The Enigmatic Dr Johnson

Samuel Johnson stands today as one of the most commonly quoted of all literary figures in the English-speaking world. In my Collins Dictionary of Quotations, he gets about nine pages. Shakespeare gets about sixty and the Bible gets seventeen. Just as there are Shakespeare societies all over the world, so too are there Samuel Johnson societies. Books, essays and postgraduate theses on Johnson or his works must number in the hundreds if not thousands.

This brings us to the first enigma concerning Johnson—the fact that many of the works of commentary involved concentrate on the personality of Johnson himself and not on the content or literary merit of his writings. This is so obvious that it tends to be overlooked. For most great writers or poets, our admiration is directed towards their work, not towards the actual person. I admire much of the poetry of Byron, but the man himself I find less than appealing. Owen Barfield once described a “Byronic tradition” of “mighty, lonely poets with open necks and long hair and a plethora of mistresses and daguerreotypes”. Shakespeare, of course, is the most obvious example—we know very little about Shakespeare the man. With Johnson, the opposite is true. His literary works, aside from select quotations, are not commonly read. Who but the Johnson specialist has read Rasselas or his Lives of the Poets? On the other hand, almost anyone can tell you a story about Johnson the man—his strange habits and idiosyncrasies, his powers in argument and his speed in writing. It is the man we love, not so much the work he produced. Strike up a conversation with any Johnson fan and you will be regaled with stories about the man, not about his literary output.

Why should this be so? Clearly, in his lifetime, it was necessary for him to gain a reputation as a great scholar, else he would have attracted little attention. We may be sure, for instance, that Boswell would not have bothered recording his life and spending so much time in following him around. Nor would his other famous contemporaries, people like Reynolds, Burke and Gibbon, have bothered to associate with him. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that Johnson’s reputation has survived down through the last two centuries very largely on the basis of his personality, not his writings. This is not to say that his works are of inferior value but simply that they have been overshadowed by the personality of the man himself.

No doubt, part of the explanation for this lies in the ability of Boswell to so accurately portray the life of Johnson—his biography is perhaps the most famous in the whole genre. We must credit Boswell as being perhaps the first member of the paparazzi, that troublesome breed of journalist or photographer whose particular delight it is to record the faults of the great and to feed off their personal habits. Even so, a biographer must have sufficient raw materials with which to work and Johnson certainly supplied these. Indeed, it might be said that he sometimes played to his audience! But it was Boswell’s genius (or, perhaps, simply his unwillingness to leave out any small detail from his notes) to supply a “warts and all” account.

In order to better understand the man and his legacy, a short biography is necessary. Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709. His parents were booksellers, reasonably prosperous and well thought of by the local community. As a tiny infant he was a weakling, and his mother also had a difficult time of it. Consequently, a wet nurse was hired to look after the child. Unfortunately, this poor woman had tuberculosis and the young Johnson immediately contracted the disease, having tubercular lesions on the face and neck. This manifestation of the disease, known then as scrofula or “The King’s Evil”, plus later attempts to remove the lesions, left Johnson disfigured for life. There are some who also supposed that this disease affected part of his brain, because throughout his life he was given to all sorts of strange gesticulations or tics of the face, violent movements in his body and other strange behaviours which made him appear, on first sight, as a mentally deficient spastic. We shall return to this business later, because there is something of an enigma buried here as well.

The prodigality of his mind soon became evident at school, and perhaps even before. There is a story (admittedly of doubtful veracity) that as a very young child he was scolded by his mother for being in her words “an impudent little puppy”. He is reported to have replied, “Do you know what they call a puppy’s mother?” Whatever the truth of this, there is no doubt about the early brilliance of his mind. At school, this soon became evident although it must be said that, from a very early age, he displayed an indolence which was to trouble him for the rest of his life. He was, to put it bluntly, naturally lazy. His early teachers, though, had the whip as a remedy. Of one of these teachers, Johnson later said “he never really taught a boy in his life—he simply whipped and they learned”. That same schoolmaster, while he was busy flogging some boy, would cry out, “This I do to save you from the gallows!”

