reading

1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 47, 49, 60, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 85, 87, 90, 93, 101, 106, 108, 113, 114, 115, 121, 129, 134, 135, 137, 142, 145, 146, 148, 151, 156, 158, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 181, 183, 184, 188, 191, 196, 207, 208.

1, 5, 10, 17, [22], 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 72, 81, 84, 88, 94, 100, 103.

Appendix II: Parallel texts of the original and revised states of The Rambler No. 1

A Chronology of Samuel Johnson

1733 Translates Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia; contributes essays to the Birmingham Journal.

1737 Leaves for London in March, accompanied by one of his pupils, David Garrick; begins working for the publisher Edward Cave, and contributes to The Gentleman’s Magazine.

1738 Publication of London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.

1754 Ceases to contribute to The Adventurer in March; publishes biography of Cave.

1759 Death of his mother, Sarah Johnson; publication of Rasselas: The Prince of Abyssinia.

1764 Founding of ‘The Club’ (an informal group founded at suggestion of Joshua Reynolds).

1765 Awarded LL D, Dublin; publication of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (8 vols.). Meets Henry and Hester Thrale.

1771 Publication of Thoughts on the late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands.

1775 Awarded DCL, Oxford; visits Paris with the Thrales; publication of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Taxation No Tyranny.

Introduction

When Samuel Johnson died in 1784, William Hamilton saw the event as an irreparable calamity: ‘He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. – Johnson is dead. – Let us go to the next best: – there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’¹ This is not just testimony to the warmth of Johnson’s friendships, for his death had also made a rent in the literary life of the nation. Ever since 1759, when the novelist and man of letters Tobias Smollett had referred to Johnson as ‘that great CHAM of literature’, Johnson had contended for a station at the centre of English literature.² His claims were not everywhere acknowledged – in 1770, for instance, Gilbert Cowper had dismissed him as ‘the Caliban of literature’.³ But Joseph Towers, writing in 1786, two years after Johnson’s death, believed that he had in the end prevailed:

For the quarter of a century before he died, Johnson’s output as a poet, a novelist, a critic, a lexicographer, a biographer, an editor and (as we shall see) perhaps primarily as an essayist had made him a dominant figure in English literary life.

However, no one is born to such a position. It has to be attained. And Johnson seems to have taken the first, crucial steps towards that position in the early 1750s, when he composed a series of periodical essays published twice weekly as The Rambler. It was here that he created the literary character, identified the distinctive preoccupations, and forged the prose style, which established him in the mind of the reading public. As Johnson’s friend, Arthur Murphy, said in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), The Rambler ‘may be considered as Johnson’s great work. It was the basis of that high reputation which went on increasing to the end of his days.’⁵ Therefore this selection from Johnson’s journalism includes a generous proportion of essays from The Rambler, and a conscious attempt has been made to include examples of all the different kinds of essay Johnson composed for that paper. Furthermore, and to throw into relief how marked an innovation The Rambler was for Johnson, a number of his earlier essays and short pamphlets are also included. Finally, also included is the best of Johnson’s later journalism, whether published as separate items or in the two successors to The Rambler, namely The Idler and The Adventurer. Aside from their intrinsic interest, in these later works we can see Johnson at moments struggling within and even against the persona and literary style which he had so successfully created for himself in The Rambler.

What was that persona, and what was the style Johnson forged in order to express and give body to it? In his Life of Johnson, James Boswell records a conversation with Johnson on the subject of death which is of help here. Boswell had deliberately introduced this subject, and had provocatively cited instances of those who professed to be untroubled by their mortality, in order to draw Johnson out. It was a ploy which later caused him some remorse:

Here I am sensible I was in the wrong, to bring before his view what he ever looked upon with horrour; for although when in a celestial frame, in his ‘Vanity of human Wishes’, he has supposed death to be ‘kind Nature’s signal for retreat,’ from this state of being to ‘a happier seat’, his thoughts upon this aweful change were in general full of dismal apprehensions. His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.⁶

