BOOKS Dr Johnson's casebook

J. W. M. THOMPSON

Samuel Johnson's own opinion of his Rambler essays was unequivocal. 'My other works are wine and water,' he once said, 'but my Rambler is pure wine.' The picture of Johnson the invincible dogmatist has been so fixed in the mind by Boswell that it is easy to overlook his capacity for modesty about his own writings. He did not, for example, dis- guise the failings of his bad play Irene; when told of some sycophant's flattery of that work he brusquely replied, 'If he says so, he lies'. Yet the Rambler, a journalistic venture undertaken to earn his daily bread while he compiled his dictionary, was peculiarly dear to him.

It was the work which set him on the high road to that extraordinary place of domin- ance which remains one of the marvels of English literature; but there was more to it than that. Its production, unbroken for two years in which other demands were pressing, represented a triumph over the melancholy indolence which attacked him for most of his life. And the work was a distillation of his long and deep reflection upon good and evil, upon the pains and consolations of human life. More than anything else, it contains the essentials of Johnson's thought and values. It was, one can suppose, in his eyes not only the best of Johnson the writer: it was the best of Johnson the man.

Posterity has generally tended to endorse the paradox which Macaulay expressed—

Johnson the writer, revered as a classic in his own age, is little read, while Johnson the companion and talker, whose memory might have been expected to die with him, is as much with us as ever. But the Yale edition of Johnson's works, which began to appear twelve years ago, is a noble attempt at redis- covery; and to the series has now been added the complete Rambler in three volumes (Yale University Press, Vols III, IV and V, l5gns). Samuel Johnson's 'pure wine' is thus avail- able at last in a form which unobtrusively displays the highest in modern scholarship.

The present-day reader, it must be said, is likely to take it up with some misgivings. A writer who avows that his principal design is `to inculcate wisdom or piety' while 'refining our language to grammatical purity' is clearly not out for the easy captivation of his readers. And then, this handsome edition, with its watchful legions of footnotes and variant readings, suggests the lying in state of some great statesman of literature: one could almost lose sight of the hard-pressed literary toiler, struggling through besetting hardships to express his commitment to 'the dignity of virtue', who stands behind this smoothly polished monument.

It is helpful to remember the origins of the Rambler. Johnson had not yet ripened into the Great Cham; he was in his early forties, his first meeting with Boswell was still a dozen years ahead, he was newly emerging from the horrors of Grub Street poverty and suffering. Having embarked upon his diction- ary. he needed other work to live by; so early in 1750 he contracted to write two Ramblers a week. He became. in other words, the eigh- teenth century equivalent of a journalistic columnist.

Not all columnists, it has to be admitted, go about their task with the high seriousness which Johnson brought to his. Volume one of the Yale Johnson (Diaries, Prayers and Annals, 1958) records the prayer which he composed when he began. 'Almighty God ...

grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my under- taking thy Holy Spirit may not be witheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory .' The Rambler may have been hack work of a sort, but Johnson was not the man to undertake it lightly or in a catchpenny spirit.

He did not even wish the identity of its author to be known, for fear that the moral counsel which he proposed to give would suffer from being linked with a known and humanly imperfect source; but his friends easily detected his hand from the outset.

One needs, of course, a sense of duty to read through all the 208 Ramblers from start to finish today. And yet one cannot pro- ceed far into these volumes without a sense of richness, of a mind that has pondered deeply and aimed at the highest. A picture forms of their troubled author, only lately escaped from his starveling, ragged years; ugly, twitching, puffing, ungainly, disfigured, often ill-used, often desperate; yet there emerges from these pages a tone of sweet gravity, of unhurried compassion and under- standing, of rare solicitude for suffering fellow-beings.

Johnson wrote, as periodical journalists have to do, on any topic that chanced to come into his mind. One day he might offer a sketch of a fortune-hunter, another day he might meditate upon the spring. He wrote of the problem of prostitution in London, or the difficulty of choosing a wife. He turned his eye upon modish dissipations, analysed Milton's versification, mused on the evils of wealth and those of poverty, or weighed the reasons for the general unacceptability of good advice. He spread his net wide.

But throughout these essays—or medita- tions, or sermons, even—the single unifying theme is the vanity of human things, the transience of earthly pleasures, the unim- portance of power and place and the para- mountcy of man's soul and man's 'futurity'.

Outward things are fleeting and a sham, the cultivation of virtue is the only true wisdom; the proper study of mankind is man, but man as a mortal creature with an immortal soul; 'the great incentive to virtue is the re- flection that we must die'. It is not, one reflects, the stuff of which many present-day newspaper columns are made.

Moreover, Johnson eschewed all current political affairs in these papers—or rather perhaps, seemed to do so. For it might be truer to say that in the Rambler he showed the other side of that political medal which, elsewhere, he wore with a flourish, to the fury of Whigs of his own and all subsequent generations. Affairs of state, systems of government, political power—all these, to him, were of small account. Did he not once say, in an extravagant moment, that he would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another? Today, one can envy the innocence of the remark; but the Rambler puts it in its framework. What mattered, Johnson insisted, lay inside a man. Elsewhere, in a couplet for his fellow-Tory Goldsmith, he phrased it thus: `How small of all that human hearts endure That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!'

