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John Casey on Samuel Johnson's morality

One William Mudford, writing in 1802, has this to say of Johnson's Rambler: What a depraved picture of human nature is this! In what a world of infamy and guilt do we exist! Where shall we seek for friend- ship where all are false; where shall we repose our griefs where none are virtuous? Alas! How may the most exalted intellect be corrupted by a pernicious indulgence of rancorous prejudices?

Such an attack from a near-contemporary must surprise those who think that in his Rambler essays Johnson was merely setting down the commonplaces of eighteenth-ceiltury moral orthodoxy. Mudford's attack expresses a 'sentimental' reaction against Johnson's rationalism. In the context of the cult of feeling, Johnson's moral writings appeared pessimistic, re- strictive and cynical. Even in his own time Johnson's ethical rationalism was un- fashionable, and his intellectual roots were essentially in an earlier tradition.

Modern interest in Johnson as a moral- ist has tended to play down his rational- ism. W. J. Bate (one of the Yale* editors) compares Johnsion with Freud; Prof E. Verbeekt ranges him as a psychologist alongside 'Pascal. Dostoievsky, Stendhal and Nietzsche'. These comparisons are not obviously illuminating. Johnson—unlike Dostoievsky, for instance—really does accept the Augustan view of the primacy of reason in the moral life; but in his Rambler essays he subjects the Augustan view to a searching examination. Modern critics are 'right to see that Johnson, as much as Swift or even Blake, is aware of what lies beneath the surface of rational behaviour. His undegstanding of human motives is profound, and is informed by a scepticism that is congenial to the modern *The Rambler edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (Vols lit, iv and v of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Yale University Press £15.75) fThe Measure and the Choice: A Patho- graphic Essay on Samuel Johnson .E. Ver- beek MD (E. Story-Scientia, Ghent, Belgium) mind. Equally congenial is his grasp of mental pathology. Nevertheless, Johnson is a rationalist, and his interest in morbid states is entirely controlled by his notion of what constitutes the reasonable and the virtuous.

The Rambler was published twice a week from March 1750 until March 1752. The sale never exceeded five hundred copies. Throughout the nineteenth century it was customary to compare the Rambler unfavourably with Addison's SPECTATOR, and in those areas where they can really be compared this was not really unjust. Even the literary criticism of the SPECTATOR is more memorable than that of the Rambler. But of course it is unfair to emphasise the comparison. The Rambler is not really in the tradition of periodical journalism at all. One never feels that Johnson has any particular audience in mind for the Rambler, and the most endur- ing impression is of an extended work on moral psychology developed in piecemeal fashion, which accidentally, and rather oddly, took the form of periodical essays. The wonder is that it sold five hundred copies. We must be grateful to the Yale editors for these handsome, meticulously edited volumes. The notes are sometimes insufficient, and one is not happy to see the set dedicated to a deceased editor. But in general this set meets the highest stan- dards.

It is hard to imagine who reads the Rambler now. No doubt many who do try to read it are disappointed with what they find. There are few, if any passages which can be quoted for their surprising insights into human behaviour. There are no pointed ironies such as we find in Hobbes or Mandeville. no maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucauld. no moral revaluations comparable to those of Niet- zsche. Again, Johnson offers no strikingly original theory in moral philosophy, un- like Hume or Shaftesbury. What then is his achievement?

The essays in the Rambler alternate between what we might call 'case-histories' and abstract moral disquisitions. The case- histories are presented with extraordinary economy, but always include some detail which has a purely narrative function and is not totally derived from the moral analysis. Johnson's essays are never— except where they are deliberately allegori- cal—parables. but retain an essential par- ticularity which reminds one of the `digressions' in the novels of Fielding and Le Sage. Even the most abstract essays have a particularity which is a function of the extreme precision of the thought. It is partly the effort required to observe what is morally commonplace that accounts for the excitement of Johnson's prose:

Happiness may be destroyed not only by union with the man who is apparently the slave of interest, but with him whom a wild opinion of the dignity of perseverance, in whatever cause, disposes to pursue every injury with unwearied and perpetual resent- ment; with him whose vanity inclines him to consider every man as a rival in every pretension; with him whose airy negligence puts his friends' affairs or secrets in con- tinual hazard, and thinks his forgetfulness of others excused by inattention to himself; and with him whose inconstancy ranges without any settled rule of choice through

varieties of friendship and who adopts and dismisses friendship by the sudden impulse of caprice.

Few English writers have combined such precision in the use of words with so much intelligence in the discovery of generality.

Although he is not primarily a theorist, Johnson's method does presuppose a highly elaborate theoretical framework. He en- tirely rejects the doctrine, fashionable in his day, of ethical sentimentalism, which was understood to assert that virtue is essentially a matter of motive, or of a man's having benevolent feelings. This doctrine, so important in the growth of the

Romantic sensibility, was dismissed by Johnson, who hated what he called 'feelers'

