These were humanists, their knowledge derived from their deep reading of the great canonical texts of Western civilization. They were heroic, but they practiced an intellectual form of heroism, not a military one. They tried to see the world clearly, resisting the self-deceptions caused by the vanity and perversities in their own nature. They sought a sort of practical, moral wisdom that would give them inner integrity and purpose.
Johnson was the ultimate representative of the type. Johnson, as biographer Jeffrey Meyers put it, was “a mass of contradictions: lazy and energetic, aggressive and tender, melancholic and humorous, commonsensical and irrational, comforted yet tormented by religion.”13 He fought these impulses within himself, as James Boswell put it, like a Roman gladiator in the Colosseum. He fought “the wild beasts of the Arena, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.” All his life he combined the intellectual toughness of Achilles with the compassionate faith of a rabbi, priest, or mullah.
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JOHNSON PROCESSED THE WORLD in the only way he could: with his (barely functioning) eye, with his conversation, and with his pen. Writers are not exactly known for their superlative moral character, but Johnson more or less wrote himself to virtue.
He did his work in the tavern and café. Johnson—gross, disheveled, and ugly—was an astonishingly convivial man. He also thought by talking, uttering a relentless barrage of moral maxims and witticisms, a cross between Martin Luther and Oscar Wilde. “There is no arguing with Johnson,” the novelist and playwright Oliver Goldsmith once said, “for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” Johnson would use whatever argument came to hand and often switched sides in a debate entirely if he thought it would make the controversy more enjoyable. Many of his most famous sayings feel as if they either emerged spontaneously during a tavern conversation or were polished to give the appearance of spontaneity: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel…. A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization…. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully…. When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.”
His literary style had the to-and-fro structure of good conversation. He’d make a point, then balance it with a counterpoint, which in turn would be balanced by yet another counterpoint. The maxims above, which everybody quotes, give a false air of certainty to Johnson’s views. His common conversational style was to raise a topic—say, card playing—list the virtues and vices associated with it, and then come down tentatively on one side. Writing of marriage, he displays his tendency to see every good linked with a bad: “I drew upon a page of my pocket book a scheme of all female virtues and vices, with the vices which border upon every virtue, and the virtues which are allied to every vice. I considered that wit was sarcastic, and magnanimity imperious; that avarice was economical and ignorance obsequious.”
Johnson was a fervent dualist, believing that only tensions, paradoxes, and ironies could capture the complexity of real life. He was not a theorist, so he was comfortable with antitheses, things that didn’t seem to go together but in fact do. As the literary critic Paul Fussell observed, the buts and yets that dotted his prose became the substance of his writing, part of his sense that to grasp anything you have to look at it from many vantage points, seeing all its contradictory parts. 14
One certainly gets the sense that he spent a lot of time just hanging out, engaging in the sort of stupid small adventures groups of friends get into when they are just passing the time. Told that someone had drowned in a certain stretch of river, Johnson proceeded to jump right into it to see if he could survive. Told that a gun could explode if loaded with too much shot, Johnson immediately put seven balls in the barrel of one and fired it into a wall.
He threw himself into London life. He interviewed prostitutes. He slept in parks with poets. He did not believe knowledge was best pursued as a solitary venture. He wrote, “Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.” He sought self-knowledge obliquely, testing his observations against the reality of a world he could see concretely in front of him. “I look upon every day to be lost in which I do not make a new acquaintance,” he observed. He dreaded solitude. He was always the last one to leave the pub, preferring walking the streets throughout the night with his dissolute friend Richard Savage to going home to the loneliness of his haunted chambers.
“The true state of every nation,” he observed, “is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in schools of learning or the palaces of greatness.” Johnson socialized with people at every level. Late in life he took vagabonds into his house. He also entertained and insulted lords. After Johnson had arduously completed his great dictionary, Lord Chesterfield belatedly tried to take credit as its patron. Johnson rebuked him with one of the greatest epistolary acts of revolt ever written, which climaxed with the passage:
Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.
Absolute Honesty
Johnson did not believe that the primary human problems can be solved by politics or by rearranging social conditions. He is, after all, the author of the famous couplet “How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws and kings can cause or cure.” Nor was he a metaphysician or a philosopher. He liked science but thought it a secondary concern. He discounted those who led lives of pedantic research surrounded by “learned dust,” and he had a deep distrust of intellectual systems that tried to explain all existence in one logical structure. He let his interests roam over the whole surface of life, wherever his natural interests took him, making connections as a generalist, from one field to another. Johnson endorsed the notion that “He who can talk only on one subject, or act only in one department, is seldom wanted, and perhaps never wished for, while the man of general knowledge can often benefit and always please.”15
He was not mystical. He built his philosophy low to the ground, from reading history and literature and from direct observation—focusing relentlessly on what he would call “the living world.” As Paul Fussell observed, he confuted all determinism. He rejected the notion that behavior is shaped by impersonal iron forces. He always focused with his searing eye on the particularity of each individual. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later observe that “Souls are not saved in bundles.”16 Johnson fervently believed in each individual’s mysterious complexity and inherent dignity.
He was, through it all, a moralist, in the best sense of that term. He believed that most problems are moral problems. “The happiness of society depends on virtue,” he would write. For him, like other humanists of that age, the essential human act is the act of making strenuous moral decisions. He, like other humanists, believed that literature could be a serious force for moral improvement. Literature gives not only new information but new experiences. It can broaden the range of awareness and be an occasion for evaluation. Literature can also instruct through pleasure.
Today many writers see literature and art only in aesthetic terms, but Johnson saw them as moral enterprises. He hoped to be counted among those writers who give “ardor to virtue and confidence to truth.” He added, “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better.” As Fussell puts it, “Johnson, then, conceives of writing as something very like a Christian sacrament, defined in the Anglican catechism as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us.’ ”