Dr Johnson and the Great Anglo Tradition

I want to open by standing back to set the broad scene within which I think, from our perspective in the twenty-first century, Samuel Johnson should be placed and judged. We live in times in which a conceit prevails that the present is all that matters; that the past is dead and buried, and the future is beyond concern. To become unmindful of cultural and historical tradition is to risk misunderstanding who we are as a people, and what shapes our characteristic ways and inclinations, and our strengths and weaknesses. This foolish blinkering is illustrated by the fading of Dr Johnson in the collective memory.

We live in a world made in England, and made to a lesser degree in its Anglo offshoot, the United States. The two pillars on which the modern world stands, its necessary conditions—the Industrial Revolution and parliamentary democracy—both seeded and grew in England. Actually, there is a third pillar, the culture of the West, and in particular its English tributary.

English has become the global, one might even say universal language—as illustrated by the surprising if incidental fact that after Britain has left the European Union, English will remain the working language of Europe. The fabric of the modern industrialised world, the weaving and the thread, was an Anglo creation: from the factory, the office, the skyscraper, to railways, jumbo jets, television, information technology; and today such creative-industry companies as Apple, Google and Facebook. Sport has emerged as a major social phenomenon, as increased prosperity has expanded the time and resources for leisure. Soccer, rugby, cricket, golf, and tennis (in its organised competitive form), were all British inventions, as was organised sport in itself, and annual tournaments like Wimbledon and the British Golf Open. Even the modern Olympic Games, while founded by a Frenchman, was modelled on the ethos of the English public school. I could go on.

The Anglo world has not lost a major war in over two centuries, from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. Military dominance has proved both a cause and effect of the confidence that fed into the expansion of the British Empire, followed by America’s emergence as a super-power. Those empires were composed from political, institutional and cultural parts.

Our fortune, in our own settler society Australia, was to be formed as a branch off this same tree, launched into a world that has been easy for us to understand, and to move confidently and successfully within, for it was born from within our own lineage.

The Anglo tradition is, like any other tradition, the creation of culture—as its source, frame, quality and texture. Every culture has as its core what might be termed the mythos of the people—that is, a body of archetypal stories from a long time ago. At the primary level, English culture is one tributary of the West, with its formative moments in Homer, Greek tragedy and the Life of Jesus.

At the secondary level, there is the particular culture of the English, composed of language, institutions and customs. I suspect that the language is the generative source, articulated through the stories, from which all else flows, but admittedly this is speculative—Johnson himself might be employed as prime exhibit.

The language as we know it today had William Tyndale and Shakespeare as its founding fathers. Tyndale, the poorly recognised, most unfairly treated figure in English cultural history, in his translation of the Bible (New Testament, 1526) produced most of the famous phrases and passages that reappeared in the King James Authorised Version of 1611 (80 per cent of which was Tyndale), phrases and passages that are integral to the rich music of the language with its unique blend of sound and idea. The place of Shakespeare needs no elaboration. The founding fathers were followed by Donne, Milton, Burke, Austen, Dickens, Darwin, Churchill and, of course, in the midst of them all, Dr Johnson.

Presiding over the Anglo tradition is the language—I shall come to institutions and customs later. English, on the surface, displays a playful anarchic mayhem and freedom of structure that hides an implicit order of extraordinary complexity, an order which is, at best, crudely codified—and makes the language a nightmare for foreigners to learn to use well. Shakespeare demonstrated what the language was capable of—wild, frisky and wayward, yet strict and formal, allowing a tactile, earthy evocativeness, a flamboyant wittiness, and a complex phraseology compressing multiple meanings into a single sentence; but also rhythm and precision. It is a language frothing from the turbulent confluence of its two river sources, the Germanic and the Romance. It has always to be worked at; never taken for granted. Anyone who has read Hamlet in French will find a text corseted into anaemic formality, which would be laughable if it wasn’t such a sad diminution of the original.

We may discern an affinity between the language and a legal culture hostile to codification, inclined to the cumbersome and messy process of trial by jury; and to a political tradition steeped in precedent, compromise and common sense, one which vests authority in the basic wisdom, and the prejudices, of the common man and woman. Both the law and parliament respect the primacy of the individual, defending the rights of private property. The language and its peculiar ways helped to shape and steer the civic culture.

From this brief sketch of the Anglo landscape, let me turn to the question of Dr Johnson himself. Of what is the legend composed? Separating the man from the mythic figure he was to become is impossible. In any case, such a separation is not my ambition here.