This image of Johnson’s mind as a place of interminable, endlessly renewed and never concluded struggle helps us to appreciate his prose style. In conversation Johnson tended to the simple and vigorous: ‘He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis.’⁷ But on paper his prose was marked by the ebb and flow of contrary qualities, as satire succeeded compassion, and inspiration was checked by reflection. In his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) William Hazlitt was sensitive to this quality in Johnson’s style, although he did not care for it:

A more sympathetic analysis of the dynamics of Johnson’s style will be offered below. The restlessness of Johnson’s prose is the signature of a moral wisdom which is always alert to the vanity of dogmatizing, and which therefore speaks to us most powerfully, not so much in what it says as in what it implies. Arthur Murphy sensed in Johnson’s essays the powerful presence of what is either left unsaid or unable to be said, when he reflected on how in The Rambler the powers of language seem to be exhausted: ‘the language seems to fall short of his ideas’.⁹ This falling short is not a defect, still less (as Hazlitt seems to imply) a case of fence-sitting. It is instead a means of dispelling what George Gleig, writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1793), referred to as ‘that inattention by which known truths are suffered to lie neglected’.¹⁰ As we attend to it, we discover a Johnson who can speak to our condition with a surprising directness, either when writing about, for instance, lotteries,¹¹ or when reflecting with more sombreness on the permanent features of our moral existence.

One of the moments in Johnson’s life which still has the power to move the sympathetic reader of today arose out of his composition of The Rambler. In the Life of Johnson Boswell records Johnson’s memory that, some time early in 1750 and after the publication of a few Ramblers, his wife Tetty had confessed that these most recent writings had transformed her understanding of her husband. They had revealed in him unsuspected powers: ‘I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written any thing equal to this.’¹² Some two years later, on 13 March 1752, Johnson presented his wife with the four duodecimo volumes of the collected Rambler. A few days later she was dead. As Allen Reddick has said with compassionate insight of this episode: ‘The timing of her epiphanic comment – the discovery of the extent of her husband’s genius just as her own decline began to hasten – and Johnson’s touching and desperate attempt to reach her through a gift of his own work that she had valued are simply further sad and ironical elements characteristic of the Johnsons’ marriage.’ ¹³ The common view of Tetty – that she was a slothful woman of unleavenable ordinariness, who took no interest in the work of the literary genius to whom she was married, and who killed herself with drink and opium¹⁴ – might encourage us to see her surprise at The Rambler as just another instance of her inability to understand her own experience. But would anyone have guessed in the early months of 1750 that Johnson would be able to write, not only anything as good as The Rambler, but even anything like it?

Even those who in 1750 knew Johnson well might have seen few clues. He had been born on 18 September 1709, the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller in Lichfield. In 1717 he entered Lichfield Grammar School, proceeding in 1728 to Pembroke College, Oxford. However, Johnson remained in Oxford for barely a year, leaving in December 1729. After the death of his father in 1731 he spent the early 1730s teaching and pursuing a literary career in the Midlands; for instance, in 1733 he had translated Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, a work eventually published in 1735. This was also the year in which Johnson married Elizabeth (or Tetty) Jervis, a widow with three children. In the following year he opened his own school at Edial near Lichfield, and began work on Irene, a moral tragedy set in Constantinople after its fall to the Turks (although the play was not to be performed until January 1749). Meanwhile, the school at Edial seems never to have flourished. It closed in 1737, and in March of that year Johnson, accompanied by David Garrick, moved to London and committed himself to a career as a man of letters. The late 1730s and early 1740s were accordingly for Johnson a period of Grub-Street hackery,¹⁵ interspersed with some brighter triumphs, such as the publication in 1738 of his Juvenalian imitation, London.¹⁶ He began writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine, contributing the ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ which, in a period when it was forbidden to report the debates in the House of Commons directly, were a mock-Swiftian vehicle for disseminating awareness of what was happening in Parliament. It was at this time, too, that Johnson composed two anti-government pamphlets, the anti-Walpolean Marmor Nor-folciense and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (the second of which is reprinted below, pp. 495–509); in both these works he revealed his antipathy to Whiggism, as well as a streak of literary inventiveness.