At nineteen, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford, to begin a university education. His family, by this time, had fallen upon hard times and could ill afford to support him. Nonetheless, the necessary funds were scratched together. At his first interview with his teachers and, in the presence of his father, he displayed little enthusiasm and sat silently. Suddenly though, perhaps after realising that he needed to prove his worth, he began spouting long passages from Macrobius, at that time a fairly obscure fifth-century grammarian and philosopher. The company was impressed and Johnson was in.

Characteristically, Johnson showed little enthusiasm for the lectures. After the first day he decided that more fun was to be had in the fields and he simply neglected to turn up for the next four days. Finally he met up with his tutor, who asked where he had been. “Sliding in Christ Church Meadow,” said Johnson. Later, Boswell was much impressed by this answer and told Johnson that he had displayed great fortitude of mind. “No, Sir,” said Johnson, “stark insensibility.”

In the event, Johnson did not remain at Oxford. He left a little over a year later. His monetary problems had worsened and he was clearly suffering from depression. Shortly afterwards, it is almost certain that he experienced a severe mental breakdown at the age of twenty, its effects lasting for several years thereafter. He managed to gain employment as a teacher in Birmingham for a short while and it was during this period that he wrote his first book, a translation of the journals of the Portuguese Jesuit and traveller Lobo, concerning his travels in Abyssinia.

In 1735, Johnson married Elizabeth Porter, the widow of a Birmingham draper. He was twenty-five, she was forty-three and, understandably, relatives on both sides thought it an unwise match. With part of her marriage dowry (some 600 pounds in total) they set up a private school at Edial, near Lichfield. When it opened in 1735, only three students turned up. One of these was David Garrick, later to become a famous actor and a person with whom Johnson was to have a sort of love-hate relationship. The school was a financial disaster and Johnson was forced to leave for London and seek work as a hack journalist. His wife stayed behind—better that he make some money first before committing her to such an uncertain future. She did come to join him later but her own life was rather tragic towards the end—she took to drinking large quantities of laudanum and withdrew from the world. Johnson, I think, has to bear some of the blame for this and he evidently did feel a certain amount of remorse later in life.

Now Johnson began his literary career in earnest, operating as a hack journalist in what was then known as “Grub Street”—the world of poverty-stricken journalists living in garrets and subsisting from day to day on their wits. Some of his best-known work originates from this period. He wrote short pieces for a periodical called the Gentleman’s Magazine, and one of his best-known poems, “London”. He also wrote the Parliamentary Debates, Life of Savage, and many other pieces. He also took a job as a cataloguer for Robert Harley’s collection of rare literature, later known as the Harleian Library. It was here that a famous incident occurred when his boss, Thomas Osborne, accused him of being slack. Johnson knocked him to the floor with a huge sixteenth-century Greek Bible, placed his foot on Osborne’s neck and told him not to be in a hurry to rise, lest he be kicked down the stairs.

When he was thirty-six, Johnson decided to write a dictionary of the English language and planned to do it in three years. His friends tried to point out to him that this was a huge undertaking. They reminded him that the French Academy, of forty eminent scholars, had taken forty years to produce a French dictionary. Johnson’s reply was typical: “Let me see, forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.” In the event, it took Johnson seven years but it was hailed as a great masterpiece. It was unrivalled for the next hundred years or so; even Webster’s early dictionaries were little more than a modification of Johnson’s.

Up until this time, what had passed for dictionaries were pretty poor productions. Johnson’s dictionary, by contrast, gave full descriptions of terms and examples of their use. Many of his definitions have become famous. Johnson is often criticised for using long and complicated explanations, but I find his dictionary definition of net/network as a beautiful example of a careful definition: “Anything reticulated or decussated at equal intervals with interstices between the intersections.” Many of his other famous definitions concern his almost gleeful put-downs of Scotland and the Scots. Thus, part of his definition of oats reads: “A grain used in England to feed horses: in Scotland, it provides sustenance for the people.” Some of his definitions were heavily influenced by his own particular views, but this serves only to endear him all the more to his readers, who can find some traces of humanity in a dry work such as a dictionary. When he comes to defining lich he includes reference to Lichfield and adds, at the end, a quote from Virgil: “Salve, magna parens” (Hail, great parent). One can almost see the great man poring over the page, with tears rolling down his cheeks.