The story is odd. Johnson was a man of letters, scholar and writer. Yet, he has not left any single work of the absolute first rank, one that imprints an indelible, inescapable and timeless mark in the culture, such as the King James Bible; Hamlet and King Lear, Much Ado about Nothing and Julius Caesar; Reflections on the Revolution in France; poems of Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge; Pride and Prejudice; The Origin of Species; poems by Hopkins, Owen, Yeats, Eliot and Auden; Churchill’s wartime radio speeches; not to mention the highpoints of American and Australian literature. Moreover, his title is a kind of imposture, in that his doctorate was honorary, not earned through direct scholarly achievement—although, to be fair, its employment seems to have been more due to Boswell than Johnson himself.

Johnson’s Dictionary is the pioneering work in English, one that sets the standard for all its successors. It is distinguished by its monumental and imposing size as much as by the vitality, scholarship, precision and flair of many of its entries. Its prose is wiry, supple and trenchant. The author himself rated the Dictionary as his one original work. But, for all of its enduring majesty and brilliance, it is not consulted today.

Then there was Dr Johnson the critic. Harold Bloom rates him as unmatched as a literary critic, before or after. Perhaps yes for the range of the work, from Shakespeare to lives of the poets, and much else. My own estimate is lower—using the test of which works stay with one long after having read them, continuing to engage and resonate. I am more taken, for example, by Wilson Knight’s Wheel of Fire on Shakespeare’s tragedies, or Frank Kermode’s Genesis of Secrecy on Mark’s Life of Jesus.

There is Johnson the biographer. As with the Dictionary, he was a pioneer, in many ways the inventor of the modern genre, compounding psychological sketches with critical assessment of the subject’s works, and presenting the whole as a moral essay, to be learnt from as a lesson in how, or how not, to live. His general praise helped bring biography to attention, his argument being that all human lives, however seemingly inconsequential, are of interest. His own biographies—from the particular life of his friend Richard Savage to his lives of the poets—would demonstrate the Johnsonian virtues of insight and balance, and deep curiosity about life and manners, all written in agile prose. Yet the Johnson biographies were never to gain the universal status of, say, Plutarch’s Lives. Johnson would, of course, become the subject of the most famous biography in English, with his own huge personality, as it is projected in James Boswell’s four volumes, bestowing legitimacy on the genre.

Johnson was an English exemplar of the Socratic maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. He spent his life thinking and talking, and prodigiously, with unimaginable energy and scope. Conversation was his most lasting pleasure. In fact, he had a lot in common with Socrates, who also spent his life talking, but with the major difference that Johnson also wrote. Johnson’s own fine biographer, W. Jackson Bate, judged him “the greatest talker in the history of the English language”.

With his extraordinary verbal intelligence, Johnson could be a character out of Shakespeare. He was part Falstaff, in look and wit, also in the company he kept—scruffy down-and-out cronies in Grub Street—complemented by his dirty, tatty attire adorned by atrocious table manners, and voracious eating and drinking habits. William Hogarth’s first visual impression of Johnson, before he heard him speak, was of an idiot. Mind, Johnson disparaged Falstaff as despicable if not wicked, perhaps in fear of similarity of look and style, but also out of moral censure. If Johnson was part Falstaff, it was the Shakespearean fat-man rogue recast in likeable and honest form, one shining with the eloquence of Henry V. Edmund Burke—Johnson’s friend, protégé, and verbal jousting partner—speculated that if he had joined Parliament he “certainly would have been the greatest speaker that ever there was”. This praise came from the most superb speech-maker the British Parliament has, in the reality, ever known.

Of all of Shakespeare’s characters, Johnson is most like Hamlet. Both men speak their lives, brooding over meaning, making of their social presence a lonely charismatic brilliance. Both men were congenitally depressive. But Hamlet was not a wanderer in search of grace, a straggler as Johnson preferred to call himself. The heroes of Johnson’s three favourite books were all pilgrims—Don Quixote, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. Johnson defined a pilgrim as “a wanderer, particularly one who travels on a religious account”. Hamlet was decidedly not a pilgrim.

I think there is a case for regarding Johnson as the paradigm English philosopher—the ideal version of the British philosopher. Philosophy in the strict sense has not been an area of British genius, one that might match classical Athens or modern Germany. With Johnson, it is less that particular works stand out, than the accumulation, and the embodiment in the man himself.

Many have praised Rasselas as Johnson’s great work. It is a moral fable, using the device of a sheltered prince travelling the world in search of the path to human happiness. Once the prince has surveyed the vast gamut of human living, his conclusion is that no one is happy: not the rich and powerful; the academic and wise; the young; the single or the married, irrespective of whether they marry early or late; parents; hermits; and not those who dwell in rustic simplicity. The one constant among these humans is complaint. Life is to be endured, not enjoyed.