The other literary form Johnson pursued during these years was biography. He composed lives of his friend the poet Richard Savage, of the historian Paolo Sarpi and of the physician Herman Boerhaave, as well as a series of shorter biographical sketches which he contributed to The Gentleman’s Magazine. Now, too, he began to frame larger literary projects. He contributed to the Harleian Miscellany (writing the ‘Introduction’, which is reprinted below on pp. 517–23), and compiled the catalogue of the Harleian library. He proposed an edition of Shakespeare, and in 1746 signed the contract for the Dictionary (finally to be published in 1755). In 1747 he published the Plan of an English Dictionary, dedicated to Lord Chesterfield, and in 1749 there appeared a second Juvenalian imitation, The Vanity of Human Wishes. So when the first Rambler appeared anonymously in 1750, even had its readers known that the author was Samuel Johnson, that name would have identified a jobbing journalist and political pamphleteer, who was also an accomplished if not prolific poet, and who had recently branched out into lexicography, textual editing and antiquarianism. It would not have suggested a master of moral wisdom. Yet in a few years, it would be these moral essays which formed Johnson’s surest claim to regard. When in 1755 the Earl of Arran wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford to request that the degree of MA be conferred on Johnson, he emphasized that Johnson had ‘very eminently distinguished himself by the publication of a series of essays, excellently calculated to form the manners of the people, and in which the cause of religion and morality is every where maintained by the strongest powers of argument and language’.¹⁷ It was a judgement endorsed towards the end of the century by Arthur Murphy: ‘In this collection [The Rambler] Johnson is the great moral teacher of his countrymen; his essays form a body of ethics; the observations on life and manners are acute and instructive; and the essays, professedly critical, serve to promote the cause of literature.’¹⁸

The periodical essay was a well-established form before Johnson wrote The Rambler, and towards the end of his life, when writing on Addison, he explained what he saw as its particular strengths. In his view, the periodical essay derived from conduct books such as Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galatheo, Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano and La Bruyère’s Les caractères, ou les moeurs de ce siècle. These works, according to Johnson, had set themselves to ‘teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation’.¹⁹ But, in Johnson’s opinion, before the publication of The Tatler and The Spectator in 1709–11 and 1711–12 respectively, ‘England had no masters of common life’:

Yet this important function is discharged by nothing so well as ‘the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amusement. If the subject be slight, the treatise is short. The busy may find time, and the idle may find patience.’²¹ Johnson was, in fact, wrong when he suggested that The Tatler and The Spectator had been first in the field. The periodical format went back as far as the 1660s and Henry Muddiman’s Oxford Gazette, while (as Angus Ross has pointed out) ‘it is no exaggeration to say that every form of writing, every topic of discussion or method of circulation (save the issue of collected papers by subscription) characteristic of The Tatler and The Spectator had been seen in some periodical or other before they appeared’.²² Moreover, when Johnson came to write The Rambler, he aspired to a much graver character than that of an arbiter elegantiarum’. Instead, he chose to move the periodical form back towards those ‘more important duties’ which in the ‘Life of Addison’ he considered were already adequately covered. Johnson wished ‘to reach the same audience the Spectator had so successfully entertained, but to encourage in it a more rigorously critical kind of thinking’.²³ What nudged him in this direction?