After the Dictionary came a number of other famous publications, most notably Johnson’s notes to an edition of Shakespeare’s plays which included a very famous preface. By Johnson’s time, it was realised that Shakespeare’s plays required editing. Since Shakespeare did not edit them himself, there was no authoritative text, only some pirated quartos of individual plays and a collected folio edition published by two of Shakespeare’s friends after his death. This and later editions were recognised as being full of inaccuracies. For one thing, many of the early editors had freely changed lines that did not suit their tastes. Johnson, although not a textual scholar, did know quite a bit about Elizabethan English and was thus able to weed out many of the inaccuracies that had crept into the texts.

It is in Johnson’s Preface to the plays, however, that we see the great power of his mind and his championship of Shakespeare against certain neoclassical critics who condemned Shakespeare for neglecting the traditional rules for dramatic composition. Voltaire, for example, found the jokes of the gravediggers in Hamlet offensively out of place. Who would have thought that the high priest of bad taste could have been so offended! Johnson defended Shakespeare from this and similar criticisms. Space will only permit one small quotation of his defence. Having disposed of certain criticisms raised by other poets, Johnson says of Shakespeare: “The stream of time, which is continually washing away the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.”

And yet, we should not suppose that Johnson himself was without some criticism of the great bard. In his Preface, and again in some of his notes accompanying individual plays, Johnson points out what he believes to be faults in Shakespeare. Perhaps the most important was a lack of any moral purpose. Johnson says, inter alia: “He sacrifices virtue to convenience and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose … his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil.” His notes relating to the individual plays could also be quite critical at times. Perhaps the best-known example is his comment on the general plot in Cymbeline:

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism on unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

Johnson covered a huge range of writings from poetry through biography to short stories. In the latter category, I must mention Rasselas, a story which covers a favourite theme of Johnson’s—the gulf between human aspiration and human achievement. In this story, Johnson takes each of the many ways in which humans suppose that they can achieve tranquillity and peace—the hermit’s life, the shepherd’s life, the noble savage, the philosopher, and so on. He proceeds to show how each is ultimately unsatisfactory. Significantly, he omits to deal with the religious life and religious experiences.

I particularly like the way in which Johnson deals with the great philosopher of nature. When Rasselas asks this great philosopher what it is to live according to nature, the latter replies:

To live according to nature is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to co-operate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things.

Johnson then adds:

The Prince soon found that this was one of those sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed and was silent, and the philosopher, supposing him satisfied and the rest vanquished, rose up and departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the present tendency of things.

This reminds me very much of the late Richard Rorty.

Finally, in this short background to his life and work, I want to say something about Johnson’s extraordinary journalistic abilities. His speed in writing is legend. Despite being a naturally indolent man who had to force himself to work, he could write eighteen hundred words an hour or twelve thousand words in a short day (usually from noon till evening). Furthermore, the sentences flowed from his mind all perfectly formed—he rarely checked anything he wrote. Keep in mind, too, that he did much of his writing in an unheated garret, on a deal table, while sitting on a three-legged chair.

Perhaps his most extraordinary effort was the Parliamentary Debates. These were written as a supposed account of actual parliamentary proceedings but, since journalists were forbidden to take notes in the gallery, Johnson had to rely on the memory of someone present at the debates and then construct his own accounts. These became so famous that the politicians themselves were eager to claim that what Johnson had written was what they had actually said. When someone in the company of Johnson once praised a speech by William Pitt he amazed the whole company present by exclaiming quietly, “That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street.” Up until this time he had not revealed that he was the author of the Parliamentary Debates.

Johnson’s literary style was already well developed by the time he was twenty-five. His sentences are characterised by what I will call dichotomous structures—a sort of branching system, which, nonetheless, impresses us as being well balanced. Consider this early example from his translation of Lobo, here reproduced as laid out in the introduction to Katharine Rogers’s selection of Johnson’s writings (Signet, 1981):

The reader will here find

no regions

cursed with irremediable barrenness,

or

blessed with spontaneous fecundity,

no perpetual gloom

or

unceasing sunshine;

nor are the nations here described

either

devoid of all sense of humanity,

or

consummate in all private and social virtues.

