THE RETURN OF DR. JOHNSON. A IKE every one else, even
the mcst blatant of optimists, we have been perturbed by the general outlook, and found the signs of the times hard to read. We have had our fears, named and unnamed. We have eagerly caught at passing straws. Little things, indeed, there were to hint that we were returning to conditions that were more or less normal, but nothing that could give us permanent hope, restore our confidence. We wanted an omen, an unmistakable sign that. the tide had turned, and at last we think that we have found it. Dr. Johnson is once more among us. When first we began to notice the reappearance of the well-known quotations in the weeklies and the "leaders" of the dailies only .a few months ago, we confess that we still doubted. We were afraid it might prove a fleeting visit. But we doubt no longer. He has come to stay. He has returned to his own Fleet Street, where the indexes of the well-thumbed Boswells are being plied with tenfold vigour after their long rest, and we begin to feel that all may yet be well.
For to us the prolonged absence of Dr. Johnson has been among the most disquieting signs of the times, giving the measure of how completely our national life had been shaken to its very foundations. It cannot be that all true Boswellians were called to the Colours, nor can this marked revival be the result of a prolonged study in the trenches of the Sage's utterances. Johnson is, indeed, John Bull incarnate, with his limitations, his prejudices, and his essentially practical outlook on life. Yet during all these years he has swum altogether out of our ken for no other reason than because he is no absolutely a part of our normal existence that we have refused to fit him into the stormy times through which we have been passing. Though he, too, lived through wars in plenty, they seem to have passed him by untouched, except for his memorable attitude towards the revolt of the American Colonies, which gave rise to regretful misgivings even among his most abject admirers. The life that was passed between Fleet Street and the Strand, the Borough and Streatham, with occasional holidays to Lichfield or Bath or elsewhere, and the two famous trips to the Hebrides and to Paris, is so typically English in its peaceful comfort, so suggestive of ease and port and ample leisure to stretch one's legs and have one's talk out, that it is only natural
that we should have turned from it for a while. We are told that nobody reads Boswell nowadays. Whether this be true or not, there are plenty of people who are glad to read about Johnson and to pass on the Johnsoniana they may have gleaned at second hand. Even the man who talks of Boswell's Life of Johnson is well aware that he ought to know something about him, just as he ought to know something about Wellington and Shakespeare and Nelson. He expects to knock up against him in his daily reading, and to feel his patriotism tickled by the pithiness of his sayings, as by the quotations from Shakespeare on the calendar which he reads out to his wife before shaving every morning. And the moment life begins to become normal he will miss him.
For the war upset our normal reading, as it upset everything else. The strain and excitement that drove many people to writing poetry who would never have thought of doing anything of the kind in ordinary times, drove others to reading it. Pepys, thanks to a clever parody, has actually taken his place as one of our best chroniclers of England in war time. And this is as it should be. Pepys was a man of action, keenly interested in all the life and movement of the day, in which he played a prominent part, and he was as typically English, as thorough a John Bull, as Johnson himself. The great Doctor, however, was essentially a man of letters. It would be impossible to parody him in order to give a picture of London in war time, for his interests did not lie in the world of action. The immortal Diary has probably had fewer readers than Boswell. Pepys is too earthy, too Philistine, to play the part in English life that is taken by Johnson. He is a fellow-sinner, upon whose indul- gence we can count when we are doing something that makes us a little ashamed of ourselves. He has none of the sententious- ness, the moralizing tendency, that has given Johnson his unique place amongst us. Ho was hi every way a much smaller man. Pepys has never before been an element in our national life, though he has had his devotees in plenty. His resuscitation is almost. as noteworthy a sign of the times as the absence of Johnson.
" What this country wants is three months' holiday," said an American observer recently. Now that it has had it, or something like it, we are slowly recovering our mental balance and returning to our normal reading. And the very poets, we are told, are beginning to " ca' canny." So Johnson can safely take up his residence again in Cough Square. We do not doubt that many a true Johnsonian—the Johnsonianissimus —continued to read his Boswell as steadily as his curtailed leisure would allow him, though the times have tempted more than one loyal follower to strange fields, that would have driven the Sage to forbid. them his awful presence for a space, had they ventured to reveal them to him. Possibly the fine, rounded periods which serve so admirably to bring out the point of the relieving epigram recalled to them too clearly all that they had lost by the war. But they doubtless returned to their allegiance swisr than most people, and were already spending their evenings in Bolt Court, or at the various places where the Club chose to meet, some months before the Sage began to take to journalism again.
He reappears, for instance, in a recent Fortnightly in Mr. H. C. Biron's article on " Dr. Johnson and Women." Mr. Bison considers that Johnson got on with them because he did not idealize them, but took them as he found them, and the paper shows how thoroughly he understood them, both on the good and the bad side, and loved them all, from Mrs. Thrale to Bet Flint, in spite of their faults. In this he was very different from the writer of the article's quasi-namesake, Lord Byron, who was far more successful with them than Johnson could ever have hoped to be, and yet idealized them to such a degree that he could not bear to see them eat, since the thought of their doing anything so unaethereal lowered them in his eyes. Yet again one thinks of the rows of empty eggshells that flanked the breakfast-
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