It was perhaps the work on the Dictionary of the English Language, on which Johnson had embarked during the later 1740s, which both made the periodical essay an attractive form, and impelled him to give that form a graver moral turn. At one level, the composition of brief essays must have seemed a relief after the unremitting reading required by the Dictionary. At the same time, that very reading may have suggested to Johnson both the perennial moral topics which form the heart of The Rambler, and how to treat them. In part, that was because work on the Dictionary was gradually equipping Johnson with a philosophical vocabulary in which he could give weighty expression to his judgements on the topics of common life.²⁴ The programme of reading which Johnson had set himself in order to assemble his illustrative quotations was in itself an education, involving as it did ‘incessant reading’ of ‘the best authors in our language’.²⁵ Johnson fortified himself for his labours by drinking deeply from what in the Preface to the Dictionary he called ‘the wells of English undefiled… the pure sources of genuine diction’: namely, the best English writers between the last years of Elizabeth I and the Restoration, when the language had purged itself of barbarity, but before it had succumbed to the French influence which had entered the kingdom with Charles II.²⁶ Even if those draughts were drained for lexicographical ends, it is inconceivable that Johnson’s mind would not have received from them a wider irrigation.

But there was perhaps another way in which the effort of compiling the Dictionary fertilized Johnson’s other writings. The broad consideration which compiling the Dictionary obliged Johnson to give to questions of language and grammar also alerted him to the possibility that the affective strengths of the English language might be found in what at a first and formal glance might look like its deficiencies. If we consider some of Johnson’s pronouncements on language, and then compare them with a poem he wrote towards the end of his life – the verses ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ – we will be in a better position to appreciate how his grapplings with language in the making of the Dictionary may have influenced his ideas about the possibilities and pitfalls involved in what he was undertaking in The Rambler: that is, imbuing language with moral content.

Just as Johnson was politically an internal exile (a stubborn Tory obliged to live under Hanoverian monarchs and in a world of which the politics, irrespective of which particular party happened to be in or out, were fundamentally shaped by the Revolution Principles of 1688) so, too, he was estranged from the most fashionable ethical theories of his time, the spokesman for a conscious ethics of the will at a time when a contrary theory of morals was dominant. The two positions were elegantly formulated by David Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751):

Johnson, of course, was, in the terms of this opposition, an opponent of affective theories of ethics; that is to say, theories which located the origin of moral discriminations in involuntary sentiments, rather than conscious and reasoned judgements. The very holders of such views were probably enough to blacken them irredeemably in Johnson’s eyes: Shaftesbury, the arch-Whig and free-thinker; Hume, the religious sceptic against whom Johnson repeatedly ranged and defined himself; Adam Smith, leading figure of that Scottish Enlightenment which Johnson emphatically slighted in his Journey to the Western Islands.

In conversation with Boswell, however, Johnson expanded on his opposition to the ethical theories of Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith, and made clear that his suspicion of those theories was not simply transferred suspicion of the men who disseminated them:

We can have no dependence upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts, I can conceive him doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there there is always temptation.²⁸

This conviction, that a morality based upon the affections might not serve to support us in those hard cases which are the test of any morality, led Johnson also to oppose speculative theories which tended to diminish man’s responsibility for his moral health – for example, fashionable theories which related morals to climate, or which located the cause of moral degeneration in broad social phenomena such as luxury. A good example of Johnson’s resistance to anything which suggested that moral judgements were not peculiarly human, and rooted in the conscious will, is his refusal even to entertain one of Boswell’s experiences while on the Grand Tour:

Johnson refused point blank to accept the possibility of a reptile’s committing suicide, because he could admit neither that animals possess a moral sense, nor that an authentically ethical act could be a reflex, without sacrificing the essence of his moral position; namely, that our moral sense is the product of our waking judgement.

Given that Johnson was such an advocate for an ethics of conscious principle, one would expect his ethical language to be overt and declaratory; that is to say, conscious, stated and argued for. But the experience of reading Johnson is, I think, not like that. Sir John Hawkins caught well how the impact of Johnson’s writing is not one of propositional clarity:

‘A strange perplexity’: it is precisely that sense of being moved at a level beyond or beneath the level of language which, I think, characterizes the experience of reading Johnson’s best moral writing. To understand why this should be so, we need to consider the theory of language which exerted the greatest influence over Johnson, that elaborated by John Locke in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The importance of language for Locke was that, since words represent ideas, not objects, they can form the conduit of knowledge:

The ideas that language could convey are of two kinds, simple and complex. An example of a simple idea would be ‘goat’. Simple ideas, Locke insisted, cannot be defined. However, in practice this is not a great problem since they can be demonstrated or pointed out. An example of a complex idea (or ‘mixed mode’, as Locke more often calls it) would be ‘ingratitude’ (and indeed the ideas represented by all ethical language fall into this category of mixed modes). For mixed modes, the reverse holds true. They cannot be demonstrated, because, in Locke’s words, ‘they are the creatures of the understanding rather than the works of nature’.³¹ However, the compensation for this is that they can be defined with perfect precision:

… the signification of their names [those of mixed modes] cannot be made known, as those of simple ideas, by any showing, but, in recompense thereof, may be perfectly and exactly defined. For they being combinations of several ideas that the mind of man has arbitrarily put together, without reference to any archetypes [i.e. things existing in nature which form the original patterns of those ideas], men may, if they please, exactly know the ideas that go to each composition, and so both use these words in a certain and undoubted signification, and perfectly declare, when there is occasion, what they stand for.³²

For Locke, this is a source of great comfort, because from it he deduces that moral language can be made more precise than any other kind of language:

This, if well considered, would lay great blame on those who make not their discourses about moral things very clear and distinct. For since the precise signification of the names of mixed modes… is to be known, they being not of nature’s but man’s making, it is a great negligence and perverseness to discourse of moral things with uncertainty and obscurity… Upon this ground it is that I am bold to think that morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics: since the precise real essence of the things moral words stand for may be perfectly known, and so the congruity or incongruity of the things themselves be certainly discovered, in which consists perfect knowledge.³³

Johnson’s famous comment – ‘words are the daughters of earth, and… things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science and words are but the signs of ideas’ – shows his affinity with Locke’s theory of language.³⁴ But on this point of the demonstrability of morality, he is at the opposite pole from his philosophical predecessor. What Locke saw as a source of encouragement – that moral terms are susceptible of exact definition – Johnson, as a practical rather than a speculative moralist, found a cause of disquiet. It may be that such moral terms can be precisely defined. But those precise definitions may not help in the practical business of grasping the substantive essence of moral ideas.

The point can be clarified if we compare definitions from the Dictionary of what Locke would have called simple ideas with mixed modes. First, two definitions of simple ideas:

These definitions follow on from Locke’s insistence on the demonstrability of a simple idea, in that they take the form of a set of instructions as to where to look. If you want to know what ink is, you find a man who is writing, and look at the black liquor he is using. Johnson’s definitions of mixed modes are quite different:

It is quite clear that, considered purely as definitions, these have a precision which the definitions of ‘horse’ and ‘ink’ lack; but it is hard to see what use they are to someone who wishes to lead a moral life, and therefore needs to know the content of the ideas these terms represent. Locke had assumed that, because these words could be precisely defined, we could have exact knowledge of the essence of the idea. But for Johnson, it is possible to have a precision of moral language, but nothing else, as he shows in the character of the philosopher in chapter twenty-two of Rasselas:

For Johnson, to live a moral life was less a question of possessing a vocabulary than of performing actions. In Rambler No. 14 he acknowledged the power of moral theory: ‘in moral discussions it is to be remembered that many impediments obstruct our practice, which very easily give way to theory’.³⁶ But that power will be only a snare and a delusion unless it be also remembered that ‘human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth’.³⁷ How can language lay hold on the substance of morality, instead of shadowing the world of moral action with a self-regarding and futile precision?³⁸

It is here that Johnson’s notion of the special virtue of poetic language is important. In Idler No. 60 Johnson amusingly mocked Dick Minim’s enactment theory of poetic language. He was obliged to do so in order to distinguish that crassness from a notion of poetic language which he took very seriously: namely, that ‘the force of poetry’ ‘calls new powers into being’, which powers are capable of ‘embod[ying] sentiment’, including moral sentiment.³⁹ If we turn now to his poem on Robert Levet, we can see an example of that force and of those powers at work.