There is a certain quality in such sentences which bears comparison to the Baroque style in music. One might, for instance, regard the stand-alone clauses in his sentences as a sort of variation on a theme such that the whole sentence has a sort of polyphony and his oppositions bear comparison to the contrapuntal style. Many people find his sentences to be unnecessarily long and of ponderous weight, but this charge, I think, can be laid against many of his English contemporaries. Edward Gibbon comes to mind. One annoying thing about Johnson, though, was his predilection for uncommon or difficult words. After publication of the Dictionary, in particular, he seemed to delight in dropping large or uncommon words into his sentences—words like anfractuosity or labefaction.

With this brief backgrounder to the life and work of Samuel Johnson, I now wish to move on to certain incongruities between Johnson the man and Johnson the writer.

It seems to me that the popularity of Johnson the man, as opposed to Johnson the author, lies in the extraordinary extent to which his own mind is laid bare, so to speak, by his everyday actions and comments. Johnson is one of the few great authors to whom all of us can relate. Other authors rely on their literary characters, whether fictitious or real, but in Johnson we get a brutally honest and real-life account of that same struggle between human aspiration and human achievement which all of us experience.

There is a certain satisfaction to be gained from the knowledge that a man as great as Johnson is beset by the same anguish and the same sense of inadequacy that all of us feel from time to time. Confucius is reputed to have said, “There is no spectacle more agreeable than to observe an old friend fall from a roof-top.” So it is with us. In Johnson’s weaknesses, but more particularly in his eventual triumph over them, we gain some hope for our own condition, collectively or individually.

For no other English author known to me do we have such a detailed account of his every movement, his every habit and his every utterance. Boswell followed him everywhere, noting down every sneeze, every strange gesticulation, and every grunt. Once he became famous, and he did so within his lifetime, scores of other people began to add to Boswell’s stock. These included Mrs Thrale and other of Johnson’s friends and acquaintances. Added to this, we have Johnson’s own private diaries, letters and prayers, published after his death. It is in these, particularly, that we get a real insight into Johnson’s mind.

However, before dealing with other seeming inconsistencies in the man, I want to mention the matter of his strange behaviour in public because this in itself is something of an enigma. How is it that such a brilliant speaker and writer could often appear as a bumbling idiot, bereft of all reason? His behaviour at times was, to say the very least, start­ling. He would, when sitting on a chair, roll his whole body continuously from side to side, extend his hands or legs violently, hiss or whistle through his teeth, and so on. It has been suggested (in more recent times) that he suffered from Tourette syndrome—a rare nervous disorder. In some respects, this theory fits with the facts. Compulsive actions such as repeating movements or sentences are features of the disease and Johnson certainly exhibited this behaviour. Often, for instance, he would be walking along the footpath, taking care to place each foot carefully on a flagstone. If he happened to miss a stone, he would go back and start all over again. On other occasions, he might vigorously tap the floor with his shoe, greatly disconcerting the assembled company about him.

And yet, there are problems in attributing his actions to a disease. It appears that they were not really as involuntary as we might have expected. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, comments that when Johnson sat for his portrait, he was as still and as self-composed as any other person. Likewise, in his arguments and expostulations at the Literary Club, his articulation was perfect—never a word out of place. As someone said, when he spoke he was as correct as a second edition! Then there are a host of other strange behavioural patterns which do not fit very well with Tourette syndrome. For instance, Johnson would often leap up from the dinner table, without warning, fall to his knees and say a prayer, quite loud and quite often in Latin.

Another intriguing aspect of Johnson the man was his ability to be both intensely rude at times and yet intensely compassionate. It was not just a case of putting down the haughty—he could be offensive to anyone. As an example, a young man—entirely innocently—once asked Johnson if it would be advisable for him (the young man) to marry. Johnson replied, “I would advise no man to marry, sir, who is not likely to propagate understanding.” He could also be very offensive in his personal habits. A friend once described his habit at table:

He would not say one word or even pay attention to what was said by others till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.

