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CHAPTER I

A Word of Introduction

OMEONE has said that Doctor Johnson was greater in

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Boswell's books than in his own. Dr. Johnson, the man of contrary qualities, the marvellous talker, the burly controversialist, who, as Goldsmith phrased it, "if his pistol missed fire, knocked you down with the butt-end of it," the man of strange and outlandish manners, has become a personal friend to multitudes of readers of the immortal biography. And very many of this generation of readers, who find Boswell too diffuse or who prefer to take their literary recreation through others' guidance, have grown familiar with him through Macaulay's witty though not very charitable paradoxes or Carlyle's imaginative re-creation of the hero. Indeed, the worthy Doctor, by the wonderful chance of having had men of genius as biographers, remains to-day one of the two or three outstanding figures in eighteenth-century letters, though most of us have scarcely more than turned the pages of his ponderous volumes.

This is a curious situation, and the result has been that we rejoice in one of the most interesting men in English literary history and neglect his intellectual eminence. That Johnson himself would have exploded with wrath at the bare thought of an immortality resting upon literary gossip and personal anecdote, at the expense of his serious labors, can be readily surmised. But this is precisely what has happened, and his fame as a really great critic of men and books has been obscured by what we may call an extra-literary reputation bestowed upon him by friends and enemies alike. Yet as the last in the succession of great humanists before the romantic

upheaval, which he foreshadowed and strove to meet; as the critic and historian of neo-classicism at a time when the old order was beginning to give way before new forces; and as a superb example of the strong-minded, morally earnest Englishman of intense personal convictions and deep-seated prejudices, he should be a figure of permanent interest to us. By the middle of the century, when Johnson was rising on the literary horizon, the English people had already begun to awaken to the changing currents of thought and feeling which were preparing the way for what is usually called the romantic revolt of the first years of the next century. Men of letters were throwing off the yoke of a static and passionless literary ideal, which, by conventionalizing its forms of expression, had forced out of its great body of literature any genuine thought or feeling it may have originally possessed. As the hold of scholastic philosophy upon the mind of the intellectual world was finally broken by the first great revolt from authority, - the Renaissance, - so this modern literary scholasticism was in process of time obliged to yield to forces hostile to its very existence.

Revolution, political and industrial, no doubt hastened this intellectual revolt from the tyranny of tradition, but the increasing importance of the middle class as one of the chief elements in English life aided very greatly in breaking the hold of the ancient aristocratic conventions. And this fact becomes of more than usual interest to us when we consider that for over thirty years this middle class of England looked upon Johnson as its chief representative in the world of letters. It did not require many years after the publication of the Dictionary for the name and opinions of the great Dr. Johnson to be received with awe and grave respect in the households of England. He may in fact in a large degree be viewed as narrowing down to his grasp the varied thought of his age and stamping it with the impress of his personality

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and his prejudices. It is true indeed that many of the best minds of the age remained outside the range of his influence; and a good portion of the changing thought of the latter half of the century was quite beyond his understanding and control. It needs no emphasis then to prove that Johnson represents the powerful, somewhat slow-moving, but massive, and upon the whole necessary and admirable, conservative spirit which distinguished the greater number of Englishmen of the period and remains one of their chief characteristics to-day. Carlyle's appellation, "The John Bull of Spiritual Europe," describes with some accuracy the temper of his mind.

The general characteristics of the man himself are too well known to require enumeration. His painful struggle against the stress of poverty and his slow rise to recognition as the most impressive figure in English letters had confirmed in him his strong but rigid emotions. His constitutional melancholy and dread of losing his reason, his hatred of solitude which drove him to seek companionship often under distressing conditions, his deeply religious nature, and his bitter selfreproaches, are all familiar to readers of Boswell. But above these peculiarities stand out a massive intellectual vigor and a moral integrity as among his chief qualities. Too much has been made, by Macaulay and others, of the entrancing nature of his conversation and the dullness of his published work. Johnson did not bind in close friendship men of the eminence of Burke, Reynolds, and Goldsmith merely because he proved himself an entertaining talker; nor was his hold upon the great English public any less accidental, for a literary dictatorship as complete as his own came to be, must find its great strength not only in a personality of unusual power but in an actual accomplishment in letters which could be regarded as of unusual worth.

Toward the various phases of the intellectual life of the day, Johnson maintained a consistent attitude. With his

feet planted firmly in the past, he remained through life a staunch Tory, doing less than justice to those "bottomless Whigs" who were endeavoring to effect some reform in the public life of the nation. To him the first Whig was the Devil, and he rested so strongly upon the rights of established authority that he chose to defend the Ministry against the American rebels. His political pamphlets, while always readable, are always wrong, revealing in full force the prejudices at the bottom of their author's nature. Prescription as a necessary basis for the life of society, and the acceptance of the Establishment in our religious lives, seemed to him fundamental in any sound social philosophy. So too in literature his very prejudices grew out of his refusal to question what experience had proved to be wise and true; consequently he in the main upheld the neo-classic tradition in face of the new ideas which he must have felt were eating away the life of what he held most dear. Johnson has in the annals of literature been known as the great Tory, and one need not make any astonishing admission in declaring this charge, if charge it be, to be essentially true.

But if Johnson were merely the conventional neo-classic critic fighting a losing battle against the coming years, he would lose half his charm to the student of the period. It is because his nature contained so many contradictory qualities, because so much of the new stands revealed in the old, because a great personality cannot be bound within a formula, that Johnson is a fascinating study. At the same time he expresses so clearly the ideals and purposes of a great age of literature, and so wise and true is so much of what he has to say on both life and letters, that a study of his intellectual life should repay the effort, both for its significance in the history of literature and for its intrinsic value to the student.

But we may go still further than this in asserting his worth to us to-day. Johnson needs to be placed beside Edmund

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