Boswell gave a disdainful sketch of Levet: ‘he was of a strange grotesque appearance, stiff and formal in his manner, and seldom said a word while any company was present.’⁴⁰ From this unpromising material, Johnson made a moral poem of extraordinary force. In his ‘Essay on Epitaphs’, he wrote:

It takes no very profound reading of ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ to see that its surface meaning is very much concerned with rectifying the neglect of society, and of paying due accord to the virtues of the obscure and the petty.

But, beneath that, there is also a more profound moral level to the poem, where it engages with the consideration that Johnson felt should always inform a person’s moral conduct; that is to say, the certainty of death. Rambler No. 78 states the principle:

Yet the fact of our own eventual death, as Johnson conceded in that same paper, is a certainty from which the repetitious nature of daily life, its common round, perpetually distracts us. In the poem on Levet, Johnson employed what he had, as a grammarian, considered a flaw in the English language, to penetrate the reader afresh with the knowledge that, while virtually everything else can happen to us many times, or may not happen to us at all, we will certainly encounter death, and will encounter it only once.

On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet

Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine,

As on we toil from day to day,

By sudden blasts, or slow decline,

Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,

See LEVET to the grave descend;

Officious, innocent, sincere,

Of ev’ry friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills affection’s eye,

Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;

Nor, letter’d arrogance, deny

Thy praise to merit unrefin’d.

When fainting nature call’d for aid,

And hov’ring death prepar’d the blow,

His vig’rous remedy display’d

The power of art without the show.

In misery’s darkest caverns known,

His useful care was ever nigh,

Where hopeless anguish pour’d his groan,

And lonely want retir’d to die.

No summons mock’d by chill delay,

No petty gain disdain’d by pride,

The modest wants of ev’ry day

The toil of ev’ry day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,

Nor made a pause, nor left a void;

And sure th’Eternal Master found

The single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,

Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;

His frame was firm, his powers were bright,

Tho’ now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,

No cold gradations of decay,

Death broke at once the vital chain,

And freed his soul the nearest way.

For the first eight stanzas of this poem, Johnson is concerned with repeated actions: our daily toil in hope’s delusive mine, Levet’s toil of every day which met the needs of every day, the narrow round of his habitual exercise of his single talent. And in the penultimate stanza Johnson also alludes to the inattention engendered by the repetitive nature of our quotidian existence:

But in the last stanza the verbs do not describe repeated actions. They become instead true preterites, referring to single, accomplished actions:

It is a feature of ‘the anomalous preterites of verbs’ in English that these two functions of the past tense (that of referring to repeated action in the past, and also to single, accomplished past actions) are not distinguished by the suffix. Had, for instance, Johnson decided to write this poem in Latin (as he was well capable of doing), the suffixes of the verbs would clearly have distinguished the separate kinds of past event to which they refer. ‘Glided’ might have been rendered by ‘surrepebant’; ‘broke’ and ‘freed’ by ‘fregit’ and ‘liberavit’. This hypothetical Latin poem, by virtue of the more regular and intricate formation of past tenses in the Latin language, would have discriminated the two types of past event which lie behind the poem more scrupulously than does, or could, the English poem we possess. But this hypothetical Latin poem would also, I believe, be a lesser poem. For it is in the ‘strange perplexity’ (to return to Hawkins’s phrase) which every reader must, for a moment, feel as we move, without preparation or warning, from imperfect to perfect tense in the final stanza, that the poem achieves its moral impact. The irregular identity of imperfect and perfect tenses in English, deplored by Johnson the grammarian as an irregularity, is here made the vehicle for the reflection which Johnson the moralist wished to place in the foundations of our ethical existence: namely, the ‘reflection that we must die’. The tenses of our hypothetical Latin poem could register vividly and directly the different event which is death. It could shock us with it. It could not, as Johnson’s English poem does, ambush us with it. For the moral impact of this poem is more subtle, and more profound because more subtle, than that of any translation could be, except a translation into a language as casual as is English in forming its past tenses. Only in such a language could what Johnson does in this poem be duplicated. Surprised by death at the end of the poem, we are forced to acknowledge, before our habitual distractedness resumes, that we too will die, and to reflect, albeit momentarily, on whether or not death will be for us an emancipation, as it was for Levet. In the strange perplexity of that final moment, Johnson’s poem achieves its moral stature, triumphs over the solipsism which lies in wait for moral language, and administers to its reader an impetus to moral reformation. At the same time, Johnson comes close to his subject: he, too, displays ‘the power of art without the show’.