Even when Johnson became relatively prosperous in later life, his personal dress and state of cleanliness often left a lot to be desired. Here is a description of his attire, given by Ozias Humphry when he visited Johnson in 1764:

He was a huge, scarred man dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat with breeches that were brown also (though they had been crimson), and an old black wig. His shirt collar and sleeves were unbuttoned; his stockings were down about his feet which had on them, by way of slippers, an old pair of shoes.

Set against this seeming arrogance and lack of respect for others was Johnson’s compassion—especially his compassion for the poor. We need to remember that the London of Johnson’s time had a huge population of poor people—beggars, street urchins, prostitutes and so on. Johnson had enormous sympathy for them. If he had any money in his pocket when he walked the streets, he would invariably give it all away to the beggars he met. Once, when Mrs Thrale complained to him regarding the smell from a poor quarter of London known as “Porridge’Island”, a series of cheap cookshops, Johnson turned on her savagely: “Hundreds of your fellow creatures,” he reminded her, “turn another way so that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge Island to wish for gratifications they are not able to attain.” One looks in vain to see this sort of compassion in most of Johnson’s learned friends—Boswell, Burke, Reynolds, Gibbon, and so on. There is that touching scene where a small boy was rowing Johnson and Boswell across the Thames. Johnson said to him, “What would you give to know of Jason and the Argonauts?” The boy replied,  “Everything I had, Sir.” Johnson was deeply moved by this reply and gave the boy all the money he was carrying with him.

Yet again, we see another curious side of Johnson in his choice of friends. While he spent a good deal of time with “the upper crust”, so to speak, he also made friends with some of the strangest rogues in London. Richard Savage was a good example. He claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield and tried for years to force her to acknowledge his claim. He was a chronic spendthrift and usually finished up by quarrelling with his benefactors. Another, even more remarkable figure was Samuel Boyse—poet, translator and drunkard. He lived perpetually on borrowed credit, by raising subscriptions for books he had no intention of writing and, in one case, by persuading his wife that he was dying and that she must solicit loans for his funeral. When things got desperate, Boyse would pawn his clothes, starting with his shirt and waistcoat and getting to the stage of pawning his trousers. This led to problems at his editor’s office—all the ladies had to leave when he appeared. At one time, he was left with nothing but a single blanket wrapped around him. Once, when he was starving, someone gave him money enough for a few meals. Boyse sent for a piece of roast beef but then decided it was inedible without ketchup, truffles and mushrooms so that, with the one meal, he blew every penny he had been given.

I might add here that, as well as being a champion of the poor, Johnson was probably the first English animal welfare activist. Right from childhood he had abhorred the ill treatment of animals and he was to maintain this stance throughout his life. He had an enormous contempt for those Cartesian philosophers who supposed that vivisection of animals was all right because they were merely machines without feeling.

Likewise, he spoke out against slavery. Talking about the Americans of his time he once noted how “the loudest howls for democracy come from the drivers of slaves”. He greatly loved his own Negro servant, Frank Barber, and did all he could to help him. We might even say of Johnson that, despite some derogatory remarks to the contrary on occasions, he was a champion of equal rights for women. He certainly encouraged many women writers in his time and always treated them as intellectual equals.

Another enigma concerning Johnson—at least it is an enigma for me—concerns his attitude to music. Not only was Johnson quite indifferent to music of all sorts, he appeared at times to be almost contemptuous of it. He once visited the home of Dr Charles Burney, a famous historian of music, and happened to arrive just as Burney’s daughter and a friend were playing J.S. Bach on the harpsichord. Ignoring both the music and his hosts, Johnson went over to a bookshelf in the far corner of the room, picked up a volume of the British Encyclopaedia and began reading to himself. Dr Burney attempted to talk to him about this wonderful composer. Johnson replied: “And pray Sir who is Bach? Is he a piper?” Bach at this time was famous in London and Johnson could not have been ignorant of him. This studied indifference—almost contempt—for the greatest musical genius in the Western world is difficult to explain. Was Johnson tone deaf? Perhaps he was, but then we need to explain how it was that he could recite poetry and prose with meticulous attention to cadence and phrasing. His words, so we are told, flowed from his mouth mellifluously—like honey.

