, became European;--for which
reason too we find his influence spread deeply over all
quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all speculation,
French, German, as well as domestic; while Johnson's name,
out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In
spiritual stature they are almost equal; both great, among
the greatest: yet how unlike in likeness! Hume has the
? widest, methodising, comprehensive eye; Johnson the
keenest for perspicacity and minute detail: so had, perhaps
chiefly, their education ordered it. Neither of the two rose
into Poetry; yet both to some approximation thereof: Hume
to something of an Epic clearness and method, as in his
delineation of the Commonwealth Wars; Johnson to many a
deep Lyric tone of plaintiveness and impetuous graceful
power, scattered over his fugitive compositions. Both,
rather to the general surprise, had a certain rugged Humour
shining through their earnestness: the indication, indeed,
that they were earnest men, and had subdued their wild world
into a kind of temporary home and safe dwelling. Both
were, by principle and habit, Stoics: yet Johnson with the
greater merit, for he alone had very much to triumph over;
farther, he alone ennobled his Stoicism into Devotion. To
Johnson Life was as a Prison, to be endured with heroic
faith: to Hume it was little more than a foolish Bartholo-
mew-Fair Show-booth, with the foolish crowdings and elbow-
ings of which it was not worth while to quarrel; the whole
would break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised the
highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each died
not unfidy, in his way: Hume as one, with factitious, half-
false gaiety, taking leave of what was itself wholly but a Lie:
Johnson as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously
expectant heart, taking leave of a Reality, to enter a Reality
still higher. Johnson had the harder problem of it, from
. first to last: whether, with some hesitation, we can admit that
he was intrinsically the better-gifted, may remain undecided.
These two men now rest; the one in Westminster Abbey
here; the other in the Calton-Hill Churchyard of Edinburgh.
Through Life they did not meet: as contrasts, " like in un-
like," love each other; so might they two have loved, and
communed kindly,--had not the terrestrial dross and dark-
ness that was in them withstood! One day, their spirits,
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? 64 Carlyle's Essays
what Truth was in each, will be found working, living in
harmony and free union, even here below. They were the
two half-men of their time: whoso should combine the in-
trepid Candour and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume,
with the Reverence, the Love and devout Humility of John-
son, were the whole man of a new time. Till such whole man
arrive for us, and the distracted time admit of such, might
the Heavens but bless poor England with half-men worthy
to tie the shoe-latchets of these, resembling these even from
afar! Be both attentively regarded, let the true Effort ol
both prosper;--and for the present, both take our affectionate
farewell!
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? BIOGRAPHY1
[1832]
Man's sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that
can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were
there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Bio-
graphy. It is written, "The proper study of mankind is
man; " to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or
by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. "Man is
perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it,
there is nothing else interesting. " How inexpressibly com-
fortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, under-
stand his goings-forth, decipher the whole heart of his
mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out
of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that
we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practi-
cally personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both
what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has
got to work on and live on!
A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in
this matter. A scientific: because every mortal has a
Problem of Existence set before him, which, were it only,
what for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body
together, must be to a certain extent original, unlike every
other; and yet, at the same time, so like every other; like
our own, therefore; instructive, moreover, since we also are
indentured to live. A poetic interest still more: for precisely
this same struggle of human Freewill against material
Necessity, which every man's Life, by the mere circumstance
that the man continues alive, will more or less victoriously
exhibit,--is that which above all else, or rather inclusive
of all else, calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action;
and whether as acted, or as represented and written of, not
1 Fraser's Magazine, No. 27 (for April). --" The Life of Samuel John-
son, LL. D. ; including a Tour to the Hebrides. " By James Boswell,
Esq. --A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes, by John
Wilson Croker, LL. D. , F. R. S. 5 vols. London, 1831.
65
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? 66 Carlyle's Essays
only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible. Borne
onwards by which two all-embracing interests, may the
earnest Lover of Biography expand himself on all sides, and
indefinitely enrich himself. Looking with the eyes of every
new neighbour, he can discern a new world different for each:
feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he lives with every
neighbour's life, even as with his own. Of these millions
of living men, each individual is a mirror to us; a mirror
both scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural
and magical; -- from which one would so gladly draw
aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the
image of his own natural face, and the supernatural
secrets that prophetically lie under the same!
Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the actual course
of things, this business of Biography is practised and relished.
Define to thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of
these phenomena, named Gossip, Egoism, Personal Narrative
(miraculous or not), Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and such-
like; the sum-total of which (with some fractional addition
of a better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable)
constitutes that other grand phenomenon still called " Con-
versation. " Do they not mean wholly: Biography and
Autobiography 1 Not only in the common Speech of men;
but in all Art too, which is or should be the concentrated and
conserved essence of what men can speak and show, Biography
is almost the one thing needful.