Rasselas’s audience remains narrow today, and I think for good reason. Its form is contrived, its narrative thread often arbitrary, and its driving theme one-dimensional. Johnson’s strength is not in story-telling. Further, Johnson’s cynicism is too easy in Rasselas, and underestimates the potential variety and richness of life, its range of redemptive possibility. It was as if it was written against the grain of the author’s own eagerness to find grace; and his insistence on the deep human need to find a meaning for suffering. He sterilised the text by repressing his own theological anxieties, from his belief in original sin to his worrying about the theodicy question—if God is benevolent, how can human life be beset by diabolical misery and evil. Strikingly, he never managed any penetrating reflections on his theological doubts. Here is a major shortcoming of Johnson as philosopher.

Rasselas lacks the metaphysical scope and originality of Plato, the pungency of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, or the best of Nietzsche. Johnson is not Kant; nor Freud. His reflections have parallels with Michel Montaigne and his urbane essays on the human condition; and with Francis Bacon, upon whom he drew as a role model.

In surveying the Johnson output, I would distinguish the impressive from the edifying. Impressive is his range of knowledge—Adam Smith’s judgment was that he had read more books than anyone else alive, but with a photographic memory allowing him to keep in mind what he had taken in. Johnson alone wrote definitions of 40,000 words, plus variations, in his Dictionary. Impressive is the integration of scholarship and experience—he was not an ivory-tower thinker. He once berated his friend, the artist Joshua Reynolds, for his ignorance of life as ordinary people experienced it. By the way, while mentioning Adam Smith, it is worth noting that the most influential principle in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the founding work of modern economics, probably came from Johnson—that self-interest is the one motive that can always be trusted amongst humans.

Switching judgment from the impressive to the edifying, Johnson illuminates in summing up character, its strengths and weaknesses; and in his philosophy of life. This is Johnson the moralist. Johnson remains best known by his aphorisms, masterly in their pungency and compression. He used to be reputed the second most quoted person in English, after Shakespeare. For example, there is his clever rather than profound quip about second marriage: the triumph of hope over experience.

Let me sample further:

Fame is shallow, for other people are universally preoccupied with their own hopes and fears, engaged in contriving some refuge from calamity, or in shortening the way to some new possession.

Everyone needs to hide his unimportance from himself.

He that in the latter part of his life too strictly enquires what he has done can very seldom receive from his own heart such an account as will give him satisfaction. We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves.

Love is only one of many passions, and has no great influence on the sum of life.

Pity is not natural to man; children are always cruel.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction.

The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.

Popularity in drawing rooms goes to persons whose conversation is “unenvied insipidity”.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

Whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.

As vignette, there was the devastating simplicity of his answer to the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, who claimed that matter does not exist. Johnson, kicking hard at a stone, asserted: “I refute it thus!” The silliness of some philosophy, its unworldly abstraction, is counter to Johnson’s sober belief in “the stability of truth”. This phrase—the stability of truth—is, to my mind, more apt than Socrates’s signature proclamation that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Johnson’s immense curiosity was hitched to the ultimate end of discovering the truths that underpin the human condition. Truth anchors the individual ship amidst the storms of unstable character, vicissitude and misfortune. Such is Johnson’s secular faith. He linked it to his more fitful and troubled trust in God through hoping that truth might lead to greater piety. We encounter here, in this, the domain of his own self-questioning worry, his personal example of the triumph of hope over experience.

Let me return to customs and institutions. Johnson’s view was that in every nation there is a style that does not become obsolete—this essay is in attempted illustration of that proposition. He himself incarnated much of the Anglo form, in his enthusiasms, his interpretations and his judgments. He loved the language, literature and customs of the people, and the texture of English everyday life; he lolled in the grimy London bustle like a pig in mud; he esteemed Parliament; he was a patriot and monarchist, believing that no one deserved a seat in Parliament who didn’t love his country. He valued what he called “the great system of society”, writing:

When I look round upon those who are thus variously exerting their qualifications, I cannot but admire the secret concatenation of society that links together the great and the mean, the illustrious and the obscure; and consider with benevolent satisfaction that no man, unless his body or mind be totally disabled, has need to suffer the mortification of seeing himself useless or burdensome to the community.

Johnson gave birth to the club, drawing upon the example of informal gatherings in coffee-houses, and adapting it into a weekly meeting in taverns for conversation and dinner. He formed his first such group in 1749. By the 1770s, Johnson’s Literary Club had become the most famous and distinguished ever to meet: it included Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith until his early death, and, in a later Australian link, Joseph Banks (Johnson once mimicked a kangaroo).