It is also curious, I think, that a man of Johnson’s intellect seems to have almost completely shunned any discussion of philosophy and theology. No doubt the new philosophies of Locke, Leibniz and Berkeley were popular discussion topics for Johnson’s circle of friends and, of course, he lived at the same time as Hume. He seemed disinclined, however, to discuss any of the new philosophical ideas in any detail. His famous dismissal of Berkeley’s theory of the non-existence of matter was a one-liner. He simply walked to a large stone, kicked it hard with his foot and exclaimed, “I refute it thus.” He held Hume in the utmost contempt and we are told that if Hume entered the room, Johnson would leave immediately.

Johnson’s one detailed foray into philosophy and theology seems to have been a review of a book called A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil by Soame Jenyns. This book was fairly typical of many eighteenth-century optimistic systems and was loosely based on the popular idea of this world as “the best of all possible worlds”. This led Jenyns to suppose that what appears evil to individuals contributes to the good as a whole. Significantly, Johnson demolishes Jenyns’s arguments not by an appeal to Christian doctrine based on faith, but rather by straight logic, turning Jenyns’s arguments upon themselves. It is a devastating critique made that much sharper because of Johnson’s own difficulties in coming to terms with pain, suffering and death.

What are we to make of all this? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the particular religious convictions Johnson held. When he was a young man at Oxford, Johnson had read William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. This was a famous book in its time and it had a deep and lasting influence on Johnson. One of the main themes taken up by Law (using Ecclesiastes as his model) was the futility of temporal ambitions and desires. We might think of the way in which it is put in the Fitzgerald Rubaiyat:

The worldly hope men set their hearts upon   

Turns ashes or it prospers and anon  

Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face           

Lighting its little hour or two is gone.

This was the great theme suffusing nearly all of Johnson’s work. We see it in his best-known poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and it is the main theme in Rasselas. Johnson was pre-eminently a stoic moralist—almost everything he wrote was in this vein.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that Johnson thought all human endeavour to be in vain. There was one type of endeavour which, alone, was worthy of pursuit. This was the model Christian life which Law had expounded and which Johnson struggled to achieve nearly all his adult life. Abundant evidence of that struggle can be seen in what we have of Johnson’s private notes and prayers from his diary. Here was a man acutely aware of his failings and who tried, however unsuccessfully, to overcome what he saw as his terrible weaknesses—laziness in particular.

I have my own theory about the enigma of Johnson. He was, I think, a man ill fitted for his time. Most of his friends and colleagues could wholeheartedly embrace the new spirit of the Enlightenment—the sense that man had at last risen above superstition and savagery. The new Enlightenment man was, for them, the master of all things and fully in control of his own destiny. There were no limits to human achievement. Johnson could not accept this and suffered a severe mental breakdown as a result. But, in other respects, he was indeed a typical Enlightenment figure. He had a deep interest in science and technology and an abiding belief in the powers of human reason. And yet looking about him, he could not bridge the gap between human aspiration and human achievement. Pain, suffering and death were problems that he could not satisfactorily explain or come to terms with. Hence his constant theme of the vanity of human wishes.

His sense of personal isolation remained with him until his death and he could not bear to be left alone with his thoughts. And yet, in the end, he did face death bravely enough. When, on his deathbed, he asked his doctor whether recovery was possible and received an answer in the negative he refused all further medicines lest, as he said, he might “meet God in a state of idiocy, or with opium in my head”.

Johnson died on December 13, 1784. We are told that his last words, spoken in delirium, were “Iam Moriturus”—“I who am about to die”. It was an echo of that famous salute given to Caesar by the gladiators. And indeed, he was a gladiator, but of a very different sort. He had conquered his own infirmities and fears and proclaimed the triumph of the spirit. In the words of Walter Jackson Bate, the best modern commentator on Johnson in my view, “With all the odds against him, he had proved that it was possible to get through this strange adventure of life, and to do it in a way that is a tribute to human nature.”