—people who substituted a spurious moral- ity of sentiment for a morality based upon principle. Johnson believed (with Aristotle) that morality is a matter of character and habit, rather than of feeling. In other words, his theoretical position leads him into a study of moral psychology. One feels of course that he rejected the fashionable cult of feeling for other reasons as well—that he thought it morally shallow. But this points in the same direction. A mind which takes ethics seriously must be interested in moral psychology, and the ethic of sentiment is, from this point of view, shallow. It confines the ethical part of human nature to one autonomous section—whereas for Johnson the ethical nature of man is an integral part of all his actions, thoughts and feelings. Fol-

lowing Aristotle, he sees the virtuous man as the man who evinces the greatest degree of rationality in his conduct. He does not simply describe human psychology and then impose moral judgments upon it. Rather what he does is to describe the practical reason in its relations to human disposi- tions, which are the dispositions front which all rational conduct must flow. In showing that a disposition is vicious he again and again shows that it is inherently—self- defeating. On anger, for instance: Pride is undoubtedly the original of anger; but pride, like every other passion, if it once breaks loose from reason, counteracts its own pur- poses. A passionate man, upon the review of his day, will have very few gratifications to offer to his pride, when he has considered how

his outrages were caused, why they were borne, and in what they were likely to end at last. Nothing is more despicable than the old age of a passionate man. When the vigour of his youth fails him, and his amusements pall with frequent repetition, his occasional rage sinks by decay of strength into peevishness, that peevish- ness, for want of novelty and variety becomes habitual; the world falls off around him, and he is left—to devour his own heart in solitude and contempt.

(Rambler No 11) Vice necessarily produces" self-deception and insincerity: Men are willing to try all methods of recon- ciling guilt and quiet, and when their tinder- standings are stubborn and uncomplying. raise their passions against them, and hope to over- power their own knowledge—incited by that conviction of the deformity of wickedness from which none can set himself free.

(No 76)

Some moral philosophers might want to say that the ideal of reason as the standard of conduct which we (rightly) associate with the eighteenth century is really a moral ideal—in the sense that it reflects the moral beliefs of the time. As such there is nothing absolute about it—any more than there is about the centrality of-the notion of Nature in eighteenth-century poetics. But Johnson is bringing to the surface the phenomen- ology of the passions which defines such an ideal. In answer to the question 'Why should I adopt a moral scheme which attaches such a high value to Reason?' Johnson points to a picture of human psychology which, if plausible, makes such a question pointless. According to this picture, the irrational man suffers a conflict of passions, is subject to obsessive hopes and fears, applies different standards to himself and others, is liable to be defeated in what he sets out to do by his own lethargy, and so on. it is impossible to describe a vicious man who is not thus in some way at variance with himself.

Self-knowledge is central to this moral picture and Johnson returns to it again and again. He denies that there is any part of our consciousness which is hidden from our own observation—there are no 'secret' depths to the human mind : Self-love is often rather arrogant than blind— We are secretly conscious of defects and vices which we hope to conceal from the public eye, and please ourselves with innumerable impos- tures, by which in reality nobody is deceived.

His notion of self-knowledge is, then, very different from the Freudian idea of 'self- analysis' with which E. Verbeek, in his 'pathographic essay' on Johnson, compares it. According to the author, the book is aimed at 'initiates'. This refers to initiates of Johnson, but one cannot help thinking that he means initiates of "psychoanalysis. He labours to establish distinctions that are of a purely clinical interest—such as that Johnson, although suffering from 'serious mental disturbances' and being 'a perturbed man', was nevertheless not neurotic and did not have a mental disease. One is grateful to learn this, and cannot but be intrigued . by Professor Verbeek's later proof that Johnson was an epileptic. Some of the evidence for that is remarkable. We are referred not only to such obvious signs of epilepsy as Johnson's tendency to begin his sentences with 'Sir!', but also to his 'prefer- ence for conservative views'. The author displays all the naivete about human motives that one expects from a profes- sional psychiatrist. For instance, Johnson as a youth refused, out of snobbery, to take his father's place at his bookstall in Uttoxeter

on a day when his father was ill. Fifty years later, at the age of seventy-two, Johnson made a visit of expiation to Uttoxeter and stood bareheaded in the market square (where the stall had stood) for several hours 'exposed to the sneers of the passers-by and the inclemency of the weather'. For the good Professor Verbeek—and no doubt for anyone else who entirely lacks a moral imagination—this episode is an example of Johnson's 'instability and eccentricity'. Then there is the episode in the theatre where Johnson was confronted with a lout who had taken his chair and refused to give it up. Johnson having 'civilly demanded' the chair, and having been rudely refused, tossed the man into the pit, chair' and all. Verbeek regards this as a loss of self- control. Boswell interprets it as a controlled response to an intolerable affront, and re- lates it as an example of Johnson's physical courage (he was sixty-six years old at the time).

Verbeek's main purpose, however, is to produce a parallel between Johnson and Freud. This is by no means absurd. Like Freud, Johnson does give an account of the mechanisms of self-deception and evasion. They have in common a certain pessimism about human motives, and a scepticism which would prevent either of them basing a morality upon such notions as 'natural benevolence'. Like Freud, Johnson tries to give an account of the genesis of vicious behaviour at a deep level. Freud, like John- son, can be represented as a great rationalist who wishes to increase the area of human behaviour which is under rational control. Verbeek assembles an interesting range of examples of Johnson's tracing the origin and growth of vicious habits to childhood. He then simply translates the term 'vice' into 'neurosis', thus turning Johnson's account of the importance of habit in moral psychology into a theory of neurosis.

Of course there is something in the analogy—but the differences are equally striking. The difference comes out in what Verbeek calls the 'moralistic aspect' of Johnson's 'psychological investigations'. What this means is that Johnson never uses the fact that vice has its causes in childhood as a reason for describing the vice in terms appropriate to childhood. Johnson's moral- ity is irreducibly social; self-deception nearly always involves an attempt to deceive others as well. Essentially, Johnson does not try to make people investigate further and further their private fantasies, but rather to come to see their states of mind from the outside, from the point of view of an external, social criterion of reasonable behaviour. This is why he is not just a psychologist but a moral psychologist. Johnson's language throughout the Rambler shows that he regards man as above all a social being; his psychological analysis is always governed by a notion of rational behaviour within a civilised society.