DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CENTURY.
TTNIVERSITY prize essays are not greatly sought after by an indifferent public, and the public is probably right, though we cannot forget that both Oxford and Cam- bridge have given to the world works of this nature which have deserved to live and have even occasionally done so. We have found in the Oxford Chancellor's English essay for 1899 an interesting theme treated in a not uninteresting way. The theme is "Dr. Johnson as Representative of the Character of the Eighteenth Century," the author is Mr. W. R. Barker (London: F. E. Robinson and Co.) It is hard to say anything new of Johnson, and Mr. Barker scarcely suc- ceeds in doing so, but his estimate is in the main exceedingly judicious. One asks with him what it is about Johnson that has made and kept him an English hero. He was certainly not a great thinker, for we cannot forget his famous " refutation " of Berkeley, which showed that he simply Ed not comprehend what are the root-problems of philo- sophy. He was not a learned man, for his Greek was elementary, his knowledge of the East and of the Middle Ages almost non-existent, he had not the faintest idea that in his own time a new literature and philosophy were springing up in Germany, he knew little or nothing of Italian, not a very great deal of French literature, and though he was well up in his Latin he knew the authors of that tongue rather as Fox knew them than as Bentley did,—knew them, that is to say, as a man of general culture rather than as a scholar. Mr. Barker points out that there is no indica- tion whatever of any intellectual growth in Johnson ; he wrote in 1740 just as he wrote in 1780. His theory of the world was simple, his ideas were all " given " to him when still young, and he relied on them with dogmatic confidence until he died. Why, then, do we find in Johnson such a great figure ? The answer is that we find him such because Boswell had the genius for making him so. But Boswell could not create a great man out of nothing, or, like the learned German, "out of his moral consciousness." Despite his obvious limitations, there must have been in Johnson some remarkable and representative qualities which have struck the imagination of England. These qualities Mr. Barker finds in the "genuine characteristics of the English- man in the eighteenth century," which "will remain as long as the nation preserves its separate identity."
Now, we do believe that Johnson stands on so high a pedestal because he is so representative an Englishman, but we doubt if he ought to be called representative of the eighteenth century. Johnson was a typical Englishman in his sturdy individualism, in his suspicion of "foreigners," in his hearty hatred of all humbug, all pretence, all glitter and show of rhetoric (witness his famous advice as to the "purple patches" in Robertson's historical works), in his utter in- capacity for speculative thinking along with his deep capacity for moralising, in his strange blend of Conservatism in thought with Radicalism in action ("Here's to the next revo- lution in the West Indies !"). He stood firmly on his feet four- square to all the winds that blew, resolved to admit no sovereignty over his life that was not a moral power, looking the world boldly in the face, an insular, choleric, but merciful free-born Englishman. As such he is typical of the nation for all time, perhaps as typical a figure as could be found ; but was he specially typical of the eighteenth century? The eighteenth century, like many other generalisations, is a misleading term. There are two eighteenth centuries, that of arid logic and prosaic common-sense, and that of romantic " sensibility " and enthusiasm for thel simplicity of Nature. The first we trace in Pope, Locke, and (spite of his brilliant persiflage) in Voltaire. The second is mirrored in Richardson, Rousseau, Sterne, and Cowper. As a matter of fact, though it is often convenient to assume that the century has a whole and continuous tissue, that is not the case in reality. As a matter of fact, most of the great world-events and movements like the discovery of America, the Refor- mation, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the rise of the new spiritual poetry in England, have come towards the ends of centuries, and surely the signs of the Latter end of the eighteenth century are very strangely different from those of the early Georgian days. If, however, we are to strike a mean, omit the Revolution and its volcanic upheaval on the one hand, and the beginning years of the century on the other, what, on the whole, do we get ?
We get, in the first place, a certain conventional view of life and society based on optimism, which might be
intellectually expressed in the doctrine of "pre-established barmony,"—the doctrine tersely stated by Pope that "what-
ever is, is right." Now this doctrine, in Pope's sense, was certainly not held by Johnson, whose life was passed, like that of Cowper, under the shadow of a great apprehension. Johnson was not to be inveigled by any brilliant epigram from looking in the face the stern and menacing facts of life, which, to him, was far from being a May-day. It would be wrong to call him a pessimist, for he had a strong though troubled faith in the Divine ; but assuredly he felt deeply the woes and sufferings of mankind, and he was not captivated by theories of progress. All governments were the same to him, few public causes were worth human effort. Resignation to the Divine will rather than confident faith and unclouded hope was his charac- teristic. In considering human life, he usually arrives at a sombre conclusion, and will no more admit airy chatter as to the "progress of the species" than will Carlyle. But he is even farther removed in another respect from his century, in that he is always and profoundly religions. If we strike the balance of the century, as suggested above, we find it repre-
sented by a certain hard, clear, excellent common-sense, ranging from the religious common - sense of Butler to the non-religious common - sense of Gibbon, and in- cluding all varieties of opinion marked by the same spirit of reliance on purely intellectual analysis and separation from mysticism and idealism. This is cer- tainly not the spirit or attitude of Johnson. He was religious through and through with the fervour, and often with the extreme credulity, of a medimval devotee. As Carlyle said of his devotions at St. Clement'e Danes, "Samuel Johnson worshipped in the era of Voltaire." His worship, too, was the absolute prostration of a troubled and contrite soul before its just and awful God. Few, if any, writers of the time, whether flippant or cheerfully pious, give us any such impression of a deep and fervent piety as does Johnson. He rather suggests and foreshadows Newman and
Pusey than represents the mind or disposition of his own age. Spite of his Toryism, his common-sense, his obstinate prejudices, we catch iu him something more than a gleam of "the spirit of the years to come, yearning to mix itself in life." Under his little brown wig and grey coat the soul of a romanticism ready to blaze out in Scott, and a spirit which was to stir to its depths English religions belief, were scarcely concealed. The man who poured forth his soul in prayer for his dying friends, and who gave to young Thrale his benediction on his starting on a youthful career, was not altogether of the main stuff of which the eighteenth century was made. He was more nearly related, in some respects, to the Jacobine and Caroline minds, and he had, as Mr. Barker admits, some points in common with our time. Had his power of expression been ampler and more delicate, and had his formative period been somewhat later than it was in date, Johnson might have been more truly entitled "a great moralist" than he actually is. As it is, his life reflects the inner tragedy of a time when an old world was dying, and a new world was being born. It may be said of him as of another and far greater man of letters:—
"He grew old in an age he condemned ;
He looked on the rushing decay Of the times which had sheltered his youth, Felt the dissolving throes
Of the social order he loved."
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