In Idler No. 41 Johnson, recently smitten by the death of his mother, had already reflected on the paradoxes arising from our distracted awareness of the inevitability of death:

The purpose of moral writing is forcibly to awaken us from this condition of impotent awareness. It is therefore a kind of assault upon us – in just the way that Johnson reported to Boswell that he himself had been assaulted and awakened, when a young man, from an unexpected quarter. The ‘religious progress’ of the young Johnson had, it seems, been fitful and uneven:

I fell into an inattention to religion, or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Holy Life’, expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational enquiry.⁴³

When Johnson says that Law was an ‘overmatch’ for him, he draws a metaphor from wrestling, which hints to us that the benefit which flowed from Johnson’s reading of Law’s Serious Call arose precisely from the energy of its attack upon the dullness of his spiritual apprehension. Such writing is like ethical sandpaper. By means of literary surprise it out-manoeuvres expectation, and re-sensitizes us to the moral realities from which the carapace of quotidian life will effectively separate us unless it is vigorously challenged. It is a kind of writing which Johnson himself could achieve in The Rambler, as the conclusion of the second essay shows:

But, though it should happen that an author is capable of excelling, yet his merit may pass without notice, huddled in the variety of things, and thrown into the general miscellany of life. He that endeavours after fame by writing, solicits the regard of a multitude fluctuating in pleasures, or immersed in business, without time for intellectual amusements; he appeals to judges prepossessed by passions, or corrupted by prejudices, which preclude their approbation of any new performance. Some are too indolent to read any thing, till its reputation is established; others too envious to promote that fame, which gives them pain by its increase. What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put their reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imagine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased: and he that finds his way to reputation, through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit.⁴⁴

The paragraph opens with the proposition that fame is elusive, and then goes on to offer a series of particular reasons why this is so. At this point, then, Johnson seems to be offering consolation to the obscure. However, the final limb of the concluding sentence springs the mine: ‘and he that finds his way to reputation, through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit’. The shift in perspective, from consoling the obscure to mortifying the proud, is abrupt and complete, and arises from Johnson’s astute perception of the further implication hidden within the instances explaining the elusiveness of fame: for what is balm to the overlooked may be wormwood to the celebrated. The startling pivot jolts the complacent, and reminds us that the conditions of our moral life are more surprising and reticulated than we slackly suppose them to be. As a result, all readers should be unsettled by this writing: the lowly should feel less securely tethered to their lowliness, the eminent more precarious in their elevation. In Adventurer No. III Johnson revealingly misremembers one of Robert South’s sermons.⁴⁵ South had proposed that men would find ‘a Continuall un-intermitted Pleasure’ intolerable. Johnson characteristically substitutes idleness for South’s pleasure. Notwithstanding – indeed, perhaps because of – all his temptations to sloth, Johnson recognized that for men work was a condition of happiness. The resistances of his own moral style create for his reader an opportunity of healthily laborious struggle, in which they may find Johnson an overmatch for them, just as William Law had been for Johnson. For, as Arthur Murphy understood, ‘Johnson is always profound, and of course gives the fatigue of thinking.’⁴⁶

The Rambler did not sell well (though unless we recall that it was widely reprinted in provincial newspapers we are likely seriously to underestimate the contemporary readership of these essays).⁴⁷ This may have been due to the unexpected seriousness of its moral appeal. However, there is also evidence to suggest that Johnson’s style was difficult for some readers, even repugnant for others. Like any literary manner, it could be guyed. ‘The ludicrous imitators of Johnson’s style are innumerable,’ as Boswell pointed out.⁴⁸ Bonnell Thornton’s parody shows that imitation could be done with affection.⁴⁹ A sharper emotion, however, seems to have prompted Horace Walpole’s strictures on Johnson’s style. The Journey to the Western Islands he dismissed as verbose: ‘What a heap of words to express very little! and though it is the least cumbrous of any style he ever used, how far from easy and natural!’⁵⁰ But the much more cumbrous style of The Rambler inspired Walpole to a freak of satiric imagination. Writing to the Countess of Ossory on 1 February 1779, he began by distancing himself from the popular mania for David Garrick, before moving on to Johnson himself:

… I have always thought that he [Garrick] was just the counterpart of Shakespeare; this, the first of writers, and an indifferent actor; that, the first of actors, and a woeful author. Posterity would believe me, who will see only his writings; and who will see those of another modern idol, far less deservedly enshrined, Dr. Johnson. I have been saying this morning, that the latter deals so much in triple tautology, or the fault of repeating the same sense in three different phrases, that I believe it would be possible, taking the ground-work for all three, to make one of his ‘Ramblers’ into three different papers, that should all have exactly the same purport and meaning, but in different phrases. It would be a good trick for somebody to produce one and read it; a second would say, “Bless me, I have this very paper in my pocket, but in quite another diction”; and so a third…⁵¹

If one recollects the conclusion of Rambler 2 quoted above, it is easy to see what prompted this Walpolean fantasy. The very premise of Johnson’s moral essays, that men more often require to be reminded than informed, perhaps by itself drives their author towards an iterative style.⁵² Moreover, it may be that Johnson himself after a while found the character of the ‘Rambler’ constricting. If, when he first forged that character, it offered release by allowing him to give voice to the fund of information and reflection which he had accumulated as a result of earlier study and the labours of the Dictionary, it was also a character he found it increasingly hard to shake off. Certainly towards the end of his life Johnson was troubled by thoughts of the path not taken:

Johnson, however, had a noble ambition floating in his mind, and had, undoubtedly, often speculated on the possibility of his supereminent powers being rewarded in this great and liberal country by the highest honours of the state. Sir William Scott informs me, that upon the death of the late Lord Lichfield, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he said to Johnson, ‘What a pity it is, Sir, that you did not follow the profession of the law. You might have been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, and attained to the dignity of the peerage; and now that the title of Lichfield, your native city, is extinct, you might have had it..’ Johnson, upon this, seemed much agitated; and, in an angry tone, exclaimed, ‘Why will you vex me by suggesting this, when it is too late?’⁵³

This reluctance to contemplate possibilities not grasped surely accompanies a measure of restiveness – an agitation even – concerning the life that has been lived. Certainly the literary personae that Johnson created for himself in The Idler and The Adventurer seem partly to have been chosen to contrast with that of The Rambler by trimming back some of the moral seriousness associated with Johnson’s first set of periodical essays. And as The Rambler itself progressed, it sometimes seems as if the author is attempting to increase the tonal range and formal variety of the papers. In addition to the moral disquisitions, we have a series of moral case studies (sometimes amounting almost to a compressed novel, as in the story of ‘Misella’ in Ramblers 170 and 171), stories continued over some distance, as with Ramblers 132 and 194, and also the contes set in the Orient and even Greenland.

But to step away from the character of the ‘Rambler’ was for Johnson a difficult task. Once he was dead, and when the advent of the French Revolution had turned Johnson from a recently deceased author to the embodiment of a resistant Englishness and a bulwark against the democratical principles then ravaging France, it was impossible for that character to be laid aside. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the second edition of the Life of Johnson, published after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Boswell presented his dead friend to a new group of readers in precisely these terms:

Selected Essays

Contents

A Chronology of Samuel Johnson

Introduction