Even in the highest works of Art, our interest, as the
critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a
Biographic sort. In the Art we can nowise forget the
Artist: while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying
the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit
dwelt in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer, wherein,
woven of Elysian light and Tartarean gloom, that old world
fashioned itself together, of which these written Greek
characters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The
Painter and the Singer are present to us; we partially and
for the time become the very Painter and the very Singer,
while we enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps too, let
the critic say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment,
the clearest recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed
is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Transfiguration been
painted without human hand; had it grown merely on the
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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. "
Tears trickling down the granite rock: a soft well of Pity
springs within! -- Still more tragical is this other scene:
"Johnson mentioned that he could not in general accuse
himself of having been an undutiful son. 'Once, indeed;
said he,' I was disobedient: I refused to attend my father to
Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and
the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired
to atone for this fault. '"--But by what method? --What
method was now possible? Hear it; the words are again
given as his own, though here evidently by a less capable
reporter:
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? Boswcll's Life of Johnson 59
"Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure
in the morning, but I was compelled to it by conscience. Fifty
years ago, Madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial
piety. My father had been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter
market, and opening a stall there for the sale of his Books. Con-
fined by indisposition, he desired me, that day, to go and attend
the stall in his place. My pride prevented me; I gave my father
a refusal. --And now to-day I have been at Uttoxeter; I went into
the market at the time of business, uncovered my head, and stood
with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where my father's stall used
;to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was
expiatory. "
Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the
"rainy weather, and the sneers," or wonder, "of the by-
standers"? The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising
from the far distance; sad-beckoning in the "moonlight of
memory: " how he had toiled faithfully hither and thither;
patiently among the lowest of the low; been buffeted and
beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it anew--And
oh, when the wearied old man, as Bookseller, or Hawker, or
Tinker, or whatsoever it was that Fate had reduced him to,
begged help of thee for one day,--how savage, diabolic, was
that mean Vanity, which answered, No! He sleeps now;
after life's fitful fever, he sleeps well: but thou, O Merciless,
how now wilt thou still the sting of that remembrance? --
The picture of Samuel Johnson standing bareheaded in the
market there, is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint.
Repentance! Repentance! he proclaims, as with passionate
,vsobs: but only to the ear of Heaven, if Heaven will give him
audience: the earthly ear and heart, that should have heard
it, are now closed, unresponsive forever.
That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling Affectionateness,
the inmost essence of his being, must have looked forth, in
one form or another, through Johnson's whole character,
practical and intellectual, modifying both, is not to be doubted.
Yet through what singular distortions and superstitions,
moping melancholies, blind habits, whims about "entering
with the right foot," and " touching every post as he walked
along;" and all the other mad chaotic lumber of a brain that,
with sun-clear intellect, hovered forever on the verge of in-
sanity,--must that same inmost essence have looked forth;
unrecognisable to all but the most observant! Accordingly
it was not recognised; Johnson passed not for a fine nature,
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? 60 Carlyle's Essays
but for a dull, almost brutal one. Might not, for example,
the first-fruit of such a Lovingness, coupled with his quick
Insight, have been expected to be a peculiarly courteous
demeanour as man among men? In Johnson's " Politeness,"
which he often, to the wonder of some, asserted to be great,
there was indeed somewhat that needed explanation.
Nevertheless, if he insisted always on handing lady-visitors
to their carriage; though with the certainty of collecting a
mob of gazers in Fleet Street,--as might well be, the beau
having on, by way of court-dress, " his rusty brown morning
suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a little shrivelled wig
sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and
the knees of his breeches hanging loose: "--in all this we can
see the spirit of true Politeness, only shining through a strange
medium. Thus again, in his apartments, at one time, there
were unfortunately no chairs. "A gentleman who fre-
quently visited him whilst writing his Idlers, constantly
found him at his desk, sitting on one with three legs; and on
rising from it, he remarked that Johnson never forgot its
defect; but would either hold it in his hand, or place it with
great composure against some support; taking no notice of
its imperfection to his visitor,"--who meanwhile, we suppose,
sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. "It was remark-
able in Johnson," continues Miss Reynolds (Renny dear).
"that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make
any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence ?
Whether this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of some
partial notion of his respecting high-breeding, is doubtful. "
That it was, for one thing, the effect of genuine Politeness,
is nowise doubtful. Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean
Politeness, which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask
twice for soup: but the noble universal Politeness of a man
that knows the dignity of men, and feels his own; such as
may be seen in the patriarchal bearing of an Indian Sachem ,-
such as Johnson himself exhibited, when a sudden chance
brought him into dialogue with his King. To us, with our
view of the man, it nowise appears " strange " that he should
have boasted himself cunning in the laws of Politeness; nor
"stranger still," habitually attentive to practise them.
