The Immortal Samuel Johnson

Who of us can have failed to note how warmly the Antipodes have marked the recent 300th birthday anniversary of Doctor Samuel Johnson (1709–84)? Among our literary journals and newspaper “sections”, few omitted a Johnsonian tribute by one or another of their usual suspects; some were granted generous space, and none that I read lacked understanding towards their great subject. (I was told that television offered a documentary on his life, but I did not see it. By pure chance, this very moment as I write, ABC Radio National has started a talk about Johnson and the Stoics.)

Here in Melbourne, the Johnson Society of Australia* has for years loyally and engagingly fulfilled its mission as guardian of the flame, bright sparks from which fly off to punctuate the year in the form of the Society’s newsletters and Johnsonian “quizzes”. In this anniversary year, a special paper was given by our own Barry Jones, not wholly an un-Johnsonian figure himself. Clearly, the name of Samuel Johnson, LLD, has not slipped into mere silence.

Yet (as it seems to me) our relationship to him is changing; he has become less an immediate presence, and more a stern prophetic image of a long-past age, a Moses or an Isaiah, someone to be pondered and quoted, but not to be invited to the theatre, or to a riotous dinner party.

In the 1950s, Cyril Pearl and I and other lunchtime literary layabouts at the old Italian Society restaurant in Bourke Street would heartily debate whether “the greatest of all living Englishmen was Doctor Johnson or Sherlock Holmes”. Objections that, so far from being alive, the first had been dead a couple of centuries, and the second was a mere fiction, were swept grandly aside by Cyril: “We all know their characters and principles, don’t we? Their quirks and oddities? Above all, their mode and style of discourse? If either one of them, by magic means, appeared at this table, an extra place would swiftly be set, and the conversation would continue seamlessly. If that’s not being alive, what is?

“For my part,” thundered Cyril, “Holmes and Johnson are far more alive than any of those bums whose names appear on the front page of today’s Argus.” (When once I asked Cyril how he thought the company might cope with the joint apparition of Holmes and Johnson, arm in arm, he replied that my question was one that he would take on notice.)

Beginning in the classics, Johnson’s own studies extended to at least a nodding knowledge of all the polite learning open to a London-dwelling gentleman of his century. Though he died some four years before Arthur Phillip led the First Fleet into Sydney Cove, he knew about Cook’s earlier landing at Botany Bay. (Acquainted with the kangaroo, he once risked his dignity, and amused the company, by hopping around the room in imitation of the creature’s movements.)

There was never a mind more promiscuously voracious than Johnson’s for knowledge of every kind, yet its ruling passion was to plumb the inwardness of the human heart—in all its tenderness and harshness, its longings, joys, virtues, vices, sins, victories and defeats. His abiding triumph was to have set down his conclusions in golden words of pungent, forthright clarity—a treasury for all time.

Johnson, for us, should not be a lumbering, slightly grubby-looking old gent, with a singed wig and chewed-down fingernails, scribbling away back in the seventeen-hundreds. We should, to our own great advantage, use him as a chief consultant and daily comforter, as we face up to the perplexities of our own times.

Among the sterner sect of feminists, I detect a still-lingering view of Johnson as not only a dead white male, but as the archetypical male chauvinist pig. (How antique such phrases sound!) That is a libellous opinion, resting probably on casual knowledge of what Johnson himself might have called certain “loose sallies”, but wholly unsupported by understanding of his deep feelings, and the daily tenor and conduct of his life.

Feminists who judge him harshly quote his saying (for example) that a man would probably rather have a good dinner on his table than a wife who speaks Greek; they regard as “patronising” the compliment to his “old friend Mrs Carter [who] could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus”. And they may dependably be enraged by the famous observation that “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

What do such careless trifles count, when measured against a lifelong deep and reciprocated delight in female company? A woman of such independent high spirit as Hester Thrale would not have tolerated Johnson’s time of residence in her household, had he not brought delight with him. His countless letters to her and other woman friends, hostesses, admirers and acquaintances show a delightful ease and lack of constraint: tender, teasing, expository, philosophical, dogmatic, gossipy. No one who reads them can imagine for a moment that Samuel Johnson discriminated between men and women when he decided to whom he would open his bosom.

Few days pass on which I am not grateful for a quiet hint murmured mysteriously over my shoulder, a terse word which has somehow travelled with great clarity across the space of three centuries. Much has changed (much has actually improved) since 1784, but much has remained the same. Many debates which agitated the circles of Johnson and Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Alexander Pope, Sheridan and Garrick, David Hume and Adam Smith are still contested ground today.

The widespread depression suffered by so many today seems to have afflicted Johnson’s age to a similar extent, though they called it “melancholy”. Of himself, Johnson wrote: “I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life.” Even in youth his depression was so severe that he had to be withdrawn from his Oxford college.

In a letter to Hester Thrale of December 27, 1783, is a moving cry from the depth of the pit, yet it is not abject. He records that, following a dose of opium (“of which I have such a horrour [sic]”) he feels more “warm, active and cheerful”.

It was Johnson who gave the name “black dog” to his pursuer and persecutor, though nowadays it is Winston Churchill, another famous depressive, who gets credit for the canine attribution. That such mighty works were achieved by minds so often dampened beneath the wet blanket of depression is a paradox I can contemplate, but not comprehend.

Last week I stood on the fringes of a rather warmish discussion with members of today’s generation of literary layabouts. At issue was the general utility and morality of financial grants (usually taxpayer money) to support the creation of new literary works. My old-fashioned view remains that creation coddled tends to become creation corrupted. Some kinds of support for literature may well be justified: contributions to the risks of publishing and printing a new manuscript by an unknown, funds to support swift reprintings of successes, a scheme for keeping always in print standard cheap editions of our accepted classics, made readily available to schools and libraries.

I was told, with the air of one producing a knockout argument: “You aren’t consistent! Your beloved Doctor Johnson was state-supported on a pension.”

Ah, my young friend … a little knowledge! In 1762, unwell and swiftly ageing, Johnson was granted a royal pension of 300 pounds a year—sufficient to support him in a decent household for the rest of his days. Before that, he had published his stupendous Dictionary, written most of two newspapers, reported the debates in the House of Commons, published novels, drama, poetry, classical translations and much else. And this he achieved mostly amid grinding poverty. Johnson a hired “creator”? Johnson a free-loader? Think again!

King George III was blamed for losing the American colonies, but he saved Doctor Johnson: a sound choice, King George.

But to hear Johnson’s name mentioned last week, even in support of a foolish argument, was happiness to me. Johnson lives! Tonight, finally in subjection to Cyril Pearl, I shall raise a special glass to the greatest living Englishman.

*The Johnson Society of Australia Inc. Secretary: Barbara Niven, 44 Essex Street, Footscray, Vic. 3011.