Clubs would develop as an essential component of the Anglo mode of sociability (equivalent to the French café), and with time they would morph into charities, unions, parties, fraternities, sporting clubs and special interest groups. Parliament became a type of club—as was the Australian derivative, especially when housed in the more convivial Old Parliament House. Here was the birth of the “free association”, a voluntary gathering of independent citizens of good will, that Alexis de Tocqueville argued, in his classic treatise Democracy in America, was the first essential to flourishing democracy as a political form. Johnson’s own contempt of someone not being, as he termed it, “clubbable” gestured towards a conception of the good life.

Johnson himself loved travel; even the infirmities of his old age could not stop him. He shared the great English passion for exploration which, linked with navigation, drove the British Empire. And, in extension, a restless curiosity about the world and its phenomena produced such scientific inquiry as launched James Cook’s 1768 voyage to the South Seas with Joseph Banks on board the Endeavour.

If conversation, the club, and the pursuit of truth were the Johnson staples, there were other aspects of eighteenth-century English achievement that were not part of his repertoire. The neo-classical aesthetic stands out, which found two of its European high points in Georgian architecture and the English landscape garden. The neo-classical ideal, wedded to its own metaphysical ambition, offered poise, proportion and balance in the midst of human trial. Here was an article of secular faith as plausible as Johnson’s stability of truth. The French painter Nicolas Poussin integrated the two—aesthetic proportion and metaphysical truth—in his philosophical landscapes, many of the best examples of which were bought by the eighteenth-century British aristocracy, sometimes under the guidance of Joshua Reynolds.

Particulars of the Johnsonian impact merit attention. I shall consider two cases, arguably the two which have had the greatest influence over the Anglo tradition. There was Edmund Burke, who staked out the philosophical ground for political conservatism in the definitive English mode. The pivot to Burke’s argument, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, comes from Johnson (The Rambler, 1751), whom I quote: even the most gifted individual “can seldom add more than some small particle of knowledge to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times, the collective labour of a thousand intellects”. Burke argued that great institutions, such as the ones the hubristic intellectuals driving the French Revolution threatened to destroy in a day, men guided by abstract reason alone, those institutions took generations of accumulated wisdom to build. In good government, “by a slow but well-sustained progress, the effect of each step is watched”. Confidence in the wisdom of generations, as planted in ordinary men and women, is the key to Anglo conservatism. It is incumbent on those working in the present to unite the past with the future, respecting the dead and considering the unborn. Burke could be Johnson when he writes that one “should approach the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude”.

Johnson and Burke did not always agree, in spite of their many affinities and their enormous admiration for each other. The mark of both men is illustrated by an exchange on the American Revolution. Burke made a memorable Speech on American Taxation in Parliament in 1774, arguing that Britain should, out of prudence, relax its taxation of the American colonies. Burke would go on to argue, as relations further deteriorated, that if the colonists wanted to become independent, then Britain should let them go—if they couldn’t be kept by authority, and desire, they shouldn’t be kept by force, although he did not think independence was in the colonists’ own best interests. Johnson replied to Burke’s first speech, and to the colonists themselves, with a pamphlet, Taxation No Tyranny. He pointed out that the original American settlers had gained their land by charter from the Crown, making them members of the British Empire and subjects of British law. Above all, the colonists had prospered under the protection of the British government, its laws, and its navy. It is reasonable they should be taxed to help pay for this protection. Burke and Johnson had both put powerful cases.

Jane Austen referred to “my dear Dr Johnson”. The influence is clear in particulars like the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, which could easily have started a Johnson essay: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” More deeply, a similar moral seriousness is exhibited in her disposition, her clear and sharp style, wry wit, and her interest in character and the chemistry of its interactions. Her work combines engagement with big metaphysical questions of life and death, with the finely-woven fabric of lives as lived.

Austen was less flamboyant and more pious than Johnson, and her experience of life much narrower. She framed her stories in a moral optimism about the triumph of good, and people living happily ever after, that would have been met by a sceptical shake of the head from her dear Dr Johnson—he dismissed romance as suited to those who are weary of themselves, and “have recourse to it as a pleasing dream”. But, at the same time, her works better exemplify neo-classical proportion and balance. Johnson and Austen complement each other, their work articulating a kind of moderate English conservatism, projecting a tone of how individuals can best live, and in tolerable harmony together. George Orwell would catch some of this mood in his late essays, as has Roger Scruton more recently.

So, what may we conclude? What is the key to the Johnson legend? I would suggest two simple answers, which complement each other.

