BOOKS AND WRITERS
IT has more than once been remarked that a large majority of those who profess and call themselves Johnsonians are in fact Boswellians and nothing else. They have a keen relish for everything that Boswell can tell them about his hero, but of John- son's own work they know little. This has never been more clearly emphasised than it was in Professor Nichol Smith's presidential address to the Johnson Society in Lichfield last year: " Boswellians .- . . read and re-read the great Life, they can quote whole passages of it, but can they quote The Vanity of Human Wishes, do they understand why Johnson was known as ' the author of The Rambler,' are they familiar with The Lives of the Poets? We shall all grant that a hasty reader can gain an impression of Johnson more quickly from Boswell's pages than his own. . . . What I maintain is that the true Johnsonian regards the Life as supplementing what he learns from the writings." .
There have, of course, been many anthologies of Johnson. In his lifetime The Beauties of Johnson (1782) was produced without any consultation with the author himself. " The book," he wrote, " is the production of I know not whom: I never saw it but by casual inspection, and considered myself as utterly disengaged from its consequences "; he also noted that the book had " got money to the collector." That was in the heyday of Johnson's fame as a writer. Fifty years later, the prospects of a Johnson anthologist had seriously declined, and Macaulay's pronouncements upon the contrast between Johnson the writer and Johnson the talker were left unquestioned for many decades: " All his books [wrote Macaulay] are written in a learned language. . . . When he wrote for publication he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. . . . His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets . . . his big words wasted on little things, his harsh inver- sions . . . all .these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject."
That was in 1831. And for another fifty years the public, broadly speaking, remained sick, or at least neglectful, of the subject until Birkbeck Hill and others began gradually to restore the balance. Miss Mona Wilson now gives us for the first time what has come to be called an " omnibus " anthology of Johnson.* The book, not- withstanding its 960 pages, is a pleasure to read and to handle. It belongs to a series of " compendious books " designed to present liberal selections from the works of great English writers and cover- ing " all aspects of their authors' works: prose and poetry, plays and letters." Miss Wilson, however, confines herself to prose and poetry. No one, perhaps, will worry about the omission of passages from Irene, but Johnson's quality as a letter-writer was such that a book designed to include " the work of Johnson which his disciples and friends want to read most frequently," and yet containing none of his letters (except the famous one to Lord Chesterfield), seems almost a contradiction in terms. Miss Wilson may well reply that she has been more strictly concerned with works published in John- son's lifetime, and that the letters deserve, and have had, a volume of selections to themselves. But in a comprehensive volume which seeks to illustrate the whole Johnson (" the man and his writings are one "), the omission is noticeable, and a similar plea might be made for some extracts from the Prayers and Meditations.
Miss Wilson very properly begins at the beginning, and reprints the preface to the translation of Father Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, with its early revelation of the authentic Johnson: "The Reader will here find no Regions cursed with irremediable Barrenness, or bless'd with Spontaneous Fecundity." Near the end of the -volume she includes the Song of Congratulation to Sir John Lade (" Long- expected one and twenty "), with a note by Mr. G. M. Young recording Housman's remark to W. P. Ker: "That poem was in my mind when I was starting the Shropshire Lad." In the 900-odd intervening pages Miss Wilson rightly gives us the full text of Johnson's major works—London, The Vanity of * Johnson; Prose and Poetry. Selected by Mona Wilson. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 21s.) Human Wishes, the Preface to the English Dictionary, Rasselas, the Preface to Shakespeare, the review of A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil and A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland among them. Here, indeed, is God's plenty for those Boswellians who do not know their Johnson. The massive irony with which Johnson dealt with Soame Jenyns's conjecture of a superior race of beings deceiving and tormenting men for their own pleasure deserves a place in any anthology of English prose: " Many of the books which now croud the world may be justly suspected to be written for the sake of some invisible order of beings, for surely they are of no use to any of the corporeal inhabitants of the world. . . . The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it : and how will either of those be put more in our power by him who tells us that we are puppets, of which some creature not much wiser than ourselves manages the wires."
Where are the useless epithets, the big words, the harsh inversions to be found in a passage like this ? Again, what better picture of a traveller to whom people mean more than places could one have than the following: " Raasay has little that can detain a traveller, except the Laird and his family ; but their power wants no auxiliaries. Such a seat of hospitality, amidst the winds and waters, fills the imagination with a delightful contrariety of images. With- out is the rough ocean and the rocky land, the beating billows and the howling storm ; within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance. In Raasay, if I could have found an Ulysses, I had fancied a Phaeacia."
But it is to be remembered that it was The Rambler essays that first established Johnson as the majestic exponent of ethical wisdom, and Miss Wilson very properly allots a generous portion of her pages to them. In The Rambler, more than in any other writings, Macaulay and Taine and others found the principal target for their attacks on Johnson's style, and, as Miss Wilson suggests in her introduction, the reader who wants to know Johnson in all his moods must put up with a modicum of Johnsonese. But, in fact, the public loves its Johnsonese—provided that it is served in small doses and served by James Boswell. Thus, if Johnson's reference to a reluctance to sit for a portrait as " among the anfractuosities of the human mind " or to The Beggar's Opera as containing " such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality " had occurred in a Rambler essay, they might well ,have been scorned as "Johnsonese." In fact, such phrases are with great gusto quoted by Boswellians as ipsissima Johnsoniana.
In her treatment of The Idler essays Miss Wilson is less generous. She gives barely a dozen pages of selections from them, and some of her individual omissions are puzzling. Apart from The Lives of the Poets, certain of The Idler papers form the best retort to the charge commonly brought against Johnson of being a dull and didactic essayist. The character sketches of Minim the Critic, of Dick Shifter in the Country, of Sober (who is Johnson himself) and, above all, of the female bargain-hunter, all illustrate both the greater " variety of real life " which Boswell noted in The Idler and that spirit of fun which frequently characterised Johnson's talk and rarely pervaded his writing.
But, as Miss Wilson says, no selection from Johnson's work can be altogether impersonal, and her compendious, yet manageable, volume should remove the last excuse for failure to sample the prose and poetry of Samuel Johnson. Furthermore, unlike some anthologists, Miss Wilson has taken trouble with her texts, using, with three exceptions, the earliest available. In her note on the Ode de Skia Insula she might have referred to the facsimile of Johnson's manuscript in the R. B Adam Catalogue, and in her chronological table she seems to have overlooked Mr. A. L. Reade's laborious demonstration that. Johnson left Oxford at the end of 1729. But these are trifles ; and it is to be hoped that through the medium of this admirable book some at least of the great company of Boswellians will now introduce themselves to the writings upon which the fame of Doctor Johnson was founded.
S. C. ROBERTS
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