Looking back through the Rambler at this stubborn stand for the private man against all that is now thought of, whether gratefully or fearfully, as the state', one sees Johnson appearing rather like a rocky islet threatened by a vast incoming tide. Indeed, had he lived only a few years longer than he did, he would have seen released in Europe the forces which would sweep away all that he believed in. In these pages he dwells on those things which to him were supreme: the cultivation of Christian virtue, the means of grace and the hope of glory.

And, much as he rejected what two suc- ceeding centuries of political change have asserted, so he was also unimpressed by the processes subsequently labelled as economic progress. He once said to Boswell: 'Depend upon it, this rage of trade will destroy itself. You and I shall not see it; but the time will come when there will be an end of it.' Poverty, with which he was familiar, he hated; but he hated greed and materialism no less. In the Rambler he wrote often of man's need to get a living (who was better placed than he to do so?). But he never failed to distinguish between the means and the end.

It is a stern message. Professor Walter J. Bate, in his introduction to the present edition, writes that 'With the Rambler, Johnson emerges for us as one of the great moralists of modern times.' That is no doubt true, even though modern times have shown precious little tendency to heed him. He adds: 'The best of the Rambler is timeless'.

That is perhaps more debatable. The thought may be timeless; but what of the frequent objection that it is now obscured by the language in which he expressed it? Johnson's English is certainly not ours. Neither is it that of Tristram Shandy. Macaulay dis- missed the language as `Johnsonese', which he amplified as 'pompous and unbending'. But this, it can now be seen, i&a criticism which has worn rather less well than its object.

There are, indeed, passages of drowsy solemnity in the Rambler, there is too regular a flow of measured periods, there are patches which today seem an awful bore. There are moments when the stately hippo- potamus-march of the prose stumbles into bathos. 'Let no man from this time suffer his felicity to depend on the death of his aunt': oh dear! Yet this example, typically, comes as a mere blemish upon what has been a penetrating portrayal of a legacy-hunter.

But there is also a great quantity of plain and truthful prose: Johnson in his wig and

coat and public manner, yes, but Johnson vigorously determined to tell the truth and

salt it with profound common sense. This may sound formal or stiff to our ears but it

is not pompous or false: 'The fondest and firmest friendships are dissolved by such openness and sincerity as interrupt our enjoyment of our own approbation.' Neither is this: 'The rich and the powerful live in a perpetual masquerade, in which all about them wear borrowed characters'. Or this, from the essay on the 'narrowness of fame'; The naturalist has no desire to know the opinions or conjectures of the philologer: the botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard: the lawyer

scarcely hears the name of a physician with- out contempt; and he that is growing great

and happy by electrifying a bottle, wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war or peace.'

He adopted the form of the periodical essay because the form happened to exist.

Journalism in the modern sense had scarcely been invented. In adopting the form, he adopted many of the conventions that went with it, such as the framing of some of the

essays in the guise of letters from supposed correspondents. This, it must be admitted,

was not at all in Johnson's line, and never less so than when he followed the custom and wrote as a lady correspondent. The fact is that whatever character he thought he was adopting, the voice that emerged through the disguise was wholly and certainly his own.

Goldsmith once caught this defect very aptly when he told Johnson that if he were to write a fable about little fishes, 'you would make

the little fishes talk like whales'. All the little fishes in the Rambler talk like one instantly identifiable whale.

When the prodigious spell which Johnson exerted upon his own times had begun to wear off, the nineteenth century critics took

to comparing the Rambler unfavourably with Addison's Spectator; it lacked the

charm, the delightful humour, the easy sim- plicity, and so on, that distinguished its pre- decessor. Perhaps Johnson's own public felt much the same about it when it first ap-

peared, for at its first printing the Rambler never had a circulation of above 500 copies, whereas the Spectator is said to have gone as

high as 30,000 on occasion. But its reputation swiftly grew. There were repeated reprints in Johnson's lifetime. The point was taken, per-

haps. and later lost sight of, that to compare the Rambler with the Spectator was not

really to compare like with like. Instead of

the complaint that the Rambler was over- serious for the form which Addison had em-

ployed, 'a more accurate statement,' as Pro- fessor Bate writes, 'is simply that he trans- cended that form'.

The periodical writer who 'condemns him- self', as Johnson wrote in the last issue of the Rambler, `to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an attention dissi- pated, a mirnory embarrassed, an imagina- tion overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease. He will labour on a barren topick, till it is too

late to change it; or . diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.' How true, how true! Yet in this most meticulous edition, which collects the innumerable polishings and prun- ings of language which Johnson performed as successive editions went to press, there is scarcely a single example of an argument being adjusted or a second thought supplant- ing the original. All this remarkable outpour- ing came from deep within him; the accident that it was put to paper while an impatient boy from the printer waited at his elbow is of no significance; he knew, and had long been maturing, what he wanted to say.