First, Samuel Johnson was a big man. The great work of genesis in the Western tradition, Homer’s Iliad, is preoccupied by the big figure of Achilles. He dominates centre-stage as much as Hamlet would two millennia later. The impression Homer leaves of Achilles, by the end of his epic tragedy, is of a huge presence standing astride the human condition. That presence starts with the invincible warrior striking terror into the enemy on the field of battle—the “godlike, man-slaughtering” Achilles with his head bathed in goddess Athena’s golden light. It moves on to the grief-stricken gentleman, paragon of courtesy, who welcomes the enemy king, Priam, into his tent, and with whom he converses and weeps about the misery of the human condition.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s most celebrated poet and Renaissance man, whose life overlapped that of Johnson, broadened the Achilles archetype into a human ideal of the individual who is a large personality: who has character in a grand sense, an “Olympian” sense—although not necessarily a tragic one. As much as Germany came to regard Goethe himself through the prism of this ultimate end, that of the grand and formidable personality, England might with some plausibility view Johnson.

The mode with Johnson is different from Achilles—obviously, he was not a warrior in the literal sense, although he did like to “talk for victory”. There was the physical size and presence of the man, pugilistic (he had been a competent boxer), frightening most who came into his company, given as he was to contradicting them, and in a loud voice. He was, according to Boswell, intemperate: “Every thing about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation.” His brilliant and domineering talk was like that of an invincible swordsman, as if, when he conversed, he too was bathed in Athena’s godly, golden light. He used that eloquence to relentlessly, unflinchingly examine life, and craft the truths he observed. His outrage at Bishop Berkeley’s delusion is indicative of the seriousness with which he approached the stability of truth.

There was, further, the scale of adversity Johnson had to overcome throughout his life. He was blind in one eye; his face was pocked and scarred; and he exhibited convulsive tics and mannerisms. When he first moved to London, he was oppressed by two decades of bitterly miserable poverty, which had once cast him into debtors’ prison. He was afflicted by physical ailments that left him hardly ever free from pain. And, above all, he was weighed down by his “black dog”, the chronic depression which tyrannised him, causing insomnia, and twice plunging him into lengthy periods of mental illness. Yet, Johnson retained a gusto into old age, with his melancholy tendency to inertia countered by an irrepressible boyish enthusiasm and curiosity. He taught himself Dutch at the age of seventy-three.

Equally in terms of size, he was a man of phenomenal warmth and benevolence, of tender charity and compassion, especially to the poor and afflicted—from taking the indigent into his house to live with him, to routinely giving coins to street beggars. He hated slavery, and opposed imperial conquest.

He had the eloquence of Hamlet; the wit of Beatrice; the breadth of knowledge of Goethe’s Faust; the intellectual energy of Plato; and the sober and balanced wisdom of Aristotle, and presented in an earthier, less theoretical manner. He wrote with the same superhuman speed that his mind moved at in conversation—once producing forty-eight pages in a day. He was himself, in his own immense persona, the great work. It is fitting that he is best known and loved through a biography, the greatest biography in English. Incredulity spread in London in December 1784, at the news he was dead.

Singling out Johnson as a great personality has some kinship with England’s capacity to conjure up extraordinary individuals at critical moments in its history: notably Elizabeth 1, William Pitt the Younger, the Duke of Wellington, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, with all of them represented by Shakespeare in his idealisation of King Henry V.

But size is not enough on its own. In the archetypal case of Achilles, size was deepened by tragic experience. The second reason for the Johnson legend, I would suggest, connects directly to the great Anglo tradition. Johnson was, first and foremost, a master of the language. Tyndale and Shakespeare were his company; so too, in lesser ways, were many who came later. He himself liked to stress that we learn by example. His lifelong wrestling to tame the beast, the raging stallion of English word, phrase and syntax, projects an enduring lesson in how to conjure up meaning that is pungent, clear and sensible; and how to avoid the clichéd, the feeble and the commonplace. In the process, he taught how to take the torch of our understandings into the darkness of uncharted territory, in search of truth and its stabilising potential. His conversation as recorded by Boswell showed the way.

We are all his beneficiaries, we who have had the good fortune to be born into English, or who, like Joseph Conrad, have made it their working tongue. Our language is like the sword Excalibur, appearing magically out of the lake of our shared past, of our collective unconscious, offered up by the genie of those who have come before. Huge and heavy, it is given to ugly jerks, incomplete swings and futile prods—like a Johnson convulsion—when in the wrong hands, or merely lazy, careless or unmindful ones. Yet, it offers the possibility of regal poise and grace, when wielded by a King Arthur, or by a big man like Sam Johnson.