More legibly is this influence of the Loving heart to be
traced in his intellectual character. What, indeed, is the
beginning of intellect, the first inducement to the exercise
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 61
;hereof, but attraction towards somewhat, affection for it?
fhus too, who ever saw, or will see, any true talent, not to
speak of genius, the foundation of which is not goodness,
ove? From Johnson's strength of Affection, we deduce
nany of his intellectual peculiarities; especially that
threatening array of perversions, known under the name of
'Johnson's Prejudices. " Looking well into the root from
which these sprang, we have long ceased to view them with
iostility, can pardon and reverently pity them. Consider
<<rith what force early-imbibed opinions must have clung
to a soul of this Affection. Those evil-famed Prejudices of
bis, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Englandism, hatred of the
Scotch, belief in Witches, and suchlike, what were they but
the ordinary beliefs of well-doing, well-meaning provincial
Englishmen in that day? First gathered by his Father's
dearth; round the kind " country fires " of native Stafford-
shire; they grew with his growth and strengthened with his
strength: they were hallowed by fondest sacred recollections;
to part with them was parting with his heart's blood. If the
man who has no strength of Affection, strength of Belief,
have no strength of Prejudice, let him thank Heaven for it,
but to himself take small thanks.
Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble Johnson could
not work himself loose from these adhesions; that he could
only purify them, and wear them with some nobleness. Yet
let us understand how they grew out from the very centre of
his being: nay moreover, how they came to cohere in him
Vith what formed the business and worth of his Life, the
sum of his whole Spiritual Endeavour. For it is on the same
ground that he became throughout an Edifier and Repairer,
not, as the others of his make were, a Puller-down; that in
an age of universal Scepticism, England was still to produce
its Believer. Mark too his candour even here; while a Dr.
Adams, with placid surprise, asks, "Have we not evidence
enough of the soul's immortality? " Johnson answers, "I
wish for more. "
But the truth is, in Prejudice, as in all things, Johnson was
the product of England; one of those good yeomen whose
limbs were made in England: alas, the last of such Invin-
cibles, their day being now done! His culture is wholly
English; that not of a Thinker but of a "Scholar:" his
interests are wholly English; he sees and knows nothing but
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? 62 Carlyle's Essays
England; he is the John Bull of Spiritual Europe: let him
live, love him, as he was and could not but be! Pitiable it
is, no doubt, that a Samuel Johnson must confute Hume's
irreligious Philosophy by some " story from a Clergyman of
the Bishoprick of Durham; " should see nothing in the great
Frederick but "Voltaire's lackey;" in Voltaire himself but
a man acerrimi ingenii, paucarum liter arum; in Rousseau
but one worthy to be hanged; and in the universal, long-
prepared, inevitable Tendency of European Thought but a
green-sick milkmaid's crotchet of, for variety's sake, " milk-
ing the Bull. " Our good, dear John! Observe too what h
is that he sees in the city of Paris: no feeblest glimpse of
those D'Alemberts and Diderots, or of the strange question-
able work they did; solely some Benedictine Priests, to talk
kitchen-latin with them about Editiones Principes. "Monsheer
N ongtongpaw I"'? --Our dear, foolish John: yet is there a
lion's heart within him! --Pitiable all these things were, we say:
yet nowise inexcusable; nay, as basis or as foil to much else
that was in Johnson, almost venerable. Ought we not, in-
deed, to honour England, and English Institutions and Wav
of Life, that they could still equip such a man; could furnish
him in heart and head to be a Samuel Johnson, and yet to
love them, and unyieldingly fight for them? What truth
and living vigour must such Institutions once have had.
when, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, there was
still enough left in them for this!
It is worthy of note that, in our little British Isle, the two
grand Antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied,
under their very highest concentration, in two men produced
simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and
David Hume, as was observed, were children nearly of the
same year: through life they were spectators of the same
Life-movement; often inhabitants of the same city. Greater
contrast, in all things, between two great men, could not be.
Hume, well-bom, competently provided for, whole in bodv
and mind, of his own determination forces a way into Litera-
ture: Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is forced
into it " with the bayonet of necessity at his back. " And
what a part did they severally play there! As Johnson
became the father of all succeeding Tories; so was Hume the
father of all succeeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was
but an accident, as worthy to be named Prejudice as any of
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? Boswell's Life of Johnson 63
Johnson's. Again, if Johnson's culture was exclusively Eng-
lish; Hume's, in Scotland, became European;--for which
reason too we find his influence spread deeply over all
quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all speculation,
French, German, as well as domestic; while Johnson's name,
out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In
spiritual stature they are almost equal; both great, among
the greatest: yet how unlike in likeness! Hume has the
? widest, methodising, comprehensive eye; Johnson the
keenest for perspicacity and minute detail: so had, perhaps
chiefly, their education ordered it. Neither of the two rose
into Poetry; yet both to some approximation thereof: Hume
to something of an Epic clearness and method, as in his
delineation of the Commonwealth Wars; Johnson to many a
deep Lyric tone of plaintiveness and impetuous graceful
power, scattered over his fugitive compositions. Both,
rather to the general surprise, had a certain rugged Humour
shining through their earnestness: the indication, indeed,
that they were earnest men, and had subdued their wild world
into a kind of temporary home and safe dwelling. Both
were, by principle and habit, Stoics: yet Johnson with the
greater merit, for he alone had very much to triumph over;
farther, he alone ennobled his Stoicism into Devotion. To
Johnson Life was as a Prison, to be endured with heroic
faith: to Hume it was little more than a foolish Bartholo-
mew-Fair Show-booth, with the foolish crowdings and elbow-
ings of which it was not worth while to quarrel; the whole
would break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised the
highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each died
not unfidy, in his way: Hume as one, with factitious, half-
false gaiety, taking leave of what was itself wholly but a Lie:
Johnson as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously
expectant heart, taking leave of a Reality, to enter a Reality
still higher. Johnson had the harder problem of it, from
. first to last: whether, with some hesitation, we can admit that
he was intrinsically the better-gifted, may remain undecided.
These two men now rest; the one in Westminster Abbey
here; the other in the Calton-Hill Churchyard of Edinburgh.
Through Life they did not meet: as contrasts, " like in un-
like," love each other; so might they two have loved, and
communed kindly,--had not the terrestrial dross and dark-
ness that was in them withstood! One day, their spirits,
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? 64 Carlyle's Essays
what Truth was in each, will be found working, living in
harmony and free union, even here below. They were the
two half-men of their time: whoso should combine the in-
trepid Candour and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume,
with the Reverence, the Love and devout Humility of John-
son, were the whole man of a new time. Till such whole man
arrive for us, and the distracted time admit of such, might
the Heavens but bless poor England with half-men worthy
to tie the shoe-latchets of these, resembling these even from
afar! Be both attentively regarded, let the true Effort ol
both prosper;--and for the present, both take our affectionate
farewell!
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? BIOGRAPHY1
[1832]
Man's sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that
can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were
there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Bio-
graphy. It is written, "The proper study of mankind is
man; " to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or
by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. "Man is
perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it,
there is nothing else interesting. " How inexpressibly com-
fortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, under-
stand his goings-forth, decipher the whole heart of his
mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out
of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that
we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practi-
cally personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both
what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has
got to work on and live on!
A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in
this matter. A scientific: because every mortal has a
Problem of Existence set before him, which, were it only,
what for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body
together, must be to a certain extent original, unlike every
other; and yet, at the same time, so like every other; like
our own, therefore; instructive, moreover, since we also are
indentured to live. A poetic interest still more: for precisely
this same struggle of human Freewill against material
Necessity, which every man's Life, by the mere circumstance
that the man continues alive, will more or less victoriously
exhibit,--is that which above all else, or rather inclusive
of all else, calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action;
and whether as acted, or as represented and written of, not
1 Fraser's Magazine, No. 27 (for April). --" The Life of Samuel John-
son, LL. D. ; including a Tour to the Hebrides. " By James Boswell,
Esq. --A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes, by John
Wilson Croker, LL. D. , F. R. S. 5 vols. London, 1831.
65
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? 66 Carlyle's Essays
only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible. Borne
onwards by which two all-embracing interests, may the
earnest Lover of Biography expand himself on all sides, and
indefinitely enrich himself. Looking with the eyes of every
new neighbour, he can discern a new world different for each:
feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he lives with every
neighbour's life, even as with his own. Of these millions
of living men, each individual is a mirror to us; a mirror
both scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural
and magical; -- from which one would so gladly draw
aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the
image of his own natural face, and the supernatural
secrets that prophetically lie under the same!
Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the actual course
of things, this business of Biography is practised and relished.
Define to thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of
these phenomena, named Gossip, Egoism, Personal Narrative
(miraculous or not), Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and such-
like; the sum-total of which (with some fractional addition
of a better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable)
constitutes that other grand phenomenon still called " Con-
versation. " Do they not mean wholly: Biography and
Autobiography 1 Not only in the common Speech of men;
but in all Art too, which is or should be the concentrated and
conserved essence of what men can speak and show, Biography
is almost the one thing needful.
Even in the highest works of Art, our interest, as the
critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a
Biographic sort. In the Art we can nowise forget the
Artist: while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying
the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit
dwelt in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer, wherein,
woven of Elysian light and Tartarean gloom, that old world
fashioned itself together, of which these written Greek
characters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The
Painter and the Singer are present to us; we partially and
for the time become the very Painter and the very Singer,
while we enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps too, let
the critic say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment,
the clearest recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed
is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Transfiguration been
painted without human hand; had